Creating quality content is time consuming. But what if we told you there was a way to transform your existing content into something new? Or new-ish?
Repurposing content is the perfect way to utilize existing content and get new eyes on it. The goal of content is to be seen, and recycling content is an opportunity to reach a wider audience or reach out to a target audience. Repurposed content helps you to reap the benefits of incoming traffic by expanding the reach of your content.
When we say repurpose, there are a few ways to interpret this. One is to amend a piece of content, like updating it with new information, or re-specify the initial audience. The second way is to transform the medium, such as taking blog content and making it into an infographic or a video, or vice versa, video content into a downloadable white paper.
When you can extend the use of your existing content, you’re working smarter instead of harder. Check out three ways of repurposing content!
3 ways to repurpose content
Before you repurpose all your content, we recommend reviewing your metrics to tell you which posts get the most traffic and most engagement. Secondly, seeing which posts have the most translatable content, like best tips or best insights, or can have a fresh take. Thirdly, content should help your readers get closer to making a decision, so prioritize content that drives decision making.
The goal here is to produce better results for your business, revenue driving, viewership, engagement. Knowing which posts are the most valuable content ensures that your audience will still find it to have value and be interested in your repurposed content. With that in mind, let’s get started on ways to repurpose content!
Amend it
One way to amend blog posts is to update it with new and target keywords. This would give you a secondary SEO boost. Include long-tail keywords in your piece. They are indicators that tell search engines what your content is about and how helpful it is to readers.
Change headlines
Another way to vamp up your blog content is to change headlines, update the picture, and refresh the content with any new information of value to your audience. Because marketing is constantly evolving, focus on creating evergreen content.
Create Evergreen Content
Evergreen content is the content that keeps on giving. It is content with a long shelf life because it continues to be valuable and relevant to your audience over time. This looks like “how-to” pieces and consistency in search, not seasonal or period pieces because those lead to temporary spikes not consistent readership.
Finding the evergreen topics for your audience can be found in the search volume of keyword research. This will provide you insight on potential new audiences, and how to position your content to those audiences.
To do this, think of a few topics you’d like to explore on your blog and enter those into a keyword tool. What you are looking for here are search volumes. Is there enough search on your given topic to increase your search traffic? Also check in with Google Trends to see if your chosen topics are gaining or losing popularity. You’ll want content that continues to grow in popularity and relevance for it to be solid evergreen content.
This is great content to invest in creating because it ensures that relevance. A refresh and amendment here and there will give you the opportunities to garner new audiences.
Refine target audience
And lastly, you could amend existing content for a broad audience to a singular, target audience. Take your broad piece “How Social Media can Help Your Business,” and target it to an audience, for example creatives, by adding information relevant to that audience.
Change your headline to, “How Social Media Can Help Creatives,” and add the information relevant to this audience, and viola! New content from your content repertoire.
This targeted content creation helps cultivate your authority on the matter. Building continued readership is important to your business, and being an authoritative figure in the industry will keep readers perpetually interested.
Change the content format
So much of your existing content is translatable into a new content format, it can be condensed, expanded, shareable and downloadable. There are so many possibilities awaiting you.
If your content is primarily blog posts, they can be recycled into whatever type of content best resonates with your audience. An infographic is a visual representation of your written content, and incredibly easy to share.
Maybe you have a couple blogs or videos on a particular topic, turn that into an email marketing campaign where you are condensing that content into four to six emails of knowledge and action. Maybe you’ve participated in or held a webinar, create a downloadable paper of take away tips.
Go from written content to visual content with social media posts or stories, graphics, webinars and videos. Go from visual content to written content with email marketing campaigns, downloadable and interactive content from your website. Changing the content format is taking existing information and inputting it into a new format to reach new audiences.
Upload it to a new platform
Reaching new audiences is the goal of this repurposing endeavor. Reformatting your content for different mediums allows you to appeal to more audiences and extend your reach into these audiences.
One place you can share your content is on LinkedIn. Change the image from your initial post, tweak the headline, include the most important aspects of your post and a link to your website to bring readers to your website to continue reading. Republishing content to LinkedIn puts your content in front of 364 million potential clients and connections.
Another great place to republish your content is on Medium because of its large viewership and subscribed audience. Wait to publish on Medium until your content has had a long enough lifespan on your own blog so it can be solidified as the primary source. Using the Import tool to publish your content will automatically set the canonical URL to your original post on your website. And at the end of the blog post on Medium, always state the original article source and link to your website.
Repurposing content is all about extending your content’s life and reaching new audiences. It also has the opportunity to provide additional value to your existing audience and cultivate authority on your realm of content.
Need help repurposing your content? We can help you develop your content and digital marketing strategy, and help you implement those strategies. Talk to us.