For content marketers, the market has become increasingly hungry for content that is more targeted and relevant to their specific niche. And while it’s still important to produce quality, unique content regularly in order to maintain a strong online presence, sometimes your website or blog may have a surplus of articles that you haven’t been able to use yet. This has led a number of content marketers to consider reusing content on other marketing channels. IN this case, Mixx will help you because of the growing audience in Instagram.Some are even making it their goal to generate more value from their sites by repurposing some of their back-catalog content. Enter the repurposed blog post. If you’re already producing quality content, it may be prudent to look for ways that you can use the same piece of content in multiple ways throughout your blog or website without investing too much time each time.
What Are the Compelling Reasons That You Should Repurpose Your Content, Anyway?
Make the Important Distinction Between Duplicating and Repurposing
Solid Content Is the Base of All Repurposing – or Else It’s All Worthless
Six Quick and Easy Ways to Repurpose Your Good Content To Create New Content
Create an infographic
Discuss the topic in a podcast
Turn a 10x Piece Into Video for More Effective Marketing Potential
Transform Content Into Listicles for More Easily Digestible Content
Write an eBook for Consumers That Are Heavily Interested in Your Niche
Share Content In Your Newsletter
Start Repurposing Your Content
If you’re following the recommendation to publish 16 or more pieces of content per month, you’ve likely created quite the content catalog–and assigned a huge chunk of your weekly to-do list to content creation. But to keep up with that speed means ploughing more time, cash and effort into your strategy. What if there was an easier way to generate tons of high-quality content, without starting from scratch each time? Repurpose your content by turning one piece into several other types of content and you won’t need to start from scratch every time. The best part? It’s also a tactic that helped one blog add 30,000 new visitors to their Google Analytics reports almost overnight.
Here’s everything you need to know about repurposing content for more backlinks, social shares, and site traffic.
What Are the Compelling Reasons That You Should Repurpose Your Content, Anyway?
You’ve got an incredible blog post on your site. It took you ten hours to piece together, it ranks at the top of Google for your keyword, and more importantly, it brings a ton of organic traffic to your website.
Why bother repurposing? Our answer to that is simple: There’s always room for more. Granted, you might be raking in the traffic and generate a couple of juicy backlinks in return for your “ultimate guide”-style blog post. But what if you could get more traffic? More people visiting your site that could turn into paying customers? More people joining your email list?
60% of marketers repurpose their content, and you could be making a huge content marketing mistake (SEO-wise) by failing to do it.
That’s because repurposing:
Introduces your content to new audiences
Caters to different learning styles–some people prefer to read; some prefer to watch
Refreshes your audience’s memory
Improves your SEO (when content is repurposed for another website)
And considering 47% of buyers consume three to five pieces of content before talking to a sales rep, you’re it’s important for your content to span a wide range of formats.
Let’s use an example. The most popular piece of content on your blog might be a long, comprehensive pillar page that’s full to the brim with data and statistics. But if you repurposed that content into an infographic, for example, you’ve got another type of content in the fraction of the time it took to create the original blog post.
Do that a few times and you’ll be left with multiple pieces of content–all stemming from the same original piece–that you can use to appeal to a wider audience. And because you’re not starting from scratch, you’re producing more content in less time. That frees you up to promote your content (which is just as, if not more, important than content creation itself), while at the same time giving you more to share.
Make the Important Distinction Between Duplicating and Repurposing
Ready to dive back into your blog archive from 2012, and publish it on any site you can find? Don’t. Repurposed content isn’t duplicate content.
Instead, you’re taking existing content and morphing or changing it—not copy and pasting it into a different website like LinkedIn Publisher or Medium, which could land you a Google penalty. By repurposing, you’re still creating “new” content by using existing content as a launchpad.
Solid Content Is the Base of All Repurposing – or Else It’s All Worthless
Remember the good old fashioned saying: You can’t polish a turd? The same applies for repurposing content. In other words, you can’t create more top-notch content if you’ve not got the basics right.
So, start by using Moz’s 10x content framework. It’s a content marketing strategy that helps you create the best possible piece of content by building upon (and improving) what you see on Google’s list of top results.
The aim is to create something 10x better than anything already ranking for the keyword you’re targeting, whether that’s by:
Adding unique data points
Including more sections
Referencing better, more recent data
Inserting more visuals
This technique, combined with general guidelines for creating an awesome piece of content, will give you the basis you need to repurpose–and turn one blog post into a piece that keeps on giving.
Six Quick and Easy Ways to Repurpose Your Good Content To Create New Content
Got a solid piece of 10x content that you want to maximize? Here are six other types of content you can create from your 10x piece:
Create an infographic
Source: Dreamstime
Did you know that people retain more information when content is paired with a visual? Using infographics is a fantastic way to make people remember your content–and circle back to your website when they need another dose of information.
Infographics also:
Increase overall website traffic by 12%
Get 94% more views than content without visuals
Get shared on social media three times more than other types of content
…which is why you should be including them as part of your content marketing strategy. But since we’ve already got a solid piece of content (and a ton of text that’s already written-out), you don’t have to spend hours creating a fancy infographic from scratch.
You understand your target audience, have a focused theme, and have verified your data. All that’s left to create (or outsource) the visual design.
Discuss the topic in a podcast
Over 104 million people listen to podcasts monthly in the States. (That’s more podcast listeners than Catholics.) And of those listeners, 85% tune in until the end–which is pretty impressive, considering the average person spends just 37 seconds reading a blog post.
Why not take your blog post and turn it into a podcast script? Start by identifying existing content that lends itself to a podcast format. Ideally, you want to find content that can be broken down into multiple episodes.
Once you’ve got your list of episodes, take your original 10x piece and write mini podcast scripts based on the information, statistics and advice you’ve already shared. Then, link to your blog post in the show notes to drive more traffic to your site–and to get a nice little backlink from the App Store in the meantime!
Turn a 10x Piece Into Video for More Effective Marketing Potential
Most content marketers rate video as the most effective content marketing format. Why not join them and start repurposing your blog posts into video, and uploading to sites like YouTube to reach a new audience?
You’ve done the research and defined the key points, and the written content itself serves as the basis of a script. The only thing you’ve got left to do is film the video. At a time when most people would rather watch a video to learn about a product or service—even when the same text is available on-page—repurposing content into a video format seems like a no-brainer.
Transform Content Into Listicles for More Easily Digestible Content
The average blog post ranking first in search results is over 2,450 words long. If you’re following that as a guideline and writing 10x content, that means you’ve got a blog post that’s jam-packed with information, data, and facts. In other words, the perfect ingredients for a listicle.
A listicle is exactly what it sounds like: A list of things. But why do they work so well? The simple answer is this: Psychologically, people love numbers. Readers will be drawn to a listicle, especially if you’ve written a killer headline, because they know exactly what to expect before clicking on it.
So, take a look through your existing content to figure out what you can repurpose into a listicle. Facts from case studies, industry analysis, advice, and quotes from thought leaders all make for excellent listicles. And if you want your listicle to work doubly hard, use a click to tweet link for each list item so readers can share your content with their network.
Write an eBook for Consumers That Are Heavily Interested in Your Niche
Writing an eBook is difficult, right? You’ve got a huge chunk of content that needs to be written, edited and proofread–not to mention the research beforehand, and the design work afterwards. But the beauty of repurposing content means you likely already have a large portion of an eBook already written.
And if you’ve got a couple of 10x pieces on a similar topic, you might only need to do a bit of editing (like chopping and changing the order of certain paragraphs, or including a workbook or checklist) before your content makes its way to the designer’s desk.
Share Content In Your Newsletter
You already know that email marketing should play a role in your marketing strategy. But where do you get content to push through your newsletter? You guessed it: Repurposed content.
Look to your meaty, info-packed 10x piece to figure out what you can pull out, build upon, and repackage into your newsletters. Is there a piece of content that you published in 2012 that still has great, evergreen advice? Repurpose your content and send it to your new subscribers. In many cases, you can even get multiple newsletters from a single blog post.
A series of quotes or insight from thought leaders, snippets from content, or industry tips all make for interesting and effective newsletter content–much better than emails that only share links to your latest blog post. And if you can get them from content you’ve already created, it’s a no-brainer.
Start Repurposing Your Content
Are you convinced to start making your content work smarter, not harder? Promotion accounts for a huge chunk of any successful piece of content, and by repurposing one 10x piece into several tidbits you can use to drive more eyeballs to your website, you’d be a fool not to start doing it.
