One of the most popular uses of DFY content is as blog posts. Most packages of written content that you can purchase always include anywhere from 5 to 10 articles that you can post on your blog. This makes adding content relatively easy if you don’t want to create it all from scratch yourself.

There are some people who will tell you that blogging is dead, and that you don’t need a blog to have a successful business but I beg to strongly disagree with that. A blog is like the store front for your business, where customers and prospective customers can come to learn more about you, and what you do. They’re looking for experts in the topics they need help with, and it’s your job to provide that for them.

The drawback of having a blog is that you need to be adding content on a regular basis in order for it to gain traction, drive traffic, and keep your existing audience coming back as well.

This is why using DFY content as a head start on your blog posts is a huge time saver. The grunt work and the research has already been done. Although, as I mentioned in a previous post on why you might want to rewrite your DFY content, you always want to be fact checking before you put your name on the finished product.

But, in order to get the best results from blog posts created from DFY content, you are going to want to rewrite parts of it, and add your own voice and experience as well.

Here are 9 tips for rewriting DFY content as blog posts:

Tip #1 – Change the headline

The headline is the first piece of your blog post that the reader is going to see, most likely even before they get to your site. So, you want to make sure that it catches their attention and gives them a reason to click on the title to read the actual content.

Most DFY articles have pretty generic titles so that you can easily change it up to put your own spin on things.

Tip #2 – Write your own opening paragraph

The opening paragraph of your blog post is critical in hooking readers and keeping them engaged. It’s your first chance to show why you think this piece of content was important enough to include on your blog.

This is where having a plan and a goal for your content comes in handy. Because you need to know why this content is important, and what you want your readers to do with it before you start rewriting.

Once you know that, it’s easy to rewrite the opening, or even delete the original content and add your own opening in your own voice.

Tip #3 – Decide on the length of the content

You don’t want to fill your blog with fluff, so deciding on the optimum length of your content is also a key determinant of how much rewriting or adding in new content will be. The unwritten rule is to say what you need to say in as many words as it takes to get your point across, and then stop.

And this can go both ways. I’ve taken 400-word blog posts and expanded them to be in-depth articles of 1200-1500 words. But by the same token, I’ve also taken 1000-word articles and trimmed them to 400 or 500 words because that was enough to give the reader the information they needed.

That being said, there are some industry guidelines that you can use to determine how long your content should be.

How Long Should a Blog Post Be? A Data-Driven Guide for 2023 (source: Semrush Blog) provides a breakdown of different types of articles and blog content, along with a description and the optimum length.

Tip #4 – Repurpose the content into other formats to add to your blog posts

So this isn’t rewriting content in a literal sense, but people tend to get bored by huge walls of text. By catering to their need for visual information, repurposing parts of the content into videos, infographics, and images makes it easier for them to consume the content you provide. And don’t forget the audio version for people who would rather listen to content than read it.

Tip #5 – Use formatting that makes it easier to consume

Along the same lines as adding other content formats to your post, formatting it in a way that makes it easier on your reader’s eyes can also help. Adding things like headers, callout boxes with quotes from the article and bullet points is also one of the easiest ways to give your DFY content a style of its own.

Tip #6 – Rewrite in your own voice

Most DFY content is created in a generic style so that buyers can add their own voice. By rewriting the content to read as if you were talking to a friend, you’ll make it much more enjoyable for your audience to consume your content. It also makes it a lot easier for you to read it out loud when you’re creating audio and video content to go with it.

Related Article: 6 Ways to Give DFY Content Your Voice

Tip #7 – Always add a strong call to action

Going back to that goal we mentioned a few tips back, you want to always be adding calls to action in your content. And this will take some rewriting in order to make it flow and sound natural with the original content.

Your whole goal with a blog post should be to encourage readers to take the action you want them to take whether that’s signing up for your newsletter, downloading a lead magnet, or making a purchase.

Tip #8 – Practice good SEO habits

Always get in the habit of optimizing your posts for SEO. Ranking for specific keywords is the best way to be found by potential new visitors. Using a tool like Rank Math* can help you find the right keywords to target, and to add the information you need to get your content found in the search engines.

Tip #9 – Promote the heck out of your new post

Creating your blog posts is only the first step in the process. Once you’ve got them on your blog, you need to promote the heck out of them. And you can rewrite and repurpose the content you’ve just created to do that too.

We’ll talk more about this in upcoming posts because it’s a whole subject on its own, but here are a couple of ideas you can use to get you started:

• Extract snippets of your content to use as social posts – if you’ve used callouts in your post formatting, those are a great place to start
• Take the subheadings and turn them into graphics for sites like Pinterest and Instagram.
• Break the content down into one or two paragraphs that you can add to your email newsletter with a link back to read the full post
• Create short videos for YouTube, TikTok, Facebook & Instagram

If you want to practice doing this, my good friend Steph Hansen at Wildflower Digitals has a Just Post It Challenge* where she challenges you to make 100 posts in 30 days.

Final Thoughts

Creating blog posts out of DFY content doesn’t have to be a lot of hard work. The more you work with your content, the more you’ll automatically see the places where you need to make changes, and the quicker you’ll be able to rewrite the content.

When you use the content as intended – a starting point that you can adapt to suit your own business – you’ll develop your own style and end up with a blog that your readers will be happy to keep coming back to.