How Can I Repurpose Old News?
This podcast audio served as the source for the blog post “How to Repurpose Old News & PR”
The transcript was rewritten to produce the blog post, which is the cornerstone of the Shortcut Content system.
Shayla: You are listening to the Shortcut Content podcast and I’m talking with founder Dave Young. Dave, how do you repurpose old news and pr to create blog posts?
Dave: Well, one of the problems that some our clients have run into is that we help them develop a list of topics that they can write about or talk to us about over the course of the first year of our engagement and often times, after they’ve run through that list, they come to kind of a screeching and halt and say, “Well, now what do I do? I’ve gone through all my topics.” And even if they haven’t done that, one of the techniques that you can use is to dig out some of the topics that you’ve done in the past, whether it’s news releases, press releases, most company websites have some news on them and usually it’s almost like the blog post archives, right? They did a few news stories one time in 2014 and maybe did a press release every month and then everything kind of coasted to a halt. That’s usually the point where they decide they need to engage us to refresh the blog.
But one of things you can do is dig out some of those old news stories, the things that were important a couple years ago that you were talking to the public about, and turn those into blog post updates. If you had a big announcement that you put in some new piece of equipment or some new product line, give us an update, tell us how that’s going and what you’ve been doing about it. If you did press releases on new employees, have you done them on everybody. And one of the things you can do is put a new employee up to the microphone and record some content as well. And so I think that’s one of those areas, we’ve talking about mining your brochures and printed materials as well for topics, and this just another thing where you’ve already got content you’ve created for one purpose or another, pull it back out and see if there’s a way that you can talk about it in a fresh voice and use it in a new blog post or podcast.
When you put your press release on your website or you news that you got coverage about something, it’s kind of a one and done type of thing. And it will just sit there in the archives. It might have got a little bit of play early on or when you first posted it and now it’s just sitting there. So the importance of it is that you can take this and create a new message from it, kind of re-state your original purpose in it, and breathe new life into and increase the frequency of exposure of that information.
A press release isn’t just a one time thing- hey, here’s our big announcement and now it’s done. Typically, you’re doing that on an ongoing PR campaign and so revisiting those things and updating them is just one more way to get them in front of people.
Shayla: If someone has questions about anything you’ve talked about today, what’s the best way to reach out to you?
Dave: Shortcut Content. We’ve got a Contact Us page and a form on it. Phone numbers. We’re not hard to find.
Shayla: Okay. And that website, again, is shortcutcontent.com. If you have any questions, reach out to Dave and the team there. Thanks, Dave.
Dave: Thank you.