In my short years as a professional writer, I’ve written lots of articles. Some are samples, and some have been published but I’ve managed to dedicate three flash drives to them and now they are spilling over into my hard drive.
Do you know how much paper that would be if I printed them all out? I don’t really want to think about it but I’m fairly certain I could wallpaper a room or two, maybe even tile a floor with some. The cat would have litter box liners for a year or more (and hey, some of it was garbage but I’m not about to start lining the litter box with them K? So don’t suggest it, I’ll delete the comment!)
My point is that’s a lot of paper. That’s a lot of ideas. My poor brain should have shut down long ago but it hasn’t (thankfully, but it could still happen!) I see lots of people on the WAH writers boards asking where writers get all of their ideas and many of us respond that our ideas come from things we read, things we see, places we’ve been, our experiences, all that is very true but sometimes, an idea comes from something that we’ve already written.
Don’t be shocked – It’s true! I’ve written multiple articles for a client and thought, “Hey! There’s more to this than I have room for here,” and then I expand upon it as a follow up or as a pitch to another client. 
For instance, the topic of blended families. I did a piece on it for a client and while I was researching, I realized there are a lot of subtopics out there. So I pitched a different slant to another client who was looking for relationship articles. Guess what? It got picked up.
That’s money in the bank for a working writer.
Reusing your articles doesn’t mean you rewrite them and make them new again (though that is a possibility and I will explain that in another post). Instead recycle the ideas and see how you can make them new. Start jotting down all the other possibilities under that one topic. Going back to Blended Families; make a list of all the ideas you can get from those two words. If you’re lazy and under a time crunch, hit up a site like http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/ and plug it in. I got 122 results back.
If you’re a really savvy writer, you will have saved some of your research from the first article you wrote and could put it to use to bring up new information or if you’re lucky some of it would still apply to the new topic you’re writing.
The idea is to give your brain a bit of a break. Look into your archived articles and see where you can bring new life to some of them.
photo courtesy stock.xchng
VERY cool post, Nikki! Sometimes we forget that ideas can be recycled. Great reminder!
Funny, I’ve often thought the same thing. I used to print hard copies of everything I did, until it became ridiculous packrattery. (Can packrattery be a word? It is today.) There’s something about being able to sift through real pages and smell real ink–I’ve had to adjust to using more earth-friendly technology instead.
It’s a similar thing to digital photos. They’re nice, but they just don’t have the same comforting feel as a stack of cool photographs I can sort through with my hands.
Thanks for the link to the site. Sometimes keywords make my brain hurt!