I just mentioned an old blog post of mine in an email to someone and thought, “hey I should repost that out on Twitter.” Titled How to Quit Your Day Job and Become a Professional Tech Blogger, it’s getting a bunch of retweets again, 3 years after I wrote it, on a rainy Saturday morning.

Here are three ways I’ve been experimenting with getting more value out of old content, whether it’s mine or someone else’s, whether it’s 1 day old or 3 years.

1. If you share it in an email or mention it to a friend, other people might like to see it too

I was telling my co-worker Shelby La Croix about this article “9 Things Successful People Do Differently” yesterday too, for example, and may as well re-share it publicly elsewhere. It’s still really good.

The river of news online plus our linear conception of time might conspire to lead us to believe that old content is inevitably forgotten, but just like time travelers we can loop back into the past and return to the present with gems for use in building the future!

2. Share pull-quotes and highlights later

I’ve been using Pullquote.com to post highlights of my and other old articles to the social web. It’s attractive and like a whole new piece of content! You, reader/writer, are a web content DJ – remix!

Pullquote is led by Henry Copeland, who also built the fabulous Twitter analysis tool Twiangulate and invested in Little Bird (thanks Henry!).

3. Take notes and re-read them

As Ben Casnocha says, If You Aren’t Taking Notes, You Aren’t Learning.

There’s no need to be so negative about it, though. Framed alternately, notes you take on the content you consume are like a deep vein of gold in the mountain of life. Tap into them and it will be awesome. This is something I’ve been thinking about right now when taking a moment to pause from the hustle of startup life, how can I get into a regular habit of taking and re-reading notes? I’m trying to use Evernote files tagged Notes. It is so wonderful when I do. It’s like a combination of Harold Jarche’s Personal Knowledge Management and renaissance man Robin Sloan’s Fish. (“Look at the fish!” I often tell myself.)

I sure do love the Internet. May you get loads and loads of goodness from it, old and new!

I’m taking the time to write this blog post up real quick because I know that an email I sent this morning to one of our advisors about an urgent matter has been opened and read. A great service called BananaTag emailed me to tell me he opened it on his iPhone. Now I know he knows about the question I’m asking for help with and I can go do something else until he responds. (Thank you, Marshall, you rock!)

I love knowing when people open my emails. Thanks to Blake Robinson, who’s taught me about many things over the years, and who turned me on to BananaTag. I saw over his shoulder, by the way, that BananaTag data indicates Blake has an incredible email open rate. And he’s a cool guy, too.

This weekend Hubspot’s new app Signals told me, in real-time, about two key people visiting our website at Little Bird. Everybody knows that the best time to connect with someone is as close as possible to when they express interest – I think you can carry that out all the way to real time. I got great responses from both people I reached out to this way and I made a little podcast about one of them.

I’ve been paying attention to real-time technology for years, usually as a way to track news sources to report before anyone else. That’s how I got the job as the first hired writer at TechCrunch, I used an RSS to SMS alert system to get notifications in real time when a key vendor made an announcement on their blog. I was able to write it up before any of the other blogs and one day Michael Arrington called me up, saying “I don’t know how you do it, but you keep beating me to stories. I want you to come write for me at TechCrunch.” That was just one of many ways I used real time technology to build my career as a journalist. And now here I am. In a different stage of my career and exploring how to use emerging real-time tech for sales and marketing. Pretty exciting!

Hunter Walk says that you shouldn’t blog to show how smart you are, you should blog to convene a group of smart readers to discuss challenges together. So please, smart readers, share with us any thoughts, ideas or experiences you’ve got with real-time technology impacting the way you do business.

When should you start outreach to press and pillars of the community before you’re going to announce something? That’s something people ask a lot, something I’ll be discussing at this week’s inaugural HypePDX marketing event in Portland and something I’d recommend most people change their approach to. I’ve been on both sides of the equation, as a journalist for thousands and thousands of pitches and now as an entrepreneur doing outreach myself.

Here are your options as I see them for press and influencer outreach, an embargo may or may not be appropriate. (Here’s how they work. More general thoughts on promoting a product launch.)

The worst: Last minute cold pitch with an asserted embargo and weakly relevant reference to the person’s past content. (“I saw you once wrote about X, so I’m writing you out of the blue about an announcement tomorrow and it’s embargoed until 9am!”)

Less bad: A week ahead of time with a well-run embargo. (“We have an announcement about general topic X that we’ll be making next Tuesday at 9am PST. Can I send you info about it under embargo until that time?”)

Realistic: A month ahead of time with conversations online so you’re a known entity when you pitch. (“Hi, I’m that person who’s been commenting smartly and resharing your content with my own added editorial value for the past few weeks. You already have some respect for me! We have an announcement about general topic X that we’ll be making next Tuesday at 9am PST. Can I send you info about it under embargo until that time?”)

Ideal: You’re talking with them right now, you’ll have been around for awhile. When it’s announcement time you’ll be able to say “Hey old buddy, we have an announcement about general topic X that we’ll be making next Tuesday at 9am PST. Can I send you info about it under embargo until that time?”

Pitching is just one of many ways to build visibility for your company. It used to be the primary way when media was centralized, but now we’re all talking online all the time and just being visibly awesome and adding value to public conversations helps you build thought leadership. You’ll probably still want to pitch though and so I hope these suggestions on timing are helpful!