Jul 19, 2014 / Beginner

Repurposing Evergreen Content: Use Blockquotes

A tip to add to our original list of ways to repurpose your timeless content: use a blockquote to highlight your best archived material.

<a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/quinnanya/4692181263">Image</a> by <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/quinnanya/">Quinn Dombrowski</a> (<a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/">CC BY -SA 2.0</a>)

How can you approach your archived content in a new, fresh way?

In a favorite post from last year, we talked about ways to repurpose your blog’s evergreen content — your timeless posts that visitors, particularly new ones, will find useful and relevant, regardless of when you wrote them. Think about your seasonal pieces you can promote each year, or essays and photographs that never grow stale, no matter the year.

Consider these kinds of posts:

  • Your suggested itinerary and backpacking tips for trekking the Camino de Santiago in Spain.
  • Your photo essay of daily life on the streets in Havana, Cuba.
  • A longform piece of memoir on the birth of your first child.
  • Your crafty DIY gingerbread house how-to.
  • A Photoshop tutorial on cropping and straightening.

But repurposing content doesn’t necessarily mean copying and pasting an old post into a new one and hitting “publish.” How can you refresh your original idea? Can you replace the photographs with new ones? Can you offer a new angle or updated information? Maybe you revisited Spain last summer and stopped along the pilgrimage route you once conquered, took photos, and noticed details you hadn’t before. Or perhaps you’ve got a new set of crooked landscape shots on your camera that would work great for a tutorial on creating a level horizon.

In this post from our Daily Post archives, we talk about ways to reimagine your posts of the past. You can expand on previous lists, compile the best posts from a series, create new material from comment discussions, and use sticky posts.

Quick Tip: Pull a favorite passage from a post in your archives, insert it into a blockquote in a new post, and expand on the discussion.

Another tip to add to this list? Pull a favorite passage from a post in your archives, insert it into a blockquote in a new post, and expand on the discussion — just like I’ve done above. In your Visual Editor, you’ll find the blockquote option among the editing and styling tools:

blockquote

Be sure to link to the original post throughout the new one, especially in the beginning and end, so new readers can refer to it, and your longtime readers can revisit it.

Repurposing content doesn’t mean just copying and pasting an old post into a new one and hitting “publish.”

Quoting a favorite bit from your best work — and then serving up new commentary or an update — allows you to promote and drive traffic to older pieces in a fresh way.

Read more tips on repurposing evergreen content. Do you have any techniques to share?

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  3. If I use old posts to wrap presents for the holidays, does that make me a re-poster, re-gifter? Seriously, thank you for some new thoughts on a subject I think about often. I foolishly started WordPress by posting ten pieces in one day before I ever even had a single follower.

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  4. This makes sense; it’s something I have done a lot more recently “you may remember me talking about…”. To reinforce it, I also have a “highlights” page of key posts that people may wish to read.

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  5. In my latest post, I summarised some themes from previous years as background to my response to a TV documentary, but silly me forgot to provide links back to the originals. Thanks for the reminder.

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  6. Wouldn’t it be better, though, to update an old list than add to it in a new post? For instance, two years ago I compiled a list of WP themes that display author names. Last week, I updated the list in the same post. I’m not sure I see the point of copying the list into a new post and updating it there. Can you help me understand the benefits?

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    1. It draws people to the old content, new and old, that may have forgotten about it and need the inspiration from it. Whatever it might be.

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  9. I’ve actually been planning on doing this lately for a really popular article of mine, but I wasn’t sure how to go about it. Thanks for the tips!

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  10. That’s a great idea! Now if I can just manage to clean up and publish all the drafts that are waiting in queue, I’ll have time to pull out some oldies-but-goodies and have some quality time with them.

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  16. I’m loving the meta-ness of this as it is clearly an example of just such a repurposing of evergreen content using blockquotes. 🙂

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  20. Excellent tip! I’ve actually been trying to do something like this because some of my articles become relevant each time an ‘event’ occurs in the game that I blog about. I usually just create a new post indicating the ‘event’ is occuring and linking to my guide article; but blockquotes on specific details could help draw readers in.

    I might even start including this in other articles as well. Funny that I never thought of including a non-reference/source-type link for blockquotes. I usually only use blockquotes when quoting external sources.

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