11 Tips and Tricks for Repurposing Content

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Published: Mar 25, 2020
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Content is a key resource for your business. While it's important to produce a steady stream of fresh, engaging content, it’s also crucial to squeeze as much value as possible from the content you already have.

Continually creating top-quality content can be difficult for businesses, after all. In fact, one study reveals that 44% of marketers cite content production as their greatest challenge. But there's no need to start from scratch for each and every content item. Instead, you can recycle your current content marketing efforts and make every piece of content work harder for you.

How? Check out these 11 tips and tricks to repurpose content more effectively.

What is content repurposing?

But first—it's important to understand what content repurposing even means.

Put simply, it means that you're changing one of two things: your content's format or its target audience. It's easy to confuse "repurposing" with "revamping," but the two terms refer to entirely different strategies.

When you revamp your content, you're improving it in some way to make it more relevant or appealing—but you're using it for the same basic purpose and targeting the same general audience. For example, revamping could be:

  • Reviewing one of your ebooks and updating any information that may have become outdated over time
  • Changing your email newsletter's design to reflect your website's new look

Repurposing content, on the other hand, involves modifying the format of the content or targeting a different audience. This can manifest in many different ways, like:

  • Taking a series of related blog posts and compiling them into an ebook
  • Creating a blog post summary of your latest podcast episode

If you've never tried repurposing content before, it can be difficult to know where to start. Try these strategies to squeeze the most value out of each of your existing content items.

1. Create a podcast from published content.

Podcasts offer a terrific way for people to digest content while they're going about their busy lives. Review some of your favorite published content items and see which ones would translate well to a podcast. It helps if you're working with a blog post or something else that's text-based, as you can easily tweak this material into a podcast script.

What makes this content repurposing strategy effective?

A podcast is easier for your audience to consume during times when they can't read, like commuting, working out, doing chores, and so on.

Getting a podcast series to gain traction can take time, but patience pays off. People tend to keep coming back to a podcast that they've enjoyed, so keep putting that content out there and be sure the technical quality of your recordings remains high.

2. Present ideas from your content in an infographic.

When you're looking for attention-grabbing, shareable content, it's hard to beat a good infographic.

According to one study, 40% of marketers named infographics as the visual content that best helped them achieve their marketing goals. Infographics are also a natural choice if you're repurposing content for SEO purposes.

Putting together a quality infographic takes some effort—designing the look of it can be tougher than gathering information from your published content. However, you don't need to reinvent the wheel or hire designers to create a top-notch infographic. There are lots of free tools like Canva available to get you started.

3. Compile a series of blog posts into an ebook.

If you have a series of articles, blog posts, or interviews that share a thematic link, why not use them to create an ebook? If you're just starting to think about how to repurpose content, this strategy can be a great way to begin, because it requires a fairly low investment of effort. You'll need to polish up each article to ensure smooth transitions and a sense of continuity, but it won't take much overall work to get your ebook ready to publish.

An ebook provides a robust, comprehensive resource for your audience that you can position as a "Complete Guide" to the topic at hand—a simple way to build authority in your field. In addition, you can use your ebook as a form of premium content to build your email subscriber list and generate leads.

4. Turn a webinar into a video tutorial.

Have you hosted a successful webinar? While your content may have been a hit with attendees, chances are good that some people weren't able to make it, and new visitors to your website probably never knew it occurred.

You can extend the life of that terrific content by making it available on your website as a YouTube video tutorial. It's a valuable addition to your website, and it may even get you some new visitors through YouTube.

5. Write a blog post summarizing your audio or video's major points.

Generally speaking, audio and video files lack the skimmability of text-based content. Sure, you can speed up the recording, but it's still not quite the same as using Ctrl-F to find the exact word or phrase you're looking for.

Given this inconvenience, it only makes sense to create a text-based piece of content for your audio and video files, whether that's a webinar, podcast episode, Zoom interview, or something else. This write-up could be a basic summary, a bullet point overview, or even a listicle of the major topics discussed. It's often most effective as a blog post, with your podcast/video/etc. embedded directly into the page.

One great example: podcast show notes. Many successful podcasters produce a high-level written overview of each episode, giving their audience an alternate means of consuming their content—reading instead of listening.

This is exactly what Buffer does with its podcast, The Science of Social Media.

For each of its podcast episodes, Buffer produces a detailed blog post summarizing the key points discussed. These posts even include visuals—meaning extra value for readers since a podcast can't include such content.

And when optimized for the web, these show notes can mean more organic traffic in the long run.

To be clear, though, this isn't the same as creating a transcript of your audio or video file. Instead, this write-up should be able to function as a stand-alone piece of its own—though you'll often see it used as an accompaniment to the original file.

6. Convert old content into a listicle.

There's no denying it: people love listicles.

These easy-to-skim lists present information in a way that busy brains can easily digest, and their headlines tend to grab readers' attention. An easy way to repurpose existing content is to create a listicle from it. It could be as simple as a list of your top 10 posts, or it could be a roundup of posts that relate to a certain topic.

For an example of how this might look, check out Literacy Daily's roundup of 2019 posts.

7. Create an email series from long-form content.

Some of your meatier content might lend itself well to being divided up into bite-sized pieces. Look at your longer, more in-depth articles and think about which ones could be turned into a daily email series.

Take the list format of this article, for example. You could easily create a 10-day email series from this content, sending readers one tip per day. All you would need to do is flesh out each tip a bit; perhaps you could add an image to the email as well. A readable but info-dense email series can serve as an effective way to capture new subscribers and leads.

8. Bring visual content to Pinterest.

If you have any posts that are heavy on images, you might want to make those visual assets do double duty.

Create a Pinterest board containing images that share a common theme—this can be a great way to reach new audiences and drive traffic to your website. Pinterest is also a good place to repurpose content that you created for your various social media platforms.

9. Create an "instructographic" for Pinterest.

Another way to leverage the power of Pinterest is by posting "instructographics" on the platform. An instructographic is similar to an infographic, but as its name suggests, it has a teaching element to it as well.

You can transform a how-to post or article into an instructographic for Pinterest, helping it get in front of new audiences and breathing some new life into what might be an older content item. Instructographics tend to be popular because they're actionable and they appeal to people's visual nature.

10. Reach new audiences with Slideshare.

One often-overlooked channel for repurposing content is Slideshare. You can reach new audiences easily by repackaging some of your existing content as a slideshow.

The platform makes it easy to search for slideshows by user and by topic, so it's not difficult to get your content seen by new eyes. Slideshows are incredibly engaging to users too, as they're more visual than an article or blog post and they offer a bit more interaction than a video.

11. Be choosy about the content you repurpose.

Not all content is created equal, and some items work better for repurposing than others. Being selective when you're repurposing marketing content will help you maximize your results and avoid wasted effort.

When you're selecting content to repurpose, stick to evergreen pieces. If you're going to give your content a second life, it's best that it has a timeless quality to it. It's also wise to look for your most popular content items. If your content was a hit in one format or with one audience, the odds are better that it will be successful with another.

Conclusion

Conserving resources is always a good idea, whether it's our planet's resources or your own valuable time and energy. Repurposing your content offers multiple benefits: It breathes new life into your older content, it helps you reach new audiences, and it helps you get the maximum value from your content efforts.

When you recycle your content for new audiences, you end up working smarter and getting more bang for your content buck. And there's no better time to start than today! These tips and strategies for repurposing content should provide a wealth of ideas to get you started.

This article was written by Compose.ly writer Nicole Wiegand.

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