How to Repurpose Content

You’ve just finished writing a blog post. You’ve poured your heart, soul, and many, many cups of coffee into it – not to mention the expensive and time-consuming photoshoot you held to create the visuals to go with it. You finally press publish, and it’s exhilarating – you’ve put new content out into the world! You excitedly draft some posts for Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook to promote your masterpiece.

Now what?

Don’t let your time and effort in developing great content fade away into the void that is the Internet; let your brilliance live on in a fresh, reincarnated form. Your best blog post could be turned into a podcast, your best video turned into a blog post! The possibilities are endless, but here are some tips to give your repurposed content some guidance.

 

Find content that merits being shared again.

That blog post you struggled with and picked away at until you gave up and hit publish probably isn’t the best choice, but content that you are passionate about and that you feel has some shelf life left is fair game. Maybe you put a lot of time and effort into researching and writing a blog post on a topic you weren’t familiar with, and you ended up falling in love with the material and creating some of your best work. Or maybe your audience reacted really well toward a video you published. This is where you should start.

 

Find timeless content.

Just because a particular video may have performed really well on social media, doesn’t necessarily make it a good candidate for sharing again – especially if it contains timely information that is no longer relevant. A super interesting video on electoral candidates is engaging when there’s an election, but not so much once the polling stations have been closed for months – unless it warrants a relevant update of some kind. And on that note…

 

See if you have more to say about a topic.

As you review your shining content, keep an eye out for topics where you have new things to say, and update posts with current perspectives and statistics. This is a great way to create new content that capitalizes on something you’ve already put a lot of work into. Plus, it’s an opportunity to improve on a piece that you didn’t love, or that didn’t get the energy it deserved. It’s like getting a chance to rewrite that paper for your undergrad that was due directly after Reading Week.

 

If you’re revisiting a topic that pulled in good traffic the first time around, consider giving the original post a quick update, rather than creating a full new post about it. This way, you actually boost the post’s SEO value, while still putting new information into the world. Some blogging platforms will even let you change the publishing date of a blog post, so your slightly revised piece will show up on your blog like it’s brand new. When you change an original post, it’s generally considered good form to include a little note letting readers know that the post has been revisited.

 

Transform your popular piece into a new medium.

Here’s the big guy when it comes to repurposing content: Figure out what makes sense as an alternate form for the original content – this could be a blog post, an infographic, a video, a graphic, an Ebook, or a podcast – but don’t force your content to fit into a mould just for the sake of getting to share it again. Remember, your repurposed content needs to be high-quality too. And people can totally tell when you’ve forced something that isn’t a natural fit. A blog post on how to take better photos for social media might not make sense as an infographic, but it would make an interesting video.

 

When content is pulling double duty, you can create less and promote more, while reaching a wider audience and improving your SEO. And that is a definite win in our books.