The content marketing engines are primed for the year ahead. According to the 2015 Content Marketing Report, 55% of B2B businesses surveyed are increasing their content marketing budget for 2015. While the financial spigots may be opening, producing quality content may still be a challenge. Time, talent and ideas will still restrict the volume of content that can be generated. To reach their content marketing goals businesses will need to be strategic in their approach. In this blog post we will look at seven smarter ways that you can repurpose content for your website.
The Philosophy of Content Repurposing
Repurposing content isn't just about taking an old post and rewriting the sentences. When you repurpose content it should in some way add value to the original. That might mean creating a video so that it can be consumed by people who prefer visual and auditory learning. Or maybe, you wrote a post about SEO and the recent algorithm updates means that it needs an update to keep the information fresh. Before you create your new repurposed content ask yourself, does this new content add any value beyond the original piece?
Why Repurpose Your Content?
Before examining how you can repurpose your content, let's look at why you would want to do so in the first place.
Efficiency The actual writing of a blog post is only one part of the content creation process. You also need to identify topics people are interested in, research those topics and organize your findings. All of this takes time. In fact often it is this part that comes before creating the blog post which takes even longer than writing. When you repurpose content you are able to skip this initial stage and jump straight into the content creation process. This is why repurposing content can be so much more effective than having to create content from scratch.
Multi-Channel Marketing Not everyone likes to consume content in the same way. Some people would prefer to read a blog post, others would rather watch a video, and yet another may prefer to listen to a podcast. If you are only delivering your content in written blog posts then you are limiting your audience size to people who like to consume content in this way. By repurposing your content you will be able to expand your reach to other content channels. This means not only more readers, but a different type of audience.
Be Everywhere Pat Flynn of the blog Smart Passive Income describes his marketing strategy as being everywhere. For Flynn this means he has his own podcast, he does in person conferences and of course he has the SPI blog. This gives his audience many different ways of consuming his content. But it also has another benefit - it makes him appear omni-present. If someone sees that you have a video channel, a blog and an active podcast, then they are more likely you to view you as an authority on the topic. But creating new content for all of these channels would be too time consuming. By repurposing your content you can save time and like Pat Flynn, be everywhere.
How to Repurpose Content
So now we understand how to repurpose content and what the correct approach to doing so is, let's look at the exact ways that you can do it, along with a couple of useful tools to make the job easier.
#1 Email Newsletter
68% of companies rated email marketing as either good or excellent in terms of return on investment according to the Email Marketing Industry Census 2014. What's more in the previous year revenue directly derived from email increased by 28%. Many people fail to take advantage of this form because they can't find the time to write emails for their newsletter. Repurposing content provides a solution to this. If you have a long step-by-step blog post you could take this material and present it as a series of emails. Each of the steps in your blog post can be its own email in the sequence. This approach can make it easier for readers to learn and implement the content. When people are confronted with a large amount of material at once it can be a little overwhelming. By giving the reader one action step each day you can move them towards their end goal without overloading them with information.
#2 Slideshare
With over sixty million visitors a month Slideshare is a great platform for reaching a wider audience. By drilling down your blog posts to key bullet points, you should be able to convert it relatively quickly turn into a presentation. Concision is a critical for an effective presentation so make sure to remove any superfluous elements and keep text to the minimum. Also remember people will decide quickly whether they want to spend time reading your presentation, so you want to keep it visually engaging. Slideshare presentations tend to rank well in Google search, so tag and title your presentation with the keyword(s) that you want to rank for.
In addition to Slideshare there are also a number of other presentation sharing sites including:
- Slideboom
- Sliderocket
- Preezi
#3 Infographics
Between 2010 and 2012 the search volume for infographics increased by more than 800%. So it's safe to say there is plenty of interest in this type of content. The fact is that the human brain is wired to learn and memorize content visually. If you have a blog post that is rich in fact, figures and statistics then converting it into an infographic should be a natural next step. Infographics are more visually engaging than blog posts and are perfect for people's tendency to scan rather than to read the web. Infographics allow people to get a broad overview of a particular subject. It's a way to get beyond the minutiae, and allow people to see the "wood for the trees". Because you can add an embed code to your infographic they are also easy for people to share and add to their own websites.
#4 Medium
Medium is a website where people can share ideas and stories in a longer form format. If you want to keep it simple, change out the headline of your post and upload it to the site. But if you really want to make an impact with medium, think about how you could illustrate that same blog post in the form of a narrative story. Medium is really a platform for telling stories, which is also happens to be one of the most compelling ways of delivering content.
#5 Quora
If you are doing your content marketing right, then the information in your blog post will answer common questions that your prospective customers have. But, why wait for them to come to your blog when you can go where they are already asking those questions? Quora is a highly popular Q & A website. To use the site effectively look for questions that relate to your blog post. Then answer the question using the information in the blog post. You may also want to include a link to the original post where they can find out more information.
#6 YouTube
YouTube now has an audience of over 1 billion people. What's more the number of hours of video watched on YouTube is increasing by 50% year on year. If you want to reach that massive audience then repurposing your blog posts into video is a smart move. There are a number of different ways of making a video out of your blog content. One of the easiest is talking directly to camera. Use a white board in the background in to record the main points to give your video a "classroom feel". Another approach is to record a PowerPoint presentation with a voice over the top. This simple approach is the basis of college lectures all over the world. YouTube is still usually the best place to upload your video, but is by no means the only platform. Other good video sharing sites include:
- Vimeo
- Vevo
- Daily Motion
- Metacafe
- Break
Repurposing enables you to streamline and speed up your content production process. By repurposing content you can maximize the impact of your best content, while giving your audience the opportunity to consume it in their preferred medium.