If you’ve been writing for a while, you likely have a pretty good stash of published articles, rejected articles, posts from article directories, blogs and forums, and a number of folders of unused research material gathering dust. Repurpose your content to make quick and completely new submissions—and potential profits. Here are 3 ways to repurpose content:

1. Turn multi-topic articles into single-focus submissions. Scrutinize long articles and features you’ve written to identify separate topics that you can expand into full-length articles. To add support information pull out, review, and use the research you previous worked long hours to get. Then send your new articles to narrowly niched trade or association publications. Acceptance is higher with these niche publications and most of them pay a decent fee.
2. Expand on blog or forum posts to develop quick sidebars. Review your blog and forum posts to quickly develop Q&A, how to, or tips sidebars that you can send to appropriate magazines, websites, newspapers, print newsletters and digital ezines. Start by submitting to paying publications and, if you have to settle for a byline, ask for a resource box to include your contact information or guide readers to your website. Tip: If you distribute your own newsletter or ezine, go back a year or two to revamp previous articles.
3. Use your out of print books to populate publications with new content. After working long and hard to get a book published, it can sometimes take relatively little time for it to be, first, backlisted and, second, reclassified as “out of print.” If you own the copyright (or it reverts back to you once it is no longer in circulation), dissect chapters and subtopics in those chapters and squeeze every bit of usable content out of it to make up for the blood, sweat and tears you shed to write it.

For most successful, profit-attracting writers, repurposing is nearly second nature. They never let an opportunity get filed for all eternity or banished to the shredder. For every assignment you’re given, book you write, or project you participate in, take a good hard look at the research material that lands on the cutting room floor and ask yourself, “What else can I do with this?”