Should you repurpose your blog content? According to online marketing influencers, Crazy Egg and KissMetrics Co-Founder Neil Patel, as well as Moz Co-Founder Rand Fishkin, you should—but you should do so with care. Based from my own experience at NinjaOutreach, I tend to agree.
There are various benefits to repurposing your blog content.
- First, you get the capability to capitalize on the popularity of your existing content. On the other hand, you can also repurpose your low-performing content, and relaunch them with updates such as better headlines, more user-friendly formatting, improved SEO, and the like.
- Second, you get to reach more audiences if you repurpose your blog content into various forms.
- Third, repurposing your existing blog content lets you produce new content in another form or medium, without having to spend even more time to actually create everything from scratch.
In onecase documented by Brian Dean of backlinko, he was able to get 260.7% of organic traffic in just two weeks. How did he do this? By repurposing old content they already have on hand.
At NinjaOutreach, I’ve always promoted the culture of productivity for the least amount of effort. After all, if you want to makeblogging pay dividends for your business, you have to find ways to produce more results using less time. So when the team got wind of this repurposing blog content strategy, we naturally thought it was a great idea.
We have since begun our own overhaul of previous content with the goal of relaunching to better results. Instead of creating a whole new slew of “optimized” articles for our blog, we leveraged the existing material we have and as a result, we’re saving tons of time.
Below are various ways to repurpose your blog content. Some of these steps we have already applied to our own content repurposing strategy, and others we are about to execute.
Repurpose Strategies
1. Enhance Existing Content And Relaunch
For some of our old content, we had our SEO manager locate certain SEO factors we could improve upon. We then relaunched our content according to these SEO findings. We updated our content with better focus keywords, optimized our article headlines, and included relevant meta descriptions.
If you want to DIY your own content overhaul and relaunch, you can run your old articles through free resources such asYoast SEO content analysis tool and the Coschedule headline analyzer.
You can then tweak these posts accordingly and republish to high authority sites such as Medium or LinkedIn Pulse. Simply reorganize the headline or the article structure (this shouldn’t take too much time) and share away. Don’t forget to add the rel=canonical element to avoid duplicate content issues. The canonical link points Google to the preferred url for duplicate content results.
2. Repurpose Blog Content Into Shareable Infographics
Some audiences prefer to consume their information through visuals and bite-sized headlines, and an infographic is a perfect format to appeal to these types of people. Canva, Pixlr, Easel.ly, or Snappa are free, idiot-proof, web-based tools that can help you add illustrations to your article. Attach text headlines to add context to your images then insert an accessible social media share button, and you’re good to go.
3. Turn Lengthy Posts Into Shareable Presentations
Turning a lengthy post into a presentation can help ease text fatigue for your readers. Not only can you gain some new audience by republishing on an authoritative site such as LinkedIn Slideshare or Scribd, you can even use these presentations for workshops or other public speaking engagements.
4. Repurpose Long Form Articles Into Downloadable White Papers Or eBooks
Turn your most valuable content pieces intolead generation tools by repurposing them into an eBook or into something more professional like a white paper. Host them on your own site or through Amazon, and ask for email addresses or encourage readers to sign up in exchange for a free download.
5. Repurpose Blog Content Into A Webinar, Podcast Or Downloadable MP3
Some audiences are more into audio based content that can let them listen and learn while on the go. For these types of people, churning out a podcast or a downloadable mp3, hosted either on your own site, through Audible, or other third party apps, might work.
Other audiences would like a learning experience that’s more interactive, so a webinar with Q&A might do the trick. Aside from getting email addresses, you can also engage with other interested people who you can add to your network and possibly turn into leads later.
6. Round Up Previous Content Into An Email Series
Another way to introduce your content to a new audience is via the good old email newsletter. Repurposing some of your more popular posts into an email series might entice an outsider or new joiner to click through to your site to discover more.
Conclusion
There are other ways to repurpose your content, such as turning it into an online course—even into a full-blown tutorial or workshop. The ones I listed are just those that don't require as much time to execute.
Still, whatever format you choose for repurposing your content, the goal should be the same: extend the “shelf life” of content you’ve published, gain more eyeballs by syndicating to other sites, and point readers back to your target landing page—whether that’s your homepage, sales page, or email signup page.