If you’re like a lot of brands, your blog archives are a treasure trove of valuable information and resources. The only problem? They’re buried on back pages that no one sees. All those months and years of content creation deserve to be featured for more than the first few days when they go live. Likewise, you could probably use a break from writing posts every once in a while. So, how can you better utilize the quality content in your archives to reach new readers, make better use of your time and effort, and keep your site updating? What are some good ways to recycle and re-use what you’ve already got to create new posts?

To help you generate fresh content and more traffic through the old content buried in the back pages of your site, here are some practical tips to try!

Group a series of related posts into a fresh guide

Browse through your site archives and see what themes emerge. Did you write a lot of posts about a certain topic a few months or years ago? Has there been a specific issue you’ve covered repeatedly throughout your blog’s history? Don’t assume readers will dig around your site to see how posts connect; instead, create a fresh, new guide that puts all those related posts together. This newly packaged roundup will not only create new content for your site, but it will point readers deeper into your archives as they click the articles you feature.

Update old posts with current info

Do you have old posts in your blog history that could use an update to reflect new information? Maybe you wrote a post about your return policy, but that policy has changed. Perhaps you did a roundup of recommended products, but some of them are no longer available. If so, go back into the post and expand it with fresh information relevant to today. Then, promote the updated post across your social channels, drawing new traffic to your site.

Write new articles as supplements to old posts

Another way to draw traffic to old posts is to write new content that follows up on, relates to or adds information to that old content. Say your cleaning business wrote an in-depth piece on how to scrub a kitchen sink last year. Today, you might write a follow-up by highlighting a new kitchen cleaning tool or a new opinion on cleaning methods, linking back to the original piece for more info. The more ways you link to old content, the better — at least in terms of keeping that old content fresh and visited

Turn old posts into slideshows or e-books 

Another great way to re-use old content is to repackage it into something beyond a post. Group related articles into a slideshow, or repurpose them into an e-book that you make free to download, for example. Re-use an old blog post by making it a podcast topic or content for an email newsletter. Re-using the content saves you the time of creating completely new information, and it makes more use of what you’ve already done.

Create a popular page for your blog

Here’s another way to draw visitors into your archives: Create a “popular posts” page or sidebar widget that lists some of your top-performing articles. This can catch readers’ eyes as they come to your site, pulling them deeper into the archives of your blog.

Share statistics from old posts on social media

If you’ve written posts with hard data such as percentages of people who use Instagram each day or number of households watching the Super Bowl each year, you have great fodder for your brand’s Twitter or Facebook pages.

Create a new Pinterest board linking to a photo-heavy post

Have you created any posts filled with lots of quality images? If so, set up a new Pinterest board that describes the content and pin each image to the board, pointing back to the original, archived post with each picture. As people find the images on the search engine that is Pinterest, they’ll be sent right to your archived content.

The bottom line with re-using content is there are so many opportunities available, as long as you’re willing to think creatively and promote old posts. So, use the ideas above to get started — and draw more people to the quality information sitting in your archives today!