Content repurposing is the simple yet beautiful concept of reusing a piece of content but with a different format, target audience, and goal in mind. By changing the format or medium on which you present your content, it can reach a vastly greater or completely different audience. This allows you to reuse and extend the life of your best content exponentially.
At Ontraport, content repurposing is one of our favorite marketing secret weapons. In fact, we published this very article about a year ago. All we had to do was change up the introduction, sprinkle in new information, update some links and BOOM: we’ve got a hot new article that you never would’ve known was recycled!
Here are six great ways to repurpose your content to extend its life and reach a greater audience.
1. Syndicate
The easiest way to repurpose a blog post is to simply publish your existing content on another website. Reposting an article across multiple blog channels will increase the likelihood of your content getting seen by different audiences.
We suggest altering posts (slightly) depending on which platform you’re re-publishing your content. For example, the best Medium articles are photo and graphic-heavy, whereas content on Reddit is text-heavy, no-frills and straight to the point.
Don’t rewrite your entire post, but changing your content to match the publication’s standard makes you appeal to a larger audience more effectively.
The best sites to republish your content:
Other places to repost existing blog content:
Be sure to tastefully promote your business or otherwise credit yourself when reposting these articles — avoiding blatant, obnoxious sales-pitches. Then include a bio and links to your website, Landing Pages and social media links to turn your hard-earned traffic into meaningful leads.
2. Republish on Your Own Site
As you would republish your content on another website, you can do the same on your own site. Your website’s traffic doesn’t just originate from your newest blog posts. In fact a huge amount of your traffic could be coming from organic searches. Meaning, if you perchance have any outdated content posted on your blog, you could unintentionally be providing inaccurate information to your audience. A way to avoid this is to update, refresh and republish your existing articles or posts.
Here’s how to simply and quickly republish your existing content:
- Use the same URL. There’s no reason to redirect to the new article or create an entirely new post as this could negatively impact your search engine results due to duplicate content.
- Write a new introduction that frames the new goal of your republished content.
- Get rid of outdated information: everything from dead links to obsolete statistics and dates.
- Create a new call to action. A new CTA can completely change the impact that an article has by generating leads from a different audience, or promoting a new product.
- Update the post’s meta description. Your existing content won’t rank any higher for SEO, but it often helps make the post more enticing and clickable to new searchers.
- You don’t have to hide the fact that you are republishing your content. Add a note to the article or include the original publish date for increased transparency.
3. Ebooks and Downloadable Content
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Repurposing blog posts into comprehensive ebooks is another way to distribute your evergreen content to a wider audience; it’s also the most effective way to generate leads from your content. We’re a testament to this: We’ve grown our email list substantially with our free marketing and small business guides.
Again, you’re appealing to a totally different audience: Some people prefer downloading complete, in-depth guides rather than reading separate blog posts online, and it’s easy to create an ebook; take a set of similar blog posts and package them together.
Tips for Creating Ebooks With Repurposed Content:
- Your ebook shouldn’t sound like you copied and pasted blog articles into a new document. Organize your ebook in an easy-to-read and digestible way – make it flow.
- Expand on the topics discussed in your blog articles – do not directly copy them. Build upon the topics you covered in an in-depth way.
- Add interactive worksheets or to-do lists for extra value.
- Try tweaking your content to appeal to a new demographic or take a different angle to engage a segmented group.
- Make sure you put your ebook behind an opt-in form. That way, you’ll have gained a lead even if the ebook fails to convert or live up to the reader’s expectations.
If designing your ebook seems daunting or you don’t have Adobe InDesign experience, don’t worry!
Check Out These Super-Easy Design Tools for Creating Ebooks:
Don’t let the term ebook scare you. Your ebooks don’t have to be 20-page monsters that take weeks to write and design! Reorganize existing content, throw in a few transitions and add design elements… then publish.
4. Social Media Content
While ebooks are highly valuable, your pre-existing content might be better suited to a shorter, easily consumable format. Your blog posts are content goldmines, so try repurposing snippets of your content on social media. Drip out important statistics, awesome quotes, interesting facts, useful tips – anything that you think your audience might find valuable. Post on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram.
Tip: Make sure to include visual content. 87% of Facebook’s page engagement happens on photo posts and 63% of all social media is made up of images, so optimize your posts with visual content!
This includes:
- Amazing photos
- Graphics
- Screenshots
- Charts and graphs
- Memes
- Videos
Use the existing visual content from your blog post or easily create graphics and/or enhance photos with Canva, Recite, and BeFunky!
5. Infographics
Sure, visual content is highly engaging, but why is it starting to overtake regular, written content?
Visual content is much easier to process, as you can see from this graphic by Unbounce. By utilizing visual content, you’re expanding your audience to reach the people who learn visually, approximately 65% of the population!
Infographics are awesome ways to boost engagement and are insanely popular – in just over two years, infographic search volumes have increased by 800%.
Try repurposing a piece of blog content into an eye-catching infographic.
We love creating and posting infographics because they bring content to life in a new way. They do take more time and effort to create, but the engagement is worth it.
One of the best platforms for sharing your infographics is Pinterest, as the site’s visual emphasis caters to your carefully designed images.
What to Include on Infographics:
- Stats
- Numbers
- Quotes
- Lists
A few years ago, creating your own infographics was a big headache for those of us who are graphically challenged. Now there are plenty of options for the non-designer to create beautiful infographics.
Check out these awesome tools:
- Infogram
- Piktochart
- Visual.ly
- Easel.ly
- Visme
- And even good ol’ PowerPoint
For everything else you need to know about infographics, check out this amazing post from Social Media Examiner.
6. Webinar
If you already have an established audience, repurpose a blog post into a webinar. Webinars are hugely effective because they ensure your audience is engaged, mentally involved, and actively learning – which, according to a Columbia University study, is how people learn most effectively. The live nature of webinars allows for immediate audience interaction; from sharing comments to asking questions, viewers are involved from start to finish.
Create a webinar from repurposed content! Take a blog post or series of blog posts on one topic and expand on them. Creating slides is easy, too – just make them with Google presentation or PowerPoint.
Marketing guru Neil Patel’s webinar slideshow tips:
- Don’t cram a lot of words into each slide. Around 15 words is ideal.
- Utilize images and graphs heavily.
- Make generous use of whitespace.
- Incorporate relevant (branded) typography and fonts.
- Ensure that the layout is designed to improve comprehension of the slides, not detract from it.
- Incorporate three to four colors in your design, but use one accent color for the points you really want to stand out.
Tip: Share your slides on websites such as SlideShare, SlideBoom, and AuthorStream to boost your reach even further!
Use your blog post and slides to create a script you can follow during your webinar. You will be presenting to a live audience, so make sure you’re fully comfortable with the content and that your slides contain no spelling or grammatical errors.
If you don’t think you have enough experience or a large enough following to host a successful webinar, try co-hosting with another person in your industry who has more experience and/or larger audience than you. It’ll make your webinar more successful — and teach you the secrets to hosting a successful webinar.
