For us business owners, it’s hard to scale back our workloads and take a break. We’re in the trenches week after week, sometimes plowing completely through our weekends and never coming up for air. This can leave other areas in our life starved for attention. Luckily, the holidays are coming up, so now is the perfect time to plan a little R&R: refresh and repurpose (your content, that is).
The most important thing you can do for your business during the holidays is to keep your content flow moving consistently. If you’re social media marketing-savvy, you’re probably familiar with apps like SmarterQueue and Edgar, which reuse and recycle content and curated posts for you. While these tools can definitely help keep your social profiles active during your holiday downtime, you’ll still need to take a few more steps to spruce up older content.
Here are four strategies you can leverage to make that happen:
1. Repackage
It can be easy to forget that we can present one message in a variety of ways. So if you have a few pieces of content that performed really well this year–no matter what they are–you can repackage the same message in a different format. You could:
- Write a blog post (or two!) based on a popular Facebook Live video
- Create a series of short videos based on the year’s top blog post
- Spin blog posts out of old podcast or video recordings
- Pull quotes from old content and create shareable memes
- Take two or three old blog posts and use information and ideas from those to create a fresh story from a new angle
You really can’t go wrong by putting a new spin on a popular message.
2. Revisit
Memorable “throwback” posts tend to be crowd-pleasers. Our audiences love to reminisce with us. Sharing special memories and heartwarming moments with our readers creates opportunities for us to relate to one another (because at its core, bombshell business isn’t just about financial transactions, but emotional investment, too).
You can re-share past seasonal posts that relate to the holiday season (like Christmas memories or your grandmother’s favorite Thanksgiving dressing recipe). But if you don’t have holiday-centric posts, don’t sweat it. Any post that creates warm fuzzies for you and your readers is fair game here.
3. Revamp
If you’ve published blog posts in the past couple of years that performed well but are now slightly out-of-date, now would be a good time to revamp them and send them back out into the world. Update the information for relevance, then share the new versions over the course of the holidays. (If the posts are techie in nature, don’t forget to update you screen shots!)
4. Roundup
A roundup blog post like “Best of the Year” or “Top Tips” is a great way to ease your workload by curating:
- Popular posts and tips you’ve published over the past year
- Useful tips and tricks from other experts in your network
To create a “best of” post, sift through your analytics to identify the top-performing posts from your blog over the past 12 months. Then, put together a list post that includes each blog title, a 2-4 sentence blurb about its contents, and a link to the original. (You can even lift these sentences from the post intros if you want. Boom!)
To pull together a “top tips” post, you can:
- Round up your most popular tips in a blog post
- Curate and summarize tips you love from other experts in your business space (be sure to link back to their original posts)
- Ask other experts in your circle for their favorite tips (do this early enough to get the answers you need for your post!)
Roundup posts take a little bit of extra work, but if you create them ahead of time, you’ll have some simple, easy posts to share on your blog when the time comes.
Do you repurpose content over the holidays? We’d love to hear your strategies in the Bombshell Business App!
About the Author
Haley Walden
Haley Walden Copywriting/Editor & Author
Copy Writing and Editing
Haley Walden is a copywriter, editor, and author who helps businesses and authors effectively articulate their established brand stories. She had a knack for emulating voice, a keen eye for detail, and will stop at nothing to give her clients the cleanest, most concise final draft possible.
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