27 Ways To Repurpose Content
Creating content can seem like a never-ending chore. Whether you live to create like me, or you are doing it out of necessity, sometimes creating takes everything out of you. Today on Amanda Cross Co., I wanted to delve into the importance of repurposing content. If you are struggling to take your content further, listen up! I have some fantastic content for you today.
Why Should You Repurpose Content
Before we talk about ways to repurpose content, let’s talk about the why. 🙇🏽♀️
We repurpose content because it saves us time, and it helps us reuse the stuff we've already done. Why spend a million years researching new content, when you could make your current content work harder?
Let's be honest: how much time have you spent trying to reinvent the wheel? Creating new content is terrific, but we should also spend time making our old content work harder for us.
If you want to drive traffic to your website continually, you need a mixture of old and new content to share.
How To Pick Content That You Should Repurpose
Now that you know you want to repurpose content, how do you pick the material you should repurpose?
Here are a few criteria for content that should be repurposed:
Does your audience like the content?
Is the content high-quality and well-researched?
Does the content relate to your current product suite or a product you’d like to create?
If so, repurpose that content!
27 Ways To Repurpose Content
Now, let’s get into what you came for: 27 ways to repurpose content.
Start With The Blog Post
Pick the blog post that you want to repurpose, and let’s get to work!
1) Write A Second Blog Post That Delves Deeper Into The Topic
If your audience loved the first post that was more general, consider creating a niche article that delves further into the topic.
For example, maybe you created an article titled “5 Questions To Ask During Every Interview.” Instead of leaving it there, create an article titled, “5 Questions To Ask During Every Nursing Interview." There might be some overlap in the questions, or you could come up with entirely different questions. You are following the same pattern, but creating an article that's more niche and building your audience in the process. Plus, you can interlink both pieces and increase your authority with Google.
2) Write A Listicle Blog Post Based On The Subject
As we’ve touched on previously, listicles are a wonderful way to share your breadth of knowledge and build authority. Instead of covering one thing in detail, you get to talk about a variety of ideas at once. This article is a listicle. I am sharing ways to repurpose your content, but I don't have to spend a ton of time on each idea. Listicles can further be repurposed into individual articles based on the list. In theory, I could create 27 blog posts using the topics I am covering today.
Let’s see how this would work for your blog. Your original article might be titled, “How To Build A Stellar Onboarding Program,” but you might create the article, “20 Companies With Stellar Onboarding Programs," as a way to repurpose content. You would be using the research you already did in the first article to identify the companies you are mentioning. You would need to research to find the companies, but you would save time studying what makes their onboarding programs great.
3) Create A Challenge
Challenges are an amazing way to build your social or email following while helping your audience take action on the content you create. If your audience is stuck when it comes to making your content work for them, consider creating a challenge for them to follow.
For example, your blog post might have been called, “How To Pick Your Company Benefits For 2020,” and you could use that research to build a 7-day challenge that helps HR professionals pick their company benefits in 2020. You could deliver this challenge via email, on social media, or even through video. If you want to up the stakes, consider adding a prize for one person who finishes the challenge. After you do a live round of the challenge, create an evergreen version of the challenge so that people can continue to take it. Bam, another way to repurpose content! 💁🏽
4) Record A Podcast Episode
Newsflash, people love podcasts now. If you already have a podcast for your company, consider using some of your best blog content as an episode. Chances are, your podcast audience hasn't seen the blog post, which might drive them to the blog. If they have seen the blog post, they might absorb the podcast version better. Lastly, you can also embed the podcast in the blog post, which might give you a few more podcast listeners. Creating a podcast is a win all around.
Any of your blog posts can easily be turned into a podcast 🙌🏽 just figure out which blog posts your audience is already drawn to.
5) Produce A Video On The Subject
Video is another astounding way to repurpose your content because it is so versatile. Everyone loves watching videos on YouTube, and you can create videos about several topics there. YouTube has more than prank videos and beauty tutorials. There are many amazing tech tutorials and news-centric videos that do well on the platform.
YouTube is one of the best search engines, next to Google, of course (which makes sense because they are both owned by Alphabet.) Creating great video content can boost your business. The best part? If you are a small company, all you need is your smartphone and a cheap lighting kit to make professional-looking videos.
Don’t want to show your face? Check out this tutorial from my friend Lindsey Hazel on videos you can record without showing your face.
6) Create An Infographic
Do you have a statistic-heavy or listicle blog post? Consider creating an infographic based on it. Infographics do exceptionally well on sites like Pinterest, plus you can include an embed code to the graphic on your blog so other websites can use it.
One of the best ways to create an infographic is by using Canva. Canva has a number of templates you can customize to create stellar infographics for your company. If you are tech-savvy enough, you could also use a program like InDesign or Photoshop to produce infographics. Have some extra money? Consider hiring a designer to create something for you. There are plenty of graphic designers for hire on sites like Upwork, or you can find someone you love and contact them directly.
7) Plan A Conference Or Event Around The Topic
If the topic you are repurposing is paramount to your company, consider hosting a conference or event around the subject. Hosting an event is a much more time-consuming task, but the payoff for your company could be game-changing. Many companies host their own special events for their potential and current customers. For example, take a look at Social Media Examiner's Social Media Marketing World conference. Social Media Examiner turned a topic that was paramount to their company (social media) into a world-renowned conference that posits them as the leading expert for that topic.
Another example of this is the HR Virtual Summit. BambooHR and The Predictive Index host this summit. Each year, they host the world's largest virtual HR conference, and it is jam-packed with amazing speakers and information from a ton of vendors. HR Virtual Summit is the place to be each year, and HR practitioners can even earn SHRM and HRCI credit for attending the conference.
There are many ways you could go about planning a conference or event. Some people work with several experts to host a free event online. To make this worthwhile for everyone, they collect email addresses and share those emails with other speakers (with attendee permission.) Alternatively, you could create a paid event in the city most of your customers or audience is from. Paid events take a ton more planning because you have to sort out tickets, locations, food, and all sorts of details, but you'll get paid for your hard work. Both event styles could lead to more customers and a more loyal audience.
8) Turn It Into A Self-Published Book Or Planner
Lately, I’ve been on the self-publishing train in my business. I’ve created two journals on Amazon: a journal to help simplify the client call experience and a 90-day freelancer planner. With Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing tool, you can easily list books for sale after you format them and get them ready. There are many tools you can use to format books like Canva and Keynote, but I used Adobe InDesign to create mine. Since I didn't feel like learning everything and digging into KDP on my own, I enrolled in a course to help me through the process. My internet friend Sarah Steckler has a fantastic course called Publish With Purpose that helped me make my creations and publish them in 60 days!
Kindle Direct Publishing is an amazing way to create something your audience can use while introducing yourself to new people. If you take the time to do some keyword research, you can rank well on Amazon and generate even more customers. You have every right to promote your company on your cover or inside your journal, which will help you create products that build your customer database.
Self-publishing a book or a planner helps your audience in the same way that creating a challenge does. Help your audience take action on what you create.
9) Create A Course
We value education and learning more about our crafts. An excellent way to repurpose your best blog content is to add to it and create a course around it. People get stressed about creating a course because they feel like they need to create a semester's worth of material. An online course isn't necessarily the same as a college course. It's about building a curriculum around a topic and delivering on it. For example, in my friend Sarah's course I just mentioned, she was teaching us to go from idea to finished planner in 60 days or less. Everything she taught in the course was preparing us, answering our questions, and helping us publish our planner in 60 days. She didn't come up with a semester's worth of material. Sarah came up with 60 days' worth.
There are a few ways to go about creating a course for your audience. You could create a free class to build your list and funnel that you put out via email or for free on a platform like Teachable, or you could go for a paid course. You can also build your paid course on Teachable or a site like Thinkific. Courses sell for a wide array of money. I suggest pricing it anywhere from $97-$397, depending on how comprehensive the course is. I've seen some courses go for prices like $997 and above, though, depending on what the course includes. I'd say price it fairly, price it according to value, and build out your product suite filled with low-cost and high-cost programs, so your audience becomes a lifelong customer.
10) Give A Talk On The Subject
Speaking engagements are an intimate way to get to know amazing people in your industry while building yourself as an expert. There are several conferences in your industry that are looking for speakers. These conferences can take you all over the world. Start looking for local speaking engagements first and build up the number of talks you can give. Once you are ready, look for gigs outside of your local area and connect with wider audiences.
One thing I love about speaking engagements is how you can repurpose them. I love following Maya Elious on Instagram. Maya is a branding expert who helps entrepreneurs and women of faith master their message and package their expertise into a premium offer. She often does speaking engagements and hires a videographer to record those talks. After Maya gets that footage, she repurposes those talks into Instagram content for her audience on her feed and Instagram stories. Since she lives in Atlanta and a ton of conferences happen in Atlanta, she hires local videographers and creates a ton of great content from the talks she gives.
Even if you can’t hire a videographer, get someone to record a few snippets of your presentation using your phone. You can splice up that content in a variety of ways and build your audience with it outside the conference.
11) Create A Presentation And Upload It To Slideshare
If you are already creating presentations, another way to grow your audience is to upload presentations to Slideshare. Even though this is a small website, you can still make a pretty significant impact and get your content seen by a ton of people there. Some Slideshare presentations have millions of views (which I assume are a mixture of views from Slideshare and views from their own websites. Overall, though, sharing your presentations is a great way to reuse something you've already created.
For example, let’s take a look at Google’s site re:Work. Their mission with this site is to make work better. Google shares a ton of their materials on this site. For example, you can get access to the slides for their unconscious bias training on this site. This helps build Google's authority on the topic while making a ton of people's lives better. Google already produced these slides for their own company, so they didn't need to do a ton of work to make these available for the public.
12) Create A Checklist
Next, let's talk about creating a checklist. Checklists help us get tasks done without forgetting integral steps along the way. If you are doing something you've never done before, creating a checklist can be one of the best things ever. It's also effortless to create a checklist on your end. Checklists are a bare-bones, step-by-step explanation of what you covered.
For example, if you wrote a blog titled, “How To Transfer To A New Project Management System,” you could create a simple checklist that walks your readers through all the steps they need to take to do that. Since you’ve already written out a detailed explanation of this in the blog post, creating a checklist should be easy as pie.
13) Create An Email Newsletter About The Topic
Your email list needs love too. The content you create on your blog can be a wonderful jumping-off point for a delightful and juicy email newsletter. Do you create emails, or do you send random blurbs about your recent content? Both could work, but I find that writing out detailed emails about one subject can make a world of difference.
So, look through your blog for content that your audience is loving right now (it might be old or new.) Break down one topic you talk about or get creative and approach the entirety of the blog post. For instance, you might have a blog titled "6 Tips For Building Your Dream Team." You could create an email about the best way to build your dream team, or you could create a condensed version of your six tips.
14) Create A Facebook Or LinkedIn Group Around The Topic
We all love connecting with people who are going through similar issues. If you want to bring different potential customers and customers together, consider using the content you’ve already created to make a Facebook or LinkedIn group. If hosting a group in perpetuity seems daunting, consider hosting a pop-up group that’s only active for a few weeks while you teach some classes and connect with your audience.
Again, if you want to create an entire group around a topic, this topic needs to be critical to your brand and services. Think of this group as a way to connect with your audience, learn their language, and create customers. Before you start a group, consider how you will run the group, who will be in the group, and what kind of topics you’ll cover. Start the group and share it on social, on your blog, and send it to your email list.
15) Create A Webinar About The Topic
Webinars are an excellent way to build your email list and connect with your audience on a deeper level. Even if you aren't currently selling anything, webinars can be a fantastic time investment. There are a few considerations to make when planning a webinar.
The hardest part is what webinar software to choose. There are so many options, but it depends on how often you think you’ll be running webinars. If you plan to do weekly webinars, you might want to invest in a software like Zoom or WebinarJam. If you plan to host a webinar every blue moon, you could always create a landing page on your site and embed a Google Hangouts On Air video on the page. If you have a Facebook group, you could also play around with some integrations and do a live webinar inside the group. It doesn’t have to be complicated, as long as it works.
Another thing you’d probably want to consider is promoting the webinar. The easiest part will be the material since you are repurposing a blog you’ve already written.
16) Use The Information In Real Life And Create A Case Study About It
Case studies are a fantastic way to show that your methods work. Get a friend to use your free advice or do it yourself and document how the information changed your life. Create a super-specific case study and go in-depth about what you did. You could create this case study as another blog post, a video, or a PDF download.
When creating a case study, it's essential to be as specific as possible. Since case studies are basically walking billboards for how you help others, make sure your readers get something useful from it.
17) Get Your Friends/Customers/Colleagues Involved And Do An Expert Roundup Around The Topic
Expert roundups are phenomenal for a few reasons:
Your audience gets actionable advice from several experts.
Those experts share the article with their audience, which expands your audience.
A company that leverages expert roundups well is Forbes. Forbes has the amazing Forbes Human Resources Council, and they use the council to create some of the best expert roundups around. They tap into their members to provide actionable HR advice that those members gladly share with the audience they have.
Can you tap into your circle and do something similar? What's a topic that matters to your blog, and how can you connect with other companies in your niche to create something amazing?
18) Write A Guest Post About The Topic
Creating a guest post on another industry blog is the perfect way to get your content out there. You don't have to reinvent the wheel when pitching a guest blog, however. One thing you can do is take a successful piece you've already written and either expand the topic or make it niche.
For example, maybe you’ve written a piece on how to create an engaging company culture. You could pitch an article that shares seven tips for creating a fantastic company culture, or you could focus on one specific part of the article you wrote and create a post about it. In your article about creating an engaging company culture, you might have briefly talked about to make work fun. In your guest post, you could create an entire article about how to make work more fun and relate it to the company culture research you've already done.
19) Get On Facebook Live And Do A Livestream About The Topic
Facebook Live, Instagram Live, or even Twitter's Periscope, are wonderful ways to connect with your audience. Livestreams are amazing and less time-consuming than typical video content. You don't have to be polished because you are going live.
Take a look at your current analytics. Which posts seem to be doing well right now with your audience? Create a quick graphic to let your audience know you are going live and then hop on a stream with them. You can also save this stream after you end it, then upload the video to YouTube or strip the audio from the stream and use it as a podcast. There are so many ways to use the content you've produced.
20) Syndicate The Blog Post On Other Platforms
Syndication gets a bad rep in the industry because of concerns over SEO. If you look at big companies, though, many of these companies are using syndication to grow their content archives and get their original content seen. Syndication can be a great way to get backlinks and expand your reach.
You shouldn't syndicate every piece of content, but consider syndicating content that makes an impact with your readers. There's nothing wrong with getting more eyes on the content you've already written.
Related Reading: The Right Way to Launch a Blog Syndication Strategy
21) Address Comments On The Content In New Pieces Of Content
If you have comments enabled on your content (which you should), you have a host of exceptional content ideas at your fingertips. You can use the comments that your audience has already left to create new blog posts, social media updates, newsletters, podcasts, and so much more.
Address comments in the comment section of your blog post, so your audience feels more comfortable asking questions. After you've addressed comments there, use your answers to start creating other content for your brand. If you got the question, chances are someone else has a similar problem. You never know how many people you can help by openly addressing reader comments.
22) Use Quotes From The Content As Social Media Updates
Your content contains some pretty awesome quotes if you don't mind me saying. Quotes do amazingly well on social media, whether you create pictures to go along with them or not. Consider ways that you can use the words you've already written to create social media updates that drive your readers back to your blog. Creating quotes doesn't take long at all. You can easily use tools like Canva or Adobe Photoshop to batch create quotes for social media.
23) Share Your Content As An Email Series
If you are looking for another way to grow your email list, share your best content as an email series. Getting your subscribers used to hearing from you is one of the best things you can do as a business owner. Collecting emails and then forgetting to talk to them can make your email list suffer. When your subscribers first get on your list, they should hear from you. That's where your email series comes in.
Instead of creating a series from scratch, consider using the content you’ve already published. You’ll likely need to do some extra formatting to make blog posts work as emails, but most of the work will already be done for you. To make blog posts work as emails:
Trim each section down to its most essential content.
Pick a subject line that draws people in and makes them want to read your email.
Add in some personalization using your email service provider to make your subscribers feel like you are talking to them.
Most email service providers let you send out email series automatically, so this is something you can set up for new subscribers, stale subscribers, or any number of people. What’s better than marketing you don’t have to think about?
24) Give Your Content A Refresh And Repost It
Sometimes the best way to repurpose content is to give it a refresh and post it on social media. Content becomes stale after a while. It's your job to shake it up and share it with your readers again. You don't need to repost it to your blog, just update the blog on your backend.
When you are updating your blog, you might want to:
Check for dead links.
Improve the search engine optimization of your blog post.
Refresh the pictures on the page.
Add more context and content.
Add some internal links to new articles.
After you’ve done a refresh and made the article better, add it to your social media queue.
25) Gather Multiple Blog Posts Into One eBook For Your Email List
As you create content, you begin to develop themes. You can use those themes to create eBooks your audience will love. These eBooks can be the perfect way to grow your email list, and you've already created most of the content. Tools like Beacon integrate with your blog to pull your content and make this process seamless.
If you want to add some sparkle to these eBooks, add a few pages of new content such as an introduction, a checklist, or something that will be valuable to your readers. eBooks and lead magnets are a perfect way to grow your brand and email list. You should be creating an eBook using the content you are producing every few months.
26) Use Repackaged Content As A Bonus For Joining A Program Or Signing Up For A Product
People are always looking for a sweet bonus to make joining a program or getting a product even better. You don’t need to create a new course module or an entirely new product as a bonus. Instead, repackage the content you’ve already created and use that as the bonus.
So, how do you do this? Simple, think about the content you've already created, and how it relates to the service or product you are trying to sell. What would someone find useful to go along with the product they are purchasing? For example, maybe you are selling a service that helps people pick different benefits for their employees. In the past, you've written an article about making room in your budget for benefits. Could you quickly create a fillable benefits budgeting spreadsheet based on the material you've already written? Or maybe you could create a benefits budgeting checklist to help your customers stick to their budget while using your service. Either way, you are creating a bonus for your customers that didn't take you long to put together.
27) Turn It Into A Magazine Article And Sell It To A Magazine In Your Industry
If you are looking to connect with people in your industry, look to print. Getting your article published in a trade magazine is a wonderful way to get your name out there and connect with industry experts.
Start this process by finding some high-quality magazines in your industry. Chances are, you already have one in mind. Go to their website and figure out who their editor is and what their submission guidelines are. Use the article you've already written to create a fantastic pitch for the magazine that addresses why their audience would love the piece and what makes you the perfect person to write the article.
Magazine lead times can be a bit harsh, but holding the magazine you’ve been published in and getting paid for your expertise is the best feeling ever.
Conclusion
Creating content doesn’t have to be as hard as we make it out to be. I think we should all repurpose more of our content instead of reinventing the wheel every month. Make sure that you take an adequate amount of time each month to go through your content and identify what you can repurpose that month.