Chances are, the majority of your blog is dedicated to text-based blog posts with images included throughout. And while that’s a good place to start – your blog can be more than that. Including other types of content, even if it’s based on the same basic topic ideas, can help you reach more people, expand your blog identity, and get more link-building opportunities. But, beyond that, there are other reasons why you should consider repurposing content.
Instead of just singing the praises of repurposing content – I’m going to show you how to identify the content on your blog that’s worthy of repurposing, and then give you actionable advice to turn that existing content into additional assets you can use to market your business.
Overview
Why Should You be Repurposing Content?
Work less. Technically, it’s more work to take a piece of content and morph it into something else, but it’s technically easier to start with something you’ve already worked on and create something else than it is to start from scratch with a new, fresh, idea. The older your blog is, and the more specific your niche is, the harder it will become will come up with those new ideas. Overall, you’ll be working less, and getting more done, since that old blog post is the jumping point. You already know the topic. You’ve done the research. You’re still a step ahead… and you’ll have that much more content ready to promote to your audience.
Strengthen your message. There’s conflicting data on the exact number of times a customer needs to hear your message before they become a buyer, but according to the Marketing Rule of Seven, your leads need to hear your message seven times before they’ll take the plunge and make a purchase. Repurposing content makes it a lot easier on you to repeat the messaging to drill it home to your audience.
Boost your SEO efforts. Producing multiple pieces of unique content around a central topic gives you the chance to target a keyword more than once. And, if you take that content to places off your website, you have the chance to build high quality backlinks to your website, with the bonus of controlling the link’s anchor text.
Earn more authority. Publishing high quality content, based around a single topic, in various places on the web helps raise your profile in the industry. It teaches others to see you as an expert in the niche/field, which goes a long way to earning customer trust.
Reach a new audience. Many people love reading blog posts, and that’s great. But, there are a number of people who’d rather listen to a podcast, watch a video, or look through an infographic. Repurposing content allows you to create multiple formats, so you can reach those people who hate reading (or just don’t have time to read) blogs, and still get your message across. After all, it’s much easier to listen to a podcast during your morning or evening commute than it is to watch a video or read an email.
Is All Content Repurposable?
The short answer is yes, but it must be evergreen. What is evergreen? If your content is evergreen, it is timeless – always relevant – and it is of high enough quality that it gets traffic.
To find content you could repurpose, start with your analytics data. Which posts are the most popular with your audience? If they were a hit once, they could be a hit again. Look at which ones were popular over the last month, and which ones were popular over the last year. Are there patterns? If your most popular posts all have a common topic they’re based on, then you definitely want to craft content around this topic as the data tells you it’s the one that resonates most with your visitors.
Before I dive into the various ways you can repurpose a single piece of content, let me be clear. Repurposing content doesn’t mean using the same piece of content over and over. It requires you to alter it each time, to ensure freshness and appeal to a new audience.
Ways to Repurpose Your Content
Craft new blog posts. Do you remember the old TV show Family Matters? Did you know it was actually a spin-off of Perfect Strangers? Harriet was their neighbor, and the show was originally meant to be centered on her and her family, until Steve Urkel, stole the show. The point is, high-quality content can spin-off more (they’re working on a The Big Bang Theory spin-off, now, too!) high-quality content. The audience can win each time. Be careful, though – we know not all spin-offs are as successful as the original – remember the Friends spin-off Joey?
Posts like this listicle are a great thing to repurpose. Each one of these points can become an individual post, fleshed out with further detail and research. Then, they can all be linked to one another and formed into a downloadable guide.
Update and republish old posts. Even though you’re aiming for evergreen content, data and research get old after a while. New information is discovered. Go back and make sure all the data you’ve linked to is still current, and no relevant new discoveries have been made. Keep the original content, but add to it in a way that lets people see you’ve updated it to be more current.
Simply adding the updated text in a different color or font style, with a note about what that means, or adding an “UPDATED (date)” at the bottom can make all the difference to visitors who are looking for the information you shared, but find the original posting to be too far back to be useful for their own research purposes.
Compile everything into an eBook. Take all of the blog posts that relate to a single topic, and expand on them with graphics and additional data. Before you know it, you could have a rather extensive library of eBook content for lead magnets or for sale – like Smashing Magazine, who has 70 ebooks in their shop – for little extra effort.
Publish an infographic. If you want to go beyond creating a slideshow presentation, you can create an infographic. It serves as a complete summary of your post contents, presented in a visual format. These are particularly beneficial if you have a lot of data in your content. If it is heavy with statistics or is centered around a relatively boring topics to demonstrate only in text, the infographic is a highly engaging format.
If hiring a graphic designer isn’t in your budget you can use tools like Piktochart or Visually to create the infographics you need. Or, you can provide the text broken down as you want it represented in the infographic and hire a professional designer to do it for you. There are several infographic distribution platforms available to help you get your new content in front of eyes. It’s also a good idea to post the infographic on your blog, with an HTML embed code to make it easier for your audience to share.
Publish an instructographic. This is a type of infographic, but instead of presenting data, it presents how to do something, step-by-step. This is a great way to convert a text-based tutorial into something more friendly for visual learners. These are great for Pinterest. Take a look at this instructographic on how to build and install raised garden beds, and you’ll see what I’m talking about.
Create a presentation. If you have any kind of actionable advice, meaningful quotes, or interesting statistics, you can use it to create an online presentation. You can use something like Microsoft PowerPoint or a free photo editing program like Venngage or Canva to create the slides for the presentation. Once the presentation is complete, you can upload it to a platform like SlideShare to increase your social reach potential and see more opportunity for engagement.
Record a video. Even if you don’t like the idea of getting in front of a camera and putting your face on video, you can still use the medium for your audience. Thanks to screencasting software like Camtasia Studio or ScreenFlow, you can demonstrate something on your computer by recording the screen. This is a particularly helpful format for demonstrating how to do something on your computer, but it can also be useful in other niches.
You don’t have to invest in a lot of expensive equipment to record video. Just make sure you’re in a quiet place that is well lit. you may want to invest in an inexpensive tripod so that you can keep the camera steady throughout the recording session. You can use your smartphone to get started. If you find that you like to do it and your audience responds well to it, you may want to grow into higher quality equipment.
Distribute your video with platforms like YouTube, Wistia, and Vimeo. Embed the video into a blog post, (using a code from the hosting platform of your choice) and for further amplification, allow your audience to share the video with an embed code and social sharing buttons.
You can also experiment with live broadcasting video using platforms like Facebook Live and Periscope. Facebook Live will save your videos to your page, group, or wherever they were reported so you can build an archive. You can also repurpose that content into future blog posts or social media for other platforms outside of Facebook.
Record a podcast. Podcasts are great for people who don’t mind putting their voice online, but don’t necessarily want to get in front of a video camera. You can inform, educate, and entertain with podcasts. The format is great for people who are always on the go, because it makes it possible for them to digest the content while driving, sitting in a waiting room, or waiting for their kids to get finished with soccer practice.
Just make sure that when you record your podcast, you have a decent quality microphone and are in a quiet place. You can use basic audio editing software to improve the overall quality of the podcast, or insert any necessary advertisements, should you decide to monetize it. Simply recording the podcast isn’t enough, however. Like infographics and video, you’ll want to find distribution platforms to get it to the right ears. Options include: iTunes (approval required) and SoundCloud.
Host a webinar. If you’ve got a lot of content related to the same topic, borrow from the slide presentation format, the podcast, and the video format. Compile it to a webinar event that you can host live, making yourself available for questions and answers at the end. After the live event, you can send people to the archived version.
Write guest posts. Guest posting can help you reach new audiences – while also earning a backlink to your website. Take a blog post you’ve already written – refresh it for the guest post host website, and there you go. You get the SEO boost, along with exposure to a new audience. Rinse and repeat for any high quality site in your niche that accepts guest posts.
Use Quora. Repurpose your content to provide answers for various questions on Quora. Or, post the content to your Quora user blog. And, if and when you get stuck for content ideas in the future, use Quora questions answers for inspiration for future blog posts. A question and answer session could easily become a full-blown blog post.
Re-share on social media. A great thing about finding your evergreen content is that you can share it again today, while providing nearly the same value you did when you first published it. It may sound counterintuitive to share the same content of the same audience, but reposting old content is an effective way to hit people across various time zones, reach new followers, and test headline variants to see which one does better.
Research shows that reposting can bring in 75% of the engagement of the original share. Archived content can also help you keep your social content calendar full, especially when something from the archive is relevant.
Write case studies. If your company has any kind of internal data, consider turning into a case study. Reach out to current and past clients to see how your products/services have helped them reach their goals. Or, run tests in your own website and save the data to use. Case studies can help you earn trust and credibility since they show your customers how you can help them, too. If you’ve never written a case study before, check out these tips to help you knock it out of the park.
Develop an email series. Some content can be broken down into smaller chunks, and delivered in a daily email format. Going back to this listicle as an example, you could break down each point into a daily email, and send it to subscribers as a lead magnet.
What if You’re Just Starting Out?
If you’re just starting out and don’t have an extensive content library to repurpose, you can use a single ideation session to hash out several ideas from a single topic or string of topics. How can you do that?
When you start with the core topic, you can start with the core article/blog post, and think of ways to convert it to any or all of the above suggestions. When you come up with ideas for content over the next quarter, six months, and year, think about the various ways you can turn that single blog post into other formats. Then, develop a plan for creating those assets, and sprinkle them throughout your content calendar. Even if you can’t create them all at once, you have a plan for how you can repurpose those initial blog posts later. It’s a great way to fill in gaps when you’re hitting writer’s block and feel like you’re running out of ideas.
What kinds of content do you have that you’ve repurposed? Have there been any instances where the repurposed content has outperformed the original? Share your experience in the comments below.
Photo credit: Adobe Stock
