When you write an article, record a video or create any other kind of content for your website, how many times do you use the same content?

Once? Twice? More?

The fact is, there are quite a few ways you can recycle your content, getting far more than a single use out of it.

Let's look at an article, for example.

Most people use an article in one of two ways. They either post it on their own website or submit it to someone else's as a promotional tool to drive traffic back to their site.

With all the talk of duplicate content and how Google doesn't like it, most people will only use that article once.

But you can take that article and multiply its effectiveness with any of these methods:

1. Rewrite it and post the original version on your own website and the rewritten version on one or more article directories.
2. Add a new message to your autoresponder series either using the article for the message or a snippet of it with a link back to the full version on your website.
3. Record yourself reading the article and submit it to various podcast directories, or post the audio version on your website.
4. Create an outline of the article in Powerpoint and then use that as the basis for a Camtasia video that you can submit to YouTube and various other video sites.
5. Break the article into paragraphs and use those paragraphs to make blog posts linking back to your website in one of the blog linking networks.
6. Flesh out the information in the article a bit and covert it into a short report that you can either sell or give away to generate optins.
7. Combine the article with several other articles on related topics, creating a report that you again either sell or give away.

If you outsource your article writing, this can be a great way to get a better return on your investment.

If you're only using an article once, you may only want to pay $5-$10 for it, since it has to do a lot more work to pay for itself.

But if you can use the same article 5 or more times, suddenly its ROI is much better and you can justify paying more for it. This is going to result in a better article, which in turn means its probably going to give you an even better ROI.

It's like a snowball effect. More ways to use the content gives you a better ROI, which means you can pay more for the article, which means the ROI is probably going to be even better still.

If you hesitate to use the same content in multiple ways, consider this example.

Think of several of your all-time favorite bands - the ones that you have bought several CD's (or some other format) from.

Now of all the albums you have from those bands, how many of them are "Greatest Hits" albums?

What is a greatest hits album but a bunch of recycled content? It might be "remastered" (edited to be a little better than the original) and it might even have a couple of new or previously unreleased songs on it (something added that you didn't already have, bundled with all the songs you did). But ultimately, it's selling you mostly the same content you already bought, just in a different format.

Music, movies, books, TV - they all recycle content all the time. And they seem to be doing pretty well with it, don't they?