Reuse your own content

I'm old enough to remember the magic of the IBM Selectric and the gulf ball print head and way before that as well.

Anyway, technology may change but there is nothing new under the sun in reality. Content has always been king and it's been difficult to come up with lots and lots of new ideas on what to write.

So what did freelance writers do?

They reused their own work and rewrote the content for different markets.

Suppose you wrote an article for Cosmopolitan, you would change it for a younger audience and submit to teen magazine and make it less upscale and submit to Redbook and so on. Then you may change it and make it male oriented and send it to some male magazines and then there are all the various airline magazines and other places you would rewrite and resubmit.

You may even change the article in a few years and send it out to the same magazine later on. Even today, Publishers may recycle books which do not sell well by changing the title and change the cover.

So reuse is as old the printing press....

Top writers today do the same thing. They recycle their writing for different Internet outlets. So the same content may be rewritten as a HubPage, Squidoo Lens, different free and hosted blogs, articles in article directories and so on.

So for others of you who, like me, have accepted the 100 HubPages in thirty days challenge and yet don't know how to do it go over your old writing and see what can be recycled.

Tomorrow I have set myself the goal of writing one new article and see how many different ways I can reuse it.

Please leave comments on the maximum number of times you have reused the same content.

The ideal search engine gives a human being the ideal information she searches for. So the purpose of the search engine robot (spider) is to search for fresh content and hence the duplicate content penalty.

In Googles own words: in some cases, content is deliberately duplicated across domains in an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings or win more traffic. Go here to read more....

Anyway, the best way to ruse your content is by doing a rewrite yourself and never using a program which just changes words with synonyms. This reminds me of the early days of machine translation (paid for by CIA, NSA or similar organization) they translated, "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak," into Russian and then translated the resulting Russian back into English. They got back:

• The Vodka is good but the steak is rotten.

That is the danger of using automatic content blowers, content spinners or whatever they are called. I have used a manual content spinner where you enter the potential synonyms (but it could be phrases whole sentences, or even paragraphs which are spun.

Tomorrow I'll write more about this as I actually demonstrate the reuse of same content....