6 Creative Tips For Repurposing Content.

by Pawel Tomczyk, Guest Contributor

Have you ever gone through your content archives and been amazed by the sheer volume of quality content that’s just lying there, seemingly doing nothing?

Content that took months of effort to ideate, prepare, and publish. Content that is still relevant to your audience after all this time. You may be wondering if there’s any way to really use all this content or if it’s simply destined to live on in the archives.

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Repurposing content, or finding new ways to recycle your existing content, has been used very effectively by a number of content marketers to grow their website traffic efficiently. Repurposing content means changing the format of previously published content and/or publishing it on new channels so that it reaches a fresh audience.

Benefits Of Repurposing Content
Salma Jaffri uses the phrase “create less, promote more” to emphasize one of the hidden golden rules of content marketing. Here are some of the benefits to repurposing content.

Save time and money
Obviously, the maximum chunk of time when it comes to content marketing is spent on coming up with the right idea and then spending many hours creating the perfect piece of content.

But many times, the perfect piece of content is actually lying in your archives, and all you need to do is figure out how to repackage it and bring it to a new audience. As  Derek Halpern of Social Triggers, says: “You don’t have to create the content day in and day out. You just have to work on getting the content you already have in the hands of more people.”

An added benefit to this is the money you save, as repurposing content means you can free up some resources in your team to work on other content ideas and projects.

SEO boost and the benefit of repetition
Many times having articles that target the same set of keywords can provide a boost to your search engine rankings. Moreover repurposing content means that you can get quality backlinks by taking your content to other platforms and having control over anchor texts and links at the same time (you may have to negotiate a bit).

Many times people are afraid to repurpose content because they think search engines have a duplicate content penalty. It’s important to know this penalty applies only to copying and manipulating content from other blogs and not to repurposing one’s own content.

Plus, Marketing’s Rule of 7 says that buyers need to hear a message at least 7 times before they make a purchase so repurposing content helps drive important messages home.

Reach a new audience
Many times repurposing content by bringing it in a different format (infographic, ebook, video, etc) may make it palatable to an audience that was not so keen on the original content format.

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Similarly, repurposing content and showcasing it on a platform which has a similar target audience to yours can be a great way to find new subscribers.

For instance, Adespresso published their Guide to Social Proof Marketing on Slideshare and the response they got on Slideshare resulted in both the SlideShare content and the original blog post getting a major boost.

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6 Tips For Repurposing Content
Before repurposing content, you need to find the content in your archives that will lend itself to repurposing most effectively. In order to be worthy of recycling, a piece of content needs to meet two criteria.

1. It should be content that is evergreen. In other words, it is relevant for readers today as it is, or with a few tweaks and updates.
2. The more popular content is, the more likely it is to do well when repurposed. Use Google analytics to determine which of your content pieces has had the most page views. Of course, there can be some exceptions to this. For instance, you may feel you got unlucky with the timing of a post and that it could do much better if you repurposed it, or if you have an old post on a topic that is now really trending.

Here are some of the most effective tips for repurposing content so that it reaches out to a new audience and helps you build website traffic.

Create an infographic from data-driven blog posts
Everyone wants to get a lot of information in one visually appealing glance, and infographics are a great way to give them that. Infographics are also a great way to repurpose content that has a lot of meaningful data.

You can use tools like Canva, Piktochart, and Visually to create impactful infographics.

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Create a podcast from a popular blog post
Podcast listening as a percentage of the population has almost doubled from 12% in 2010 to 24% in 2017. If you have evergreen content that would be great as a podcast, now would be a great time to start. ​

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If you already have a podcast, you can go the reverse way by transcribing the podcast and adding notes to create a blog post for people who are more comfortable with reading articles.

Have a roundup
Having a weekly or monthly roundup is a great way to repurpose your best performing content while also giving your readers a choice of your best articles. Another great way of doing a roundup is by theme, allowing you to dig deep into your archives.

Slideshare
Slideshare is a great place for content that is graphics heavy and business oriented. You can repurpose old blog posts or even relevant company presentations by putting them on SlideShare and attracting a committed new audience.

Shorten your videos to gifs or short videos
This will help you promote your video content on platforms like Instagram that are less patient with long videos. You can think of this as a trailer for your original video. If people like these gifs and short videos, they may find their way to your original videos as well.

Republish old posts
You may find you have some truly unique content on topics that are really exploding now for some reason or the other. It’s a great idea to make some tweaks in the original content, add a Twitter or Pinterest-friendly image and an SEO friendly headline, and republish the original post.

If your old post already has significant traffic it may be a better idea to make the changes in the original post itself, keeping the old URL and yet presenting it as a new post.

Make repurposing a part of your content strategy
Repurposing content is an easy and extremely effective tool to improve your SEO and reach out to new audiences with minimal effort. It’s a great idea to incorporate repurposed content into your overall content strategy and monthly content calendar.

Your content calendar can be an important part of your digital marketing strategy. Keeping it filled up will not only help keep you and your marketing efforts organized, but it will also help save you time and energy. You’ll be helping yourself avoid the headaches of trying to think of new content on the fly or last minute. Repurposing content can be both fun and creative, and it can also easily help fill in some of your scheduled post slots. Schedule some time to think about different content you can repurpose, or outsource this to a team member. After the content is created, make sure to allot some time to work on filling in your content calendar, and make sure to add in some of your repurposed content.

Don’t be shy with scheduling repurposed content. In fact, probably be generous with it. Remember, you’re driving people back to content you’ve already made, in creative ways, and thus extending the life of that content for your business. If you just keep on creating new content, which you should still do, then you may never get people coming back to your old content. And that’s just wasted potential. Repurposing your content just makes good sense. Of course, you probably want to make sure that the content you repurpose is evergreen in quality. Evergreen content, as the name suggests, is content which is timeless and top quality, and should always be able to drive traffic and public interest. Of course, if some of your content isn’t quite evergreen, and is outdated, you might be able to update or improve it.  

Conclusion
All in all, repurposing your content is a great way to save you time, energy, and money; to extend the life of old content that’s collecting metaphorical digital dust; to increase your SEO value; and to potentially reach new audiences who like the new content style better than the original - they may like an infographic better than a long article. Don’t miss such an easy opportunity to expand your digital marketing efforts. With that said, go and rock your website!

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