When you run your own blog for a living, you’re going to face a number of challenges on a fairly regular basis. You’re always going to be working on improving your monetization strategy, for example, and there’s always room to move up on those search engine rankings too. Another area where you might encounter the occasional struggle is with content creation.
In the early days of your blog, this may be less of a concern. After all, you’re still riding the high of enthusiasm from launching your blog and your brain is filled with all sorts of fantastic ideas. Over time, though, that well can start to run dry and you might find yourself reaching for post ideas. You don’t know what you want to write about anymore, because it feels like you’ve already said everything you wanted to say.
What’s Old Is New Again
The good news is that many of the people who are reading your blog today may not have been reading your blog all along. They may not have ever encountered your “old” content, so when you present it to them now, it can look like fresh “new” content.
Don’t get me wrong. It is definitely a bad idea to simply copy and paste your own blog post and try to pass it off as something you’ve never published before. That’s dishonest and disingenuous, not to mention the potential negative SEO impact it may have. You shouldn’t simply regurgitate or reword what you’ve already said either. Instead, you can re-frame the content from a slightly different perspective, adding something new.
Consider this. The blog post that you see above from Beyond the Rhetoric was actually written and published back in 2009. In that blog post, I talk about the kinds of “freedoms” that accompany running a freelance business and how that directly impacts my choice of lifestyle.
Looking Through a New Lens
Fast forward to several years later and I touch upon a related subject here on John Chow dot Com with a new blog post. There, I discuss the “dot com” lifestyle rather than the “freelance” lifestyle, but the two concepts are intrinsically intertwined. They’re two sides of the same polyhedron die, so to speak. And rather than talk about the “time freedom” that a freelance business affords me, I talk about how this freedom directly impacts my sense of work-life balance.
While I may not be talking about exactly the same thing, you can see how the subject matter is related. In the case of (mostly) evergreen content like this, you can almost say exactly the same thing and it can come off as a fresh idea. You just have to add a little something new to the offering.
Great Content Is King
Case in point: consider how many times John has talked about what the dot com lifestyle is all about. He’s written that it’s about having the freedom to spend more time with his family. And in a separate post, he wrote about how it’s about enjoying daddy-daughter time. And in yet another post, he shares a video where he talks about the day he spent with Sally. Each time is a little different and a little new, but it’s also very similar.
As a blogger, there is certainly no shame in this. It’s all about taking a very careful, measured, and strategic approach to the content you post on your blog. As long as your readers are able to extract the value from your writing and as long as it all builds toward your greater goals, you’re in a good place.