If you blog, write articles or are into any of the other activities that involve writing original material you’ve probably thought it is a shame to use that material in only one place.

Just republishing exactly the same material in a number of places is generally considered bad form. There are exceptions to this of course, but we generally assume that creating, say, a Squidoo lense or Hub Page from a previously published blog post will not get the same impact as if those pages consisted of new material.

The solution is to “repurpose” your content. This involves cutting it up, rewriting it, spinning it, and so on so you can use it in a variety of places without having to publish “duplicate content” all over the place.

Here are 5 “repurposing” techniques that I find useful. Some of them are obvious. Others not so much.

1. Cut up long articles into smaller chunks

Say you’ve just written an 800 word masterpiece. Before you go ahead and publish it as an article or post it to your blog why not chop it up into 3 or 4 chunks. That way you can turn one article into 3 or 4 posts. Then apply some of the other repurposing techniques to each of the chunks and publish them elsewhere.

2. Cut up already published articles

Even if you’ve already published an original article you can still chop up the original, modify each section to make it fresh and original. Then use individual chunks or combinations of chunks for blog posts, Squidoo, and so on.

3. Give already published articles a new twist

You probably have articles, reports and blog posts you published two, three or more years ago. Pull out a good one – where the information is not out of date – and think of a new twist you can give it. Rewrite it to match the new twist, with a new title of course. Then apply some of the other repurposing techniques listed here: chop it up into individual chunks, modify each of them and republish the chunks in one of your blogs.

4. Recombine material from two or three articles

Say you have a number of articles about a similar topic. For example, I’m sure we have numerous articles about “Why You Should Use a Personal Injury Lawyer” (legal) or “Getting Your House Ready to Sell” (real estate) or “Curing Your Slice” (golf). You can take parts from different articles (with the same general theme), put them together to create a new article and then make modifications to the new version so it makes sense and is original.

In fact you can probably make two or three new articles this way – especially if you use the spin technique mentioned below. Generally you should not just copy and paste sentences or paragraphs without modifying them, but even if you don’t make substantial modifications the end result will usually be acceptable.

5. “Spin” your material

If you are familiar with “spinning” you probably have mixed feelings about this technique. Spinning involves entering a number of synonyms for words, phrases and sentences within the text and then letting a spinning program create different “unique” versions by randomly combining alternative wordings.

There are automatic spin engines that create the synonyms and alternative wordings for you. These usually create unintelligible gobbledegook. I’m not talking about (and certainly not recommending) this type of spinning. Rather, I’m referring to the systems that require you to write correct alternative wordings which result in a variety of perfectly acceptable and well-written versions of the original.

This technique is most often used by people writing articles and submitting them to a large number of article sites. They are trying to avoid what people (erroneosly) call the “Google duplicate content penalty”. The idea is to have each “spun” version of the article appear as a unique original version.

Regardless of what you think of this tactic, spinning can be useful for repurposing content – especially when it is combined with some of the other techniques mentioned here. With a good spin engine you can even randomly combine different paragraphs.

Say, for example, you want to use technique 4 mentioned above (“recombine material from two or three articles”). You can enter paragraph variations pulled directly from the different articles into your spin engine. Then you can add variables and alternative wordings to each of the paragraphs. Then every time you need a new version of the article you can have the spin engine spit one out for you.

April 20, 2010 – A “hyperlocal” blog is one that focuses on one or more specific neighbourhoods within a region. In a hyperlocal blog you publish material of specific interest to people in those neighbourhoods. We refer to these neighbourhoods as “communities”.

Why specific communities? Why “hyper” local? One reason for this is to gain search engine traction for those specific communities. Keywords such as “Lakeshore Village Kingston” are much less competitive than “Kingston”.

But this is really a secondary reason for focusing on the smaller community. The truth is you will get very little search engine traffic from hyperlocal keywords, even if you dominate them in the search results. As I have said in many other places, relying on SEO to get local blog traffic is both frustrating and disappointing and it is doomed to failure.

The far more important reason is to focus on hyperlocal communities is to become a resource for the people of the community – to become an online destination for people interested in reading about or seeing photos and videos featuring people and events in their community.

And, of course, in the process you build your own profile as someone active in the community.

What is a “community”?

In the case of real estate blogs a “community” within a city will usually be a subdivision or neighbourhood. If you are a real estate agent you know exactly what I’m talking about.

In a rural area like I live in, my township (Woolwich, Ontario) has a fairly strong identity, but most people in the township more closely identify with the specific village or town they live in. So the communities one would focus on with a “hyperlocal blog” about Woolwich township would be villages such as Conestogo, St. Jacobs, Breslau, Bloomingdale, Linwood, Elmira, etc.

What does a hyperlocal blog look like?

Some real estate agents active in hyperlocal blogging feel it is best to create a separate blog for each community or neighbourhood they service. For an example and discussion of this approach see the series by Matt McGee called Starting a Hyperlocal Blog: The Series.

Frankly, this seems like overkill to me. As long as you have clearly identified sections within your blog for each local community you service you will accomplish your goal.

In fact I would say it would be much easier to manage if you had just one blog dedicated to the city or area of the city you want to focus on, and then sections within that blog for each “community”.

In WordPress you can manage this by creating categories for each community, and/or a separate “page” for each community with links to the appropriate posts.

Content is what matters

Regardless of how you approach the organization of your hyperlocal blog it is absolutely essential to remember that this exercise is not about impressing the search engines. If that works, then fine. It is much much much more important to publish items that will interest the people in your communities.

Photographs are the easiest – Take a few hours and drive through your communities taking photographs of interesting buildings, schools, churches, playgrounds, community centers.

Take off your real estate agent hat for a few hours and think of yourself as a photographer or reporter. Shoot some pictures from interesting angles.

Then run some simple little contests – possibly one a week for each community – “Identify this building/person/tree/bird house/window/etc. and win a prize”. Get a local coffee shop or restaurant to donate some $5 gift certificates, or if they won’t donate them, buy them.

Be sure to run your contests on the level. Plan them carefully, make sure the winners are selected in a fair way, and be sure to award the prizes as you said you would. Ask the winners for a photo of themselves and publish them along with the names of the winners each week.

The whole point is to get people involved and show your face in the communities to a broader audience. You want to get people coming to your blog and participating.

This is just one idea among many that others have successfully used. If you have any suggestions, please leave a comment.