Just as you can repurpose a glass jar into a flower vase, you can repurpose a blog post into an infographic or a video into a series of blog posts. Let’s explore how to repurpose content and the benefits that come with it.
There’s a misconception that for content to be valuable or successful, it has to be consistently fresh and trendy, while old content belongs in the trash. But, with a little work, old content can be recycled into something useful and compelling again.
You save money — and time. Content creation isn’t easy or cheap — it requires a lot of time and labor. According to a recent study, it takes between one and six hours, on average, to create a piece of content. There’s no sense in spending that much time when your existing content can serve you. As Derek Halpern, founder of Social Triggers muses,
“You don’t have to create content day in and day out. You just have to work on getting the content you already have in the hands of more people.”
And that’s precisely the point of repurposing content: You’re breathing new life into what you already have to serve new audiences.
You can boost your SEO. When it comes to SEO, we know that trends change regularly. However, it doesn’t make sense to have your old content collecting virtual dust. When you have more than one piece of content revolving around the same topic, your chances of targeting a desired keyword increases. Also, when you have a lot of quality content, search engines like Google will recognize you as a credible source of information.
You can delight new audiences. Only a certain amount of people have seen your older pieces of content. Reach new audiences by publishing your repurposed content on multiple platforms. For example, if you've just published a blog post, don't just post it on LinkedIn — pedal it around other social platforms and plug it in emails, too.
You get the message across. While you may think that publishing multiple pieces of content with the same topic is repetitive, you must remember that your audience needs to hear your message at least seven times before it sinks in. Diversifying ways to deliver that message will help strengthen your authority as an industry leader on specific topics.
For starters, try to select your strongest content pieces or your favorites that didn’t perform so well. This is an exciting opportunity to get creative and refresh those pieces to gain better traction.
Don’t forget to look into evergreen content, as well. Evergreen content is SEO content that’s sustainable and can easily be reused in the long-run. For example, a topic like “social media marketing” is evergreen because the topic is relevant and will remain relevant for the foreseeable future. Be sure to continually keep up with what’s changing in the news and add the necessary changes and stats to these types of topics.
Let’s say you hosted a great webinar and had a ton of attendees — great! This is an excellent opportunity to repurpose the webinar into a blog post. Why? Because there were probably people who couldn’t attend, and you probably have new leads who don’t even know that webinar exists. It can be as simple as transcribing the audio and then fleshing out the rest of the piece with an introduction and conclusion.
Infographics are a treasure trove of potential social media posts: There are compelling visuals like charts and graphs, an array of interesting stats, and much more. Break down the components of an infographic and start posting — a chart here, a stat there.
If you have an existing guide or ebook that breaks down a particularly complex topic, you can repackage them by creating a series of digestible blog posts.
72% of consumers prefer videos to text marketing. If you have blog posts that are listicles or how-tos, they can turn into fun, bite-sized videos.
Do you have glowing reviews and testimonials from your customers? You can pull snippets from these and transform them into a cool social proof campaign. This way, you can add credibility for your products or services because people trust online reviews when making purchases.
Repurposing your content doesn’t mean half-heartedly copying and pasting an old piece of content and republishing it as new. Google doesn’t take kindly to duplicate content — or in other words, content with “substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar.” While Google won’t penalize you, having duplicate copy could negatively influence your search rankings.
Last updated on January 12th, 2024.