Hey All.  I posted this to my blog today.  I thought it would be a good article for some of you out there struggling with article content.

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You know how people really love watching re-runs of old TV shows? There’s a reason for that.  They love the content of  those shows. This blog post explores a clever content generation strategy that uses this re-run principle to add quite a bit of posting power to your blog.

In the work that I do in helping small businesses promote themselves online one of the top things I recommend is that they maintain a blog (more than one in some cases) that they post to at least once a week.

A hurdle that I often have to help business owners contend with is how to keep generating content for their blog on a consistent basis, especially if they have limited in-house resources.  In many cases the businesses I work with only have a couple of talented writers on staff, and their main jobs obviously aren’t creating blog content.

Creating content consistently isn’t that difficult if you only post once a week, but at that rate it is going to take quite a bit of time to generate any sort of significant organic traffic back to your website – 6 months or more depending on your industry.  I recommend that my clients post twice a week if at all possible, and if they really want to ramp things up quickly, that they try to make some kind of post each day or even multiple posts per day if their resources allow it.

But in that case the problem eventually becomes…  ”Cody, we’ve run out of things to write about.”

I hear that one a lot, but believe me, no you haven’t. You’re an expert on your topic and there are hundreds of millions of people online each day, each searching for different things.  It’s not going to hurt if you post about the same thing now and again, but in a different way, or from a different perspective. This is what separates the so-so blogs from the highly trafficked blogs – finding unique ways to continually generate content.  This big blogs like BNET, Wired, Engadget, and Techrepublic do this extremely well.

This is one of the strategies I highly recommend. Aside from the SEO value this offers to your website in the form of freshness and being able to generate anchors to other posts, this strategy allows you to take advantage of your past “most popular” articles.

Rather than just tell you how to do it, here’s a perfect example of this tactic in use.

I was going through the analytics in one of my blogs recently looking for what people liked. As I was looking at the stats I saw an article that had nearly five times (5x) the page views as other articles posted around that same time period. I knew that I hadn’t done anything out of the ordinary to promote that article, but people really liked it.

So I re-read it for some inspiration, wrote another article that expanded on its ideas, gave it a catchy headline, and posted the new article, linking back to the old one in the process(thereby increasing the views of the older post as well). And by the way, while I was writing it I came up with two or three more ideas of things I could post about that related to it.

If you’re running low on content ideas this is a VERY powerful, yet simple strategy to generate new ideas.  Simply go through your traffic statistics, find your most popular articles, and re-use their ideas.  You can never have enough content about things that people love to read, so take advantage of that fact!