Writing blog posts, recording videos, taking photos, emailing your customer lists…we all know that creating original content is a cornerstone of developing a strong online marketing strategy, but when – if ever – is it OK to take a break from creating content?

And if you do determine it’s a good time to take a break from content creation, should you be doing something else while on the break?

When It’s OK to Stop Creating Content

The short answer here is: you can stop creating new content when you have enough content to reuse and repurpose.

But what does “enough content” really mean? And is it different for different industries and online marketing strategies?

The right answer for you absolutely does matter on your specific business as well as your online marketing strategies and tactics.

For example, if you created a series of videos for use on your website, social media posts, and YouTube channel, you can reuse those same videos in ads or blog posts, and you can edit sections out of each video for use when trying to drive home a specific point you are trying to make. Let’s say that you created a video for your small business about 5 tips to…(fill in the blank)…you can take short clips from that video that breaks out each of the 5 tips into their own mini video, and then (re)use those 5 individual tips videos on your social media channels. So you’ve turned 1 piece of existing content into 5 new pieces.

If you’ve already spent a lot of time, energy, and/or money on photography or graphic design for your small business, there’s a great chance you can reuse a lot of the images and graphics you already have. You can put a new quote or tip or promotional announcement over top of existing images and graphics. You can use your social media images in future blog posts. You can add a transparency to any previously-used images to make them look new again. And perhaps you are trying to expand your reach on social media by publishing Stories on Facebook or Instagram…use the images you already have as the backgrounds to those Stories.

The bloggers out there also deserve a writing break from time to time. All blog posts should be reshared on social media (several times). Blog posts can be used for email newsletter content. Blog posts can also be turned into ebook content or for lead magnets. Plus, if you’ve properly optimized those blog posts for search, they should be earning you organic site traffic for weeks and months to come.

What Should I Do When I’m Not Creating Content?

If you take a break from creating content, you should take that time to (re)optimize the content you already have. This is particularly important for any video and blogging work you do. If you properly optimize your videos for Facebook and on YouTube, they should be earning views – and ideally, website traffic – for a long time after their original publishing. So a break from creating content means that you have time to add tags and captions to your Facebook videos and organize them into playlists in your Facebook video library, and freshen up your YouTube titles and descriptions, tags, and playlists.

A blogging break gives you the opportunity to peek at your analytics to see what your best performing blog posts are, and see if any of those top performing posts could use an update (content, links, screenshots, etc.). What I personally have done is create a spreadsheet of the posts I utilize most often with clients or link to often in new blog posts. My spreadsheet allows me to keep the blog post topics and links organized in 1 place, and track when I last revisited them to see if any updates were needed.

Take a Break in Content Creation Only If You Know You’ll Start Back

One of the biggest challenges with creating original content is finding the time to do so and making a good habit of doing so. That’s why you need to be very careful if you do choose to pause your content creation for a short time, that it’s not so long that you don’t get back to it. Stopping your content creation should only ever be temporary, so make sure you strategically use your pause to benefit your business by optimizing your existing content, and then get back to the creating part.