Better ways to re-hash other people’s content

Over at Online Marketing Blog, Thomas McMahon posts a nice entry about 4 Ways to Successfully Re-Post Others Content. These practices are widely used in the blogosphere so it’s nice to see how bloggers are making good use of these methods in their blogging activities.

1) Your Thoughts. This is the easiest. Someone else posts on the best way to get traffic from Google and you post your thoughts. You can agree or disagree but it’s your opinion that makes it unique.

2) Expand upon it. Evey now and then, someone will write a nice short post that those that are familiar with the subject can follow along no problem. But others may feel lost. Expanding on someone else’s post to put in more details and make it understandable to a wider audience can be beneficial to a whole new group of people.

3) Summarize. The other day Matt Cutts did a quick post that ended up with about 800 words. Summarizing that into a 200 word post can draw more readers that don’t want to take the time to read the no-so-quick original post.

4) Time Travel. This is my favorite. Go to someone’s blog and dig back into the archives. Lets say to 2005. What were they talking about? It could be a fun point out how back in 2005, Rand was talking about sandbox theories with poison links and hilltop hubs. How many of these are still true today? With hindsight being 20/20 you have to be nice though.

Of the lot, the two most common ways I always see around the blogosphere are summarizing and adding your two cents. It’s because these approaches are far easier to do with minimal time/effort to republish than the rest.

However, there are a few other less known methods of re-purposing other people’s content. One of them is to contradict + dissect. Others call it linkbait.

Another one is to translate and recalibrate. Here at the Blog Herald, we actually have a Japanese version that translates the contents of our main blog to the Japanese-reading public. It doesn’t even have to be a verbatim translation. As the blogosphere expands, some concepts will be different and personalities change. So, in the example 3 above, instead of mentioning Matt Cutts in the translation, one could use some other personalities your readers recognize or can relate to better.