Republishing: reuse own content and reach new readers

Using your own content again is frowned upon by many. Why this attitude should be reconsidered I explain in the following article.

[Picture credits: CC0 image, pixabay, by klimkin]

Recently on television 📺

A few months ago I saw a comedian and a politician zapping by in one of the countless talk shows. By chance I had seen the same politician at a speech and the same comedian at the broadcast of his show a couple days before.

Nothing special in itself. But special was what they had to say. The two had taken over their words simply 1:1 into the talk show. Since I pay attention to it this behavior has struck me already more often.

And even if these are not always complete texts, they are still often the same sentences, phrases and platitudes.

"What they can do, we can do for a long time" 💪

This is in stark contrast to what is generally expected of bloggers and what bloggers generally demand of themselves. By blogger I also mean people who write content here on Steemit.

Thus, certain informal moral demands are made on the little people, or imposed by them themselves, to whom the powerful, who earn many times more, do not adhere and do not feel obliged to. For now I have served the populists and the tribune of the people in me enough. 😎

So why shouldn't we simply reuse our content, especially since we create our own content ourselves. With many politicians and also with some Comedians the texts come even from strange feathers.

Advantages of Republishing & how to proceed? ✏️

The recycling of your own content is nothing reprehensible, in fact quite the opposite.

1. The visibility 🔍

You don't have to take Steemit, Facebook & Co. as an example, where your own content disappears gradually after a few days or even hours. First from the trendings and then also in the feed of the readership.

It's the same in regular weblogs, too. Everything that can't be reached on the homepage or with a maximum of one or two clicks is as it says:

Long absent, soon forgotten.

2. Update contents 🆕

But not the lack of visibility is the reason to reuse an article. It may be that the manual has changed a lot and that would be a good opportunity to update the content so that the readers don't follow an outdated recommendation.

3. Platforms with different reader groups 💬

But even beyond the visibility and relevance of the content, there is an additional reason why the same content could and should be reused. This can be especially the case if the potential readers or consumers of your content are usually on different platforms.

Caution is needed here: 👆

Here a rather bad starting situation:

[An unfavorable distribution of your audience]

If you notice that your audience is often on the platforms you're on, I wouldn't recommend you to re-use the content or only in very rare cases. The danger is too great that you will upset the readers if they read the same articles on multiple platforms.

Here you can do Republishing with a clear conscience: 👍 🚦

In the following situation I would recommend you to publish your content on both platforms or at least to have a strategy ready:

[A good distribution of your audience]

Such an initial situation might occur in many cases if you have your own weblog - which is run with WordPress, for example - and you are also active on Steemit/Facebook/Reddit/Medium.

After my observation and some measurements I can say that the vast majority of users stay within their own network. In a nutshell: everything that happens outside your own social media platform is non-existent or at best irrelevant to most people. 😊

A possible strategy

Therefore you could publish an article on different platforms with a clear conscience. Whether you publish the article first in your own weblog and later on the alternative platforms has to be decided on a case-by-case basis.

In the case of Steemit, I recommend that you publish the article first on Steemit.com and then after a while - seven to ten days should be enough - on your own weblog. In the case of Medium.com I would suggest the other way around.

At the same time you can make a virtue of necessity and update the article if necessary, correct possible spelling mistakes, optimize and if necessary adjust the linguistic style.

If you are only active on one platform, you can of course use your old articles as well. If there are significant changes, we don't need to talk about them for long. That's your duty to inform your readers about it → in that sense it is a "service to the customer".

But even if there are hardly any changes, you can still highlight the article and republish it. Such a thing is recommended with contents, like for example Tutorials and How-Tos, which are frequently looked for and inquired, because articles which disappear from the Feeds and Trendings, slide with the time also in the results of the search machines downward.