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Content Marketing 15 min read October 25, 2019

How To Get More Value From Your Existing Content: Repurposing Guide

9 Ways To Improve Your Chances Of Getting Viral Marketing Campaigns
Dmitry Chervony
Chintan Zalani
Founder of ECM
Let me guess: you toil for hours to create a content piece. However, when it comes to distribution, you do it only once on your owned media platforms. For the occasional piece, you run social media ads and reach out to influencers.
A simple and efficient strategy for extracting more value from your existing evergreen creative assets is content repurposing. It's a great way to make the most of your content creation efforts and breathe new life into your content.

So in this article, you'll learn how to go about repurposing content. First, let's look at the top benefits of leveraging the strategy.

Three top benefits of repurposing content

#1 Serve the audience in different formats and cater to varied tastes

Are you creating a lot of text content? Well, some people like to consume podcasts and YouTube videos on the go. Whereas others prefer visuals over long-form reads. To fit in the lives of such an audience, you need to switch up your content formats.

Arto Minasyan, the co-founder of 10Web, shares how repurposing helps you provide convenience to your audience:

1. "When you truly care about your audience hearing what you have to tell them, you make your message comfortably accessible to every single one of them. Suppose I've written a guide on building beautiful websites in an hour."

2. "A lot of people who need the info may not read it. Because in 2019, you don't just choose what you need to learn, but you also get to choose how you want to learn it."

3. "Now here's what we'll do - we'll make a webinar out of the guide. We'll design beautiful infographics based on our statistics. We'll turn our most interesting articles into podcasts and share our PDF presentations wherever people are looking for them."

#2 Extract more value from existing assets

Do you know that 91% of content does not receive any organic traffic from Google? To fight infomania, "creating more" is not a practical solution. It takes a lot of time to create high-quality content from scratch anyway. You can substitute those efforts by promoting your content to new audiences.

Did an old content piece perform poorly? You can try salvaging it by mixing up its material or playing around with its format and serving it to a new audience. So you can guest post on a subject, later conduct a webinar on the same subject, and release the video of the webinar on YouTube! See how it's done?

#2 Establish your authority on multiple platforms

A key value proposition of content marketing is establishing thought leadership of your brand. But every platform has an affinity for different kinds of audiences. On Medium you run into avid readers, while on Quora you might find a lot of curious people.

As a smart entrepreneur, it makes sense to establish thought leadership in your niche on as many platforms as possible.

You can create new content for every platform, but it's more efficient to refresh a set of your ideas into many formats. After publishing a master content piece on your site, you can spin it into native formats of other platforms. For instance, you can answer questions on Quora that are related to your top-performing blog posts. And link it back to the blog posts on your site.

You can also republish posts in full - remember to switch the headline, subheadlines, introduction, and conclusion as these are the most-read parts of the article.

Such repurposing lets you maintain a regular publishing cadence on multiple platforms and enables you to build a native audience on all prominent platforms.

Pro Tip: Adam Enfroy recommends a counterintuitive approach to repurposing. Instead of conversion into other formats, he goes after 'maximizing the quality of the blog content itself over time.' He shares his strategy in detail and the results he has achieved below:

"None of my posts that are ranking #1 on Google for top keywords started there. It took a long time. Maybe the post was published at a length of 2,000 words. I will then update it to three, four, five, and six thousand words. By using the best SEO tools, doing competitive research, matching reader intent, and increasing my content's quality, I've seen blog post traffic increase by 20x or higher."

If the strategy feels more suitable for your business, then you can experiment with it!

Identifying the kind of content that deserves repurposing

If you wrote a piece about Obama becoming the 44th President of the United States, it would not earn any attention now. You will need to find evergreen content pieces that will stand the test of time and are going to remain relevant for a few years. Typically such articles are:
Jacel Booth from the AddThis team shares another criterion you need to use to find the deserving candidates for repurposing. "Look at the analytics and see which posts received a lot of traffic and engagement. The numbers will show what your audience is drawn to and would likely be a hit the second time around."

5 simple ways to repurpose content

#1 Narrate your blog post

 
Do you know that 22% of American people listen to podcasts weekly?

As listenership is on the rise and with Google surfacing podcasts in its results, it's a great idea to convert your blog post into an audio format. Author and blogger, Mark Manson, regularly publishes audio versions alongside his blog posts.
How To Get More Value From Your Existing Content: Repurposing Guide 16261788363867
You don't need to buy expensive gear to get started with narrations. Something as cheap as this Blue Snowball Condenser Microphone will do in the beginning. And if you don't want any kind of overhead, hire voiceover talent from a freelance marketplace like Fiverr.
How To Get More Value From Your Existing Content: Repurposing Guide 16261788363869

#2 Convert your top blog post into an infographic

Compared to the last decade, infographics aren't as effective for snagging backlinks. However, Ian Bower, founder of Graphic Rhythm Designs, suggests that converting even parts of blog posts into infographics is a great way to deliver your content on more visual platforms, like Pinterest and Instagram.

He adds, "It gives you the opportunity to make clickable, shareable content which has a better chance of going viral since it's an image instead of a blog. You can also use downloadable infographics as lead magnets embedded inside of your posts."

So to design an infographic, you can either use Photoshop or a tool like Canva. If you don't have a designer on your team, then you can consider hiring freelancers from Upwork.
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If you're strapped for resources, another way is to strike partnerships with other businesses. In the B2B niche, you'll find many brands open to co-marketing if you make a decent deal. For instance, Adam Connell from Blogging Wizard got 24Slides on board to design an infographic for his article at Tweak Your Biz. It netted him more than 32,000 extra views on his content.

#3 Produce videos from your top performing content pieces

Do you know that YouTube currently has over 2 billion (logged-in) monthly users? Further, many of them log into the platform when they want to solve problems that they are struggling with.

As a content creator, it's a great opportunity to educate your audience while showing off some personality. However, it's tricky to create video scripts from scratch alongside publishing blog posts.

A quicker way is repurposing your top-performing content into conversational video scripts. Once published, you can embed the video inside your article and promote your YouTube channel along with adding value to your readers. Think of the increase in the time people will spend on your article and how it's going to affect your website positively.

To get started, you don't need a fancy studio or an outdoor setting. In the over 15-minute long on-page SEO video tutorial below, Ryan Robinson created a quick one-minute introduction in an informal homely environment and followed it up with a screen recording showing the specific steps.

#4 Combine your top content into an actionable email course (or an ebook)

A few years ago, Buffer performed a no publishing experiment for a month. During that period they repurposed their content into email courses and Ebooks. The first course generated 17,817 signups, and the ebook got 2,397 downloads.

If you don't want to create a full-fledged course, then you can also create an autoresponder sequence for your new subscribers. The first few emails have the highest open and engagement rates. So it makes sense to put your best foot forward when a new subscriber hops onto your list. For instance, here's the first email Nat Eliason sends to his new subscribers.
How To Get More Value From Your Existing Content: Repurposing Guide 16261788363873

#5 Update and repromote old blog posts

Once you have a bank of about 100 to 150 evergreen articles on your site, there will be diminishing returns from new content published. A significant percentage of your site's traffic will come from your archives.

So what happens when a reader lands on an article that you wrote a couple of years ago? They might get turned off to see that the tactics you share are irrelevant. In this manner, if a lot of visitors drop off your site because of outdated content, then your search rankings will drop. The remedy is to update your blog posts regularly.

Here's how Alex Panagis, ScaleMath founder, puts it:

"It's important that you build content review, improvements, and updates into your part of your process. We do this too – we regularly update and rewrite outdated content to make sure that it stays relevant and continues to perform well. It can include fully rewriting a post, making sure that all sections are still relevant, or just improving and optimizing meta titles and descriptions with a plugin like Rank Math."

You can also consider adding quotes by influencers to add credibility to the advice you share in the article. Once updated, don't forget to promote the updated piece of content on social media, relevant communities, and perform an email outreach (if possible). The new social media shares and attention on your piece will bump the long-term performance of your piece.

Bonus: release your internal documents and data

Customers love to take a bite of what's going on inside businesses, which has led to the rise of transparency marketing. Companies like Buffer share the reports they send their investors with revenue, salaries, and intricate details of their business. You can take a more conservative approach by releasing documents displaying your internal processes.

Mailchimp, for example, had created a style guide for its employees to ensure a clear and consistent creation of content. The company released it under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license so that other businesses can adapt it as required.

The guide now serves as a gold standard for many communication teams - referred by marketing professionals across the industry. Look at the number of links the guide has amassed over the years!
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Another way to leverage your internal data for creating content is by fleshing out a case study. Did you increase conversions by A/B testing your value proposition? Or have you managed to scale your content team and triple your traffic? The practical utility of such stories makes them one of the most loved kinds of content.

Pro Tip For Repurposing Content: Ensure a few parts are unique to every channel and format. Kevin Indig believes it incentivizes people to consume your content.
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Conclusion

Any business that wants to up their marketing ante efficiently should experiment with content repurposing. It can extend your thought leadership and allow you to serve multiple audiences simultaneously. Here are a few ways to get started with repurposing:

  • Narrate your blog post
  • Convert your top blog post into an infographic
  • Produce videos from your top performing content pieces
  • Combine your top content into an actionable email course (or an ebook)
  • Update and repromote old blog posts
  • Release your internal documents and data

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