Content

There’s something wrong with your strategy if your social media platforms are on mute for days in wait for content, because you’re too busy with other things, and you’ve no time to create new content.

But why do you think ‘creating’ is the only way to keep your content marketing game going?

You can always fill the gaps of inconsistencies with repurposed content. You don’t need to generate content daily to be consistent on your profile across channels.

All you need is previously published content and a good content marketing strategy that includes repurposing.

What Does Repurposing Mean?

Let’s suppose ‘Rice’ is your content (Sorry, WFH effect: all my recent analogies are somehow about food).

Okay, back to supposition- the blog you created has an equivalent value of 20 kg rice that you managed to grow in your field using skills and sheer hard work.

Your task is to make your family (your audience) eat rice.

Now, you have two options:

1. Cook plain rice every day. It’s a risky option as everyone would not prefer to consume plain rice every day, and people who don’t like plain rice will never prefer eating at your table.
2. Another option is to make optimum use of its taste and texture so that your family members consume rice at least in one form instead of leaving your table.

Mix it with milk and sugar for people who prefer rice in its sweet form and Voila- Kheer.

Or you could cook it up with meat or vegetables for people who love the spice.

Some who want to consume rice as a quick snack: Poha(flattened rice) or Murmura(puffed rice) will satisfy that sect of the audience.

So you have…

One content- Rice

Which you managed to turn into…

Multiple dishes(formats)- Plain rice, khichdi, kheer, biryani, poha, murmura

That’s what repurposing is! Using one piece of content, say, your blog, to create different forms of content for different audiences on different platforms.

You don’t need to create content every day. You just have to use the existing content in a way that it reaches maximum people.

So the “basic” idea is to take an existing piece of blog, edit in a way that matches your audience expectations on that platform, and make it live.

Why You Should Repurpose Your Blog

1.   Reach New Audience

Readership building is a gradual process. While some of your content might die in a few days, good posts continue to gain traction over months.

These fine, older blog posts would have more views and engagement than the newer ones.

If you repurpose such a blog post and keep sharing its tidbits at a regular interval, you will reach a unique audience, increasing the organic reach.

2.   You’ll Get to Use Information Optimally

Each social medium has a different set of audiences, and they prefer to consume content accordingly.

All the information, experiences, and data you have gathered to create a blog post need a different representation to reach different audiences.

With repurposing, you make sure to use the information and data in the best way possible. And you manage to get something in return from that set of information through all the marketing channels.

3.   Shows That You’re Consistent

If you’ve discussed something on your blog, why would you want to let that piece disappear in your archives?

Isn’t it a dead investment if a blog post stays alive just for a few months?

And isn’t it unprofessional to take a topic, write once, and never touch it again, as if it was a one-time thing?

There’s an old concept in marketing, The Rule of Seven, which says that a prospective buyer needs to see your marketing message at least seven times before they consider buying from you.

Repurposing is just the apt way to reach your prospective buyer on a channel he/she prefers.

That brings us to…

How to Repurpose Content?

1.   Convert Your Blog into Podcast

I’ve written approx. six hundred words until this point of the blog, and you have read these words. Now imagine listening to the same words in the form of a podcast.

Interesting and plausible, right?

People are consuming podcasts more than ever. You are eliminating your brand from reaching your ‘listening’ audience by not offering content in audio form. Many people have now shifted to ‘listening’ and ‘watching’ content from ‘reading.’

The best part of turning your blog into a podcast is that you don’t have to limit yourself with the number of words.

Edit your blog with relevant industry examples, even better, with your examples, latest insights from the industry, and record it in a conversational way.

If the blog is an ultimate guide, you could always divide it into sections and create a mini-series for podcast episodes. There are many possibilities for exploration.

You’re offering an alternative for consuming content to visitors who bounced from your blog to drive or take shower.

Insight: 80% podcast listeners listen to almost the entire episode. (Source)

2.   Turn Your Blogs into Videos [‘How To’ Blogs = Goldmine]

65% of people turn to YouTube when they’re stuck with a problem, and are looking for answers. I remember myself going straight to YouTube to learn how to shoot a stop-motion video.

Why not leverage the many channels(Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram) where people can turn to your brand/service to find solutions to their problems?

If you’re waiting to generate suitable content for videos, or for a big-budget allotment to rent hi-tech equipment for shoots, you’ve got it all wrong.

You’ve ample content right in front of you- all the ‘How To’ blog posts.

Choose one of your popular blog posts, and turn it into a series of videos! If you aren’t camera-shy, you can do reasonably well with your phone.

And if you’re camera shy, there are tens of tools for creating explainer videos such as Powtoon, Wideo, Animaker, and Renderforest. Drag, drop, animate, add text, and your video is ready to go live!

If I’m to make a video of this blog post,

• I could create 10 short videos to post on social media,
• a one-hour exemplary tutorial for YouTube on ‘How To Repurpose Content,’ and
• a crisp 15-second video on ‘Why Should you Repurpose your Content’ with stats and insights.

That’s 13 videos from this one blog post!

Insight: 72% of customers would rather learn about a product or service through a video. (Source)

3.   Make E-book/PDF Out of A Series of Blog Posts

Source: www.hubspot.com

How many times have you seen a CTA asking you to download a FREE PDF guide or a workbook like Hubspot above in exchange for signups on websites? Plenty, right?

That’s because people love free content, and the idea of getting back to that content in their free time is super attractive and convenient.

Do you think the brands offering free guides sit down with the intent of writing thousands of words to create the guide?

NO.

Some may be doing that, but they wouldn’t have if they knew how to repurpose their existing content into a PDF or e-book.

Let’s say you are a freelance web designer, and you can’t afford to create huge volumes of content. But you want to build your email list by offering a free guide.

There are two ways to do that.

One- use the existing content, club relevant blog posts together, edit it to make it readable as one piece of content, and have it!

But hardly anyone can take this route because hardly anyone creates a content strategy or a content marketing plan.

So the second route, which you could focus on starting today, is to create a content strategy.

Let’s say you want to target an audience who loves minimalistic designs. All you have to do is have patience.

You add blog posts to your website, right? This time, you focus on writing different aspects of ‘Minimal designing.’

Take all the topics that you want to feature in the free guide and create separate blog posts.

Even if you add just two blogs pieces having 1500 words every week, you’ll have your e-book by the end of the month. Yes, it’s that simple!

For companies, it’s even simpler, provided that they already have clusters of topics posted on their website that could be clubbed into a free downloadable.

Insight: Darren Rowse, the founder of ProBlogger, clubbed his popular series of “31 Days to Build a Better Blog” into an e-book and started selling at $29.99. It’s still available today!

4.   Extract Content from Your Blog Post and Create a Slide Share

Good content writers always back their claims with statistics.

It’s their way of saying, “Hey, these are not stories that I create on a whim. Some people have already accomplished something doing the way I claim here!”

Your content, or almost any blog post for that matter, will have some statistics proving the writer’s perception. So far, I have shared almost 4-5 stats and may share 4-5 more.

You can extract each of those statistics, club it with similar statistics from other blog posts, and make a deck.

For example, the video insight that I shared above- “72% of customers prefer videos to learn about a product,” is perfect to be clubbed with stats on videos from other blog posts.

I could also combine all the stats that I write in this blog post to create a slide share on the same topic. The best way to do it would be to combine each stat with a bang-on 10-word copy to prove my point and create a slide share featuring ten power-packed data.

Have a look at this SlideShare by Pew Research Center. Of course, they are a research center equipped with data but have a look at their SlideShare views. It’s in millions! And hundreds of people have clipped the individual slides for reference!

If you manage to repurpose your existing blog posts to a deck of 10 slides, you’ll have

• 10 Instagram posts,
• a hook for 10 LinkedIn posts, and
• this deck could itself go to your company’s LinkedIn page.

There! You get an original piece of content- SlideShare, and ten secondary pieces (slides) to post on social media platforms. All of it from existing blog posts!

Marketers are speculating the end of SlideShare, but a good presentation can be embedded even on your website.

Insight: 80% of SlideShare’s 70 million monthly visitors come from targeted search. (Source)

5.   Turn your Step-by-Step Guides into Infographics

Did you know that bright visuals or rather color in visuals increase attention span by 82%?

Don’t you think that’s too much to ignore, including in your content strategy?

Infographics are just what you need to grab your ‘visuals first’ audience and drive them to your website.

Pick the main points from your blog post, add supporting text, the shorter, the better, including a few complementing statistics if viable, and it’s done.

With tools like Canva and Venngage, creating infographics has become much easier and faster than before.

If you’re active on LinkedIn, you might have come across many infographics.

To keep the content flowing on LinkedIn, many of my connections are leveraging Pinterest for infographics.

That’s only smart because Infographics are wholesome.

When you repurpose your ‘How-to’ or ‘7 ways to’ or ‘step-by-step’ guides into infographics efficiently, you don’t even have to spend time curating new information instead of creating it on a whim, on a topic picked without strategizing.

And even if you choose to do it that way- that is-create an infographic first, you could repurpose it into a blog. Include the graphic, elaborate on its main points, and you have it!

Now the juice!!

See this image?

This is a screenshot of a specific section from an infographic posted by Visme. Isn’t it perfect for Instagram, Facebook, and other social profiles?

Their infographic is about ‘29 infographic statistics,’ which means 29 social media posts! Crazy, right?

Insight: Infographics are 30x more likely to be read from top to bottom than blog posts or articles. (Source)

6. Convert One-liners, Statistics, and Analogies into Social Media Posts

Do you think the analogy that I made in the beginning (the rice one) could pictorially define what content repurposing is? Do you think that could be a potential social media post if made in a tasteful way?

I have my doubts, but I don’t see why it couldn’t be!

And that’s how you pick potential social media posts from a blog post!

All the graphics that you create for a blog are fit to become your content for Facebook and Instagram.

Then there are statistics, one-liners, poll stories on Instagram (Which tool do you prefer to create an infographic: Canva or Venngage), and plenty more that this particular blog post could be used for generating social media content.

You could also put short snippets of the same blog’s video format on Instagram.

Unless you are a creative business/professional, this strategy is perfect for keeping your social media churning numbers.

When I say social media, I also mean LinkedIn, Quora, and Twitter. LinkedIn has become one of the best and fastest growing mediums to generate leads, especially for the tech industry.

If your blog post contains 10 different points, each of them could be a separate LinkedIn post. You may need to edit it for your LinkedIn audience, making it more conversational and crisp.

Tip? Use statistics as hooks for LinkedIn!

Another way to repurpose content is to convert your testimonials into social media posts. Testimonials garner attention as well as trust from the audience, making them ideal for social media.

Using your LinkedIn testimonials for gratitude posts is yet another way of repurposing content.

Of course, you need to shuffle things between repurposed content and new content.

But with this strategy, I promise you won’t have blank days when you wonder what to post! You’ll have a tight social media posting schedule!

Insight: An average of 3 hours are spent per day per person on social networks and messaging (Globalwebindex, 2019)

7.   Use your Popular Blog Posts for Email Marketing

Do you know that for every dollar you spend on email marketing, it gets you $44? Email marketing is still a great channel for driving traffic and conversions.

I don’t remember going to a website to read something via Facebook, but I regularly open at least four emails every week.

For instance, I don’t like to miss emails from CopyHackers! This one is from last week, featuring an amazing blog post.

Feature your blog post in a newsletter and drive traffic! It doesn’t have to be a link to the post necessarily. You could always add visuals from the post to offer your subscribers insights.

Email marketing has to be a priority in your outreach marketing strategy.

And you don’t just have your subscribers list as a target; you could always filter the audience on LinkedIn and reach your prospects via InMail.

LinkedIn Premium has a fantastic feature of Sales Navigation that allows you to create a set of groups using filters.

Using that for InMail to ask if the connections are interested in receiving newsletters could open new doors for your outreaching strategy.

Get personal with your subscribers and LinkedIn connections.

Use metrics of readership to grab their attention. Your target is to be a trustworthy and unique source of information among industry professionals.

If you think email marketing is dead, you are in a slumber that Social Media has put you in, and you need to wake up.

The recent ban of TikTok left the platform’s marketers confused as all their efforts went down the drain.

I think it is a grave mistake to ignore email marketing as an outreach strategy because of such unforeseen situations.

Insight: Email is 40x more effective at acquiring customers than Facebook and Twitter combined (Source)

8.   Republish as Guest Posts

Guest posting is an ultimate way to attract visitors from another website or platform.

Also, a tested method to generate backlinks, republishing your blogs could be a win-win opportunity for your content marketing strategy.

Platforms like Medium are perfect for republishing your content. If you are worried about how search engines would treat you for duplicate content, you don’t have to!

Medium has this Import Tool, which allows you to import any content before you press the Share button.

Changing titles with a different introduction that matches the audience’s tone on Medium is a good way to start with your republishing.

Medium’s audience is unique and keen on learning. If your content is authentic and engaging and adds value, it is highly likely that you’ll build your own audience.

However, this is not the only way to republish your content.

The old school way still works! You can approach digital publications or your friends in the industry who have a good audience to republish your content.

And there’s also LinkedIn Articles! In all, there are several options that you could choose to roll out this inbound strategy.

You must remember that the purpose of republishing is to get attention from new prospects. It may not perform as well as the original post, but it’s worth it!

Does That Mean You Should Repurpose All Your Blog Posts?

No.

We all know how some of the blog posts work wonders while others don’t hit the mark. You have to trust your audience and go with the numbers.

Choosing a blog post that has done well in the past would be the best for repurposing.

After all, we are putting efforts into repurposing as well, and don’t want them to go in vain, right? So yes, strategizing is inevitable for promoting your content as well.

Another factor that could be worth considering is ‘Relevance.’ Relevant topics that still have the buzzing after-effect could help you revive your content.

Whichever you choose, make sure to give it a fresh perspective, and edit the content’s tone.

Wrapping Up…

The advantages of repurposing content are endless as this approach eliminates the ultimate killer of engagement- inconsistency in posting.

Start with one great performer from your archives! Dig its content for data, facts, quotes, analogies, and put your creative team to work!