Every piece of blog content that you create has a lifespan, which starts as soon as you hit the publish button. But what does it mean when your audience stops reading your content? After generating some interest among the readers initially, most blog pieces get added with the billion others, collecting dust in the digital space. Does this mean that it’s the end of blog content’s lifespan? With content repurposing, it doesn’t have to be.
We’re sure that your content repository contains many valuable, engaging, and popular pieces of content. Letting them just sit there in the archives would be a shame. By repurposing your content, you’ll get an opportunity to breathe new life into old blog posts. What’s better is that you’ll continue to gain value from these old posts.
We’ll tell you how to get started with the content repurposing process, and then get into some genius tips on approaching content repurposing. But before we get to that, let us explain what exactly repurposing is.
What is Content Repurposing?
To explain it in simple terms, content repurposing or recycling essentially involves re-using existing content to present it in a new format. This is done to increase the lifespan of the content and to expand its reach to new audiences on different mediums. There are numerous benefits of content repurposing and numerous ways you can repurpose content, which is what we’ll cover in the following sections.
Benefits of Repurposed Content
The benefits to be enjoyed through content repurposing are many –
- Reaching out to a new audience: In repurposing content, you can share it on different mediums. When you share content in places where people are searching for it, you’ll be able to reel in new audiences.
- SEO boost: Repurposing old content is a great way to give an SEO boost to your blogs. You can leverage this opportunity to add the desired keywords, generate quality backlinks, and use several other techniques to optimize content for better rankings on search engines.
- Reinforcing your brand message: The ‘Rule of Seven’ is a principle in the marketing industry, which says that people need to hear about your message at least 7 times before they decide to take any action. Repurposing your old content gives you an opportunity to use this principle to your advantage. As you reinforce your message through the repurposed content, it will help in letting your marketing message sink into the minds of the audience.
- Establish authority: In repurposing your popular content, you are essentially creating knowledge on the same topic on various mediums. This will help in positioning you as an expert and a thought leader in the industry.
Where to start with content repurposing?
When you are looking to repurpose content, the first place you should start with is your blog archives. Review all the content you’ve published previously and look for the following –
1. Evergreen content
When you look through your content repository, you’ll be surprised by the amount of content that will qualify as evergreen. In picking out evergreen content pieces, look for two major things – quality and timelessness. While quality will ensure that your repurposed content generates substantial traffic, the element of timelessness will help you in keeping your repurposed content relevant.
2. Popular blog posts
Most likely, you already have some idea about the most popular posts you’ve created in the past. To get a better idea about this, you can use an analytics tool to see which content piece has performed the best in a given time period. You can then devise ways to repurpose the best-performing blog posts.
3. Content pieces that have scope for improvement
As you browse through your blog archives, look for any piece of quality content that has room for improvement. It could be that the blog post holds outdated details on the topic, or that new research has come on the subject.
After you’ve picked out the content for repurposing, it’s time to get to the fun bit – repurposing old blog posts. The next section deals with some great tips on repurposing existing content for driving more engagement.
7 Tips for Repurposing Content
Tip#1. Shareable Graphics
Creating graphics can be a great way to repurpose your old blog posts and present them in a new format. You don’t need to be a professional graphic designer either to come up with engaging graphics supporting your blog content. Today, there are various tools like Canva that can help you create branded graphics that your readers would love to share on their social media. The graphics that you create can be based on the following –
- A summary of the blog
- Visual representation of statistics and facts related to the blog topic
- Share-worthy quotes
- Slogans related to the theme
Even by creating fairly simple graphics, you can give your existing content a new look. What’s better is that the visual content stands out as opposed to a basic text post.
Tip#2. Email Newsletter Campaigns
Another great way to repurpose your old content is by turning it into an email newsletter. It’s important to be smart with newsletter campaigns though. You can’t expect to increase your click-throughs just by inserting the link of the blog along with the headline. You need to come up with interesting ways to repurpose the old content for the newsletter to make it more relevant and engaging for the readers. This type of content duplication will not affect your SEO negatively either, so it’s essentially a win-win strategy.
Tip#3. Video Content
It’s a well-established fact that videos are more memorable, more engaging, and better at driving traffic. To leverage this medium, you can turn your blog into video content. This strategy works especially well with any listicles, how-to posts, and guides you’ve written previously, as these types of blog posts can be excellent for creating graphic-heavy videos. Don’t forget to include the link to your blog along with the YouTube video.
Tip#4. SlideShare Presentation
This is possibly the easiest way to repurpose any old blog content that has performed exceptionally or moderately well in the past. For creating a SlideShare presentation of your blog, you would simply have to condense the text to make it more appropriate for the presentation format. What makes SlideShare presentations great is that it gives you an opportunity to present your ideas in a more palatable way. Besides this, you get to add some graphic elements, which is especially useful for making long-form blog posts more interesting for the readers.
Tip#5. Podcast Episode
Your high-performing content can also be turned into a podcast episode. But you might be wondering – where do I start with this? The first thing you would need to do is create a script for the podcast, and this is where the blog post content comes in. After you’ve picked the most salient points from the blog post, you can invite experts and thought leaders to have an in-depth discussion on the topic. There are various directories where you can then publish these podcasts. You can even post important snippets from the podcast episode on your social media channels.
Tip#6. Spin-off blog posts
Spin-off content like a follow-up, case study, opposing opinion, and update is great for expanding on your existing content. This is especially good for content that has performed well in the past, since your audience will certainly appreciate more information and background on the topic. It’s also a good time-saving tactic, since you’ll be able to create a new blog post without having to start from scratch. To employ this content repurposing strategy, plan your content calendar in such a way that gives you an opportunity to spin each blog post into multiple other posts.
Tip#7. Workshop/Webinar
If you have some comprehensive blog posts that contain useful information and educational value for your readers, you can consider turning them into a webinar or workshop. This is a great way to increase engagement among your readers and position yourself as a thought leader in the industry. What’s better is that later you can turn the webinar into video content, so you’ll essentially be getting two forms of repurposed content through this strategy.
Wrapping Up
With these great tips in your arsenal, you would no longer have to spend extra energy and effort creating brand-new content every time. Repurposing your content is a great way to increase conversions and boost traffic with content you already have. It is also a great way to create consistent content for your social media accounts. So the next time you have to repurpose your old blog post, use the 7 genius tips in this article to breathe new life into your old content.