When I talk about content marketing, I talk primarily about blogging, because that’s my specialty, but there’s a lot more to it than that. There’s also social media, videos, podcasts, ebooks, whitepapers, press releases, the list goes on. No wonder there are so many small business owners who don’t create any content at all for their business: just looking at the options is overwhelming.
And we’ve all been told we need to be blogging, we need to be on social media, we need to make videos and host a podcast. None of this is ever portrayed as optional, so it’s understandable that many people simply throw up their hands in despair and never create any content.
It’s true that the more content you create, the better your chances of attracting, engaging, and converting the right clients. Google uses written content to index and categorize your website and the content on your site, which makes it easier for Google to pair your website with the people who are looking for you.
At the same time, not everyone is going to read a blog post. They might be more likely to watch a video or listen to a podcast while they get some chores done, and having content in all those mediums means you’ll be able to get in front of people who consume all kinds of content.
So the question becomes: how do you create all that content without spending all your time creating content (or blow your budget hiring various people to create different kinds of content for you)?
Let’s go over each type of content you might be creating (or thinking about creating) for your business and how you can repurpose it.
Table of Contents
Repurpose Your Blog Posts
Again, I love blog posts, so I think they’re a great place to start. Obviously I love writing blog posts, but I also love how versatile they are. They are one of the easiest pieces of content to repurpose in all kinds of ways, so let’s take a look at some of the ways I’ve repurposed my blog posts.
Repurpose Your Blog Posts for Social Media
A lot of business owners struggle to come up with things to say on social media, but it doesn’t have to be complicated. If you have a recent blog post, you can just take a selection from your blog post, copy it into your social media post with a link to the blog post and a couple hashtags and you’re all set! You can do this again and again as you work your way through the blog post, especially for a social media site like Twitter, where a tweet gets most of its views in the first hour after it’s published. For other social media sites, such as LinkedIn and Facebook, you’re going to want to wait longer before publishing a link to the same blog post.
One mistake I see a lot of small business owners and marketers making is focusing on social media over their own website. Social media is a good way to get your name out there and build brand recognition, but it can be difficult to turn social media followers into customers, especially for B2B industries and professional service industries. You need a way to lead them back to your website so you can get them to take the next step in the buyer journey, and blog posts are a great way to do that while providing value. The alternative is just to post a link to a sales page or your home page over and over again, and people quickly get tired of that strategy.
Repurpose Your Blog Posts for Books
Writing a book for your business, whether it’s just an ebook or you include a paperback option, is one of the best ways to establish yourself as an authority in your industry. Few things sound as good as “published author” or being able to tell someone you literally wrote the book on a particular subject.
That said, writing a book is extremely time consuming. If people don’t have the time to write blog posts for their business, they certainly don’t have the time to write an entire book.
The good news is that it doesn’t have to be an either/or thing. I’m currently writing a book for my business and while there is plenty of original content in there, I have also been referring to my blog for chapter topic ideas and content. So if you’ve been thinking about writing a book for your business, but you just don’t have the time, but you do have a large archive of blog posts, see which blog posts you can repurpose for your book.
Repurpose Your Blog Posts for Presentations and Webinars
When I’m asked to give a presentation, my first step is to look at my blog posts and see which one would make a good presentation for that particular group of people. That way I already know what to say, and for anyone attending the presentation who has questions, I can direct them to the blog post, which can then do its thing leading them the rest of the way through the buyer journey.
As a bonus, I can use some of the images from the blog post in my Power Point, so I don’t have to try to recreate those images or hunt around online for stock images that would fit the presentation.
I’ve also been known to turn some of my presentations and webinars into videos, which I’ll talk about more a little later in this article.
Repurpose Your Blog Posts for Infographics
There’s a reason we’re seeing infographics everywhere. If people love images, they really love infographics. They’re a great way to portray a ton of information in a condensed manner that is also engaging.
If you wrote a blog post that lays out a step-by-step process for doing something or achieving a certain goal, put those steps into an infographic. You can even make it interactive by turning each item on the list into a link back to that section of the blog post.
Repurpose Your Content by Republishing It
If you’ve had a busy week/month and you haven’t had time to write a new blog post, take a look at your older blog posts and see if there’s one with an evergreen topic you can republish. You might need to do a bit of editing to update it, but as long as nothing major has changed on that topic since you first published that blog post (preferably at least six months to a year ago), it shouldn’t take you too long to give it a new publication date. You might want to put a disclaimer at the top that it’s an updated post and give the date it was originally published, but that’s up to you. As long as the blog post is at least six months old (preferably a year or longer) chances are good no one will notice you reused it, and anyone who did notice would probably be glad to get a refresher on the topic.
What’s even better is that Google treats it just like a brand-new blog post. The new publication date is enough to fool Google into thinking this is completely fresh content, in which case republishing old blog posts can be a great way to get old blog posts to show up in online searches.
To make the most of this opportunity, check the traffic of your old blog posts and be sure to republish one with a high traffic volume because that ensures that, by republishing it, you’re giving your audience more of what they’ve already told you they want, which means republishing will only improve the chances that blog post will show up in relevant searches and get even more traffic.
Repurpose Your Videos
We are visual creatures, so it makes sense that videos have become extremely popular, and they’re not going anywhere. They’re also super easy to repurpose into different types of content, so let’s take a look at all the different places you can repurpose your video content.
Repurpose Your Videos for Social Media
First of all, like blog posts, videos are great to share on social media. All you need is one or two short lines introducing the video, and then let it speak for itself. Because we are visual creatures, we are much more likely to engage with a post (and spend more time engaging with a post) that has a compelling image or video than a post with only text.
Repurpose Your Videos for Podcast Episodes
Few of us have the time to create compelling videos and podcast episodes, but don’t forget that you can always take just the audio from a video and turn that into a podcast episode. If you use Zoom to record videos, it does this for you by giving you an “audio only” version of your recording in addition to the full video recording.
The trick is to make sure your video doesn’t rely too heavily on anything visual. If you’re displaying charts and graphs in your video that you’re talking about in the audio, it might be hard for listeners to follow, so remember this method of repurposing content doesn’t work in every situation.
Repurpose Your Videos for Blog Posts
You can transcribe the audio from your video or podcast and turn that into a blog post. Believe it or not, there are still people who prefer reading over watching a video or listening to a podcast, if only because it gives us the ability to skim the content and pick and choose which sections we want to consume, rather than forcing us to go through the whole thing.
While people love to watch videos and listen to podcasts, Google does not (yet) have the capability to “read” audio or visual files, so for now, we’re still relying on written content to get our website to show up in relevant searches.
Once you have your transcribed blog post, don’t forget to go back to the beginning of this article and use the tips for repurposing blog posts.
If you found this content useful and would like to receive more of it, you can sign up for our newsletter in the space below. You can also see what we’re up to by following us on LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook.
If you’ve repurposed your content to death and you still haven’t managed to create new content to be repurposed later (or if you haven’t managed to create any content at all for your business) we can help.
