Working hard is not enough. You need to work ‘smart’ in order to get ahead in this world. That is what my mentor used to tell me, and she could not be more right.

Content Marketing is a throbbing and thriving channel, which can elevate your business to the highest degree, if done right. However, every step comes bearing a hidden risk. For instance, you might churn out one content piece after another for your blog, day in and day out, and still see only a minimal change in the results. You might even reach a burnout, god forbid, and find yourself facing a stasis of a terrifying nature. Nothing is more depressing than a website that does not manage to generate enough traffic and ROI despite all the hard work put into it.

This is where you need to introduce the ‘smart’ element into your content marketing strategy. One of the best ways to do that is by pausing your content creation process, retracing to your old content stack, revising it to breathe a new life into it, and promoting it throughout new platforms in multiple engaging formats to gain dynamic traffic. In order words, you need to repurpose your content to ward off the monotony, and to gain an altogether new exposure.

What does ‘content repurposing’ even mean? The hint lies in the name. According to Contentworks Agency, content repurposing is a form of information recycling. You take an underperforming content piece from your blog archives, update it with the latest research or mold it in various promotional templates, and launch it across multiple online channels to get more mileage out of it. It is quite like earning passive income, wherein you work hard once and then continue to reap benefits for a long duration of time.

Yet, only a third of the leading marketers tend to repurpose their site content, with the rest hesitating to incur Google’s wrath over content duplication issues.

Nevertheless, Neil Patel counters this myth in his post by making a clear distinction between duplicated content (excessive copying in a manipulative manner) and the marketing techniques that are often overshadowed by it. He deems ‘content repurposing’, in whichever format and frequency, as a means for raising brand awareness and far from violating Google’s set standards.

Now that the basic definition and the penalty myth are out of the way, we can move on to the main question. How can you repurpose your blog’s content for getting an SEO boost, a conversion spike and a revenue roll – all at the same time? Follow the steps mentioned below and prepare to face a surge of traffic directed to your site.

Step 1: Choose your Star Players

First, you need to head to the blog archives and examine your content stack. See which old posts are worthy of reconsideration, and select your main players. One of the intelligent ways to do that is by logging into your Google Analytics account, navigating to ‘All Pages’ section in ‘Behavior’ and sorting the top pages on your blog by ‘Page Views’. Take, for instance, www.localcabledeals.com, which is a telecom site owned by a friend of mine. It had not been performing well lately, regardless of the content he had been posting on binge. So, he changed his strategy to ‘repurposing’ after observing the Analytics report on the site’s blog posts, and chose the ‘best home security systems 2019’ post as his underperforming champion piece to be repurposed at will. You can follow the same steps for finding your own ideal content piece(s) to recycle.

Step 2: Choose your Cross-Funnel Audiences

Next, you need to tie the selected content piece(s) with the most-suited audiences, and aim at buyer personas hitherto unexplored. Why? Because in this era of rapid personalization, a more specified targeting strategy will help you speak to the right customer at the right time, and bring in more leads once you think outside the single-persona box. Take a look at the three stages in a buyer’s journey that you can address individually or intersectional-ly or aggregately:

To continue the example from above, when my friend found out that his ‘home security systems 2019’ post was targeting the tech-savvy Gen Z persona in the ‘Awareness’ stage, but missing out on the more profitable old dad Gen X persona in the ‘Consideration’ leading to ‘Decision’ stage, he repurposed it into an easier to understand form and promoted it on a channel with the highest Gen X ratio. Similarly, you can reshape the same content to cater to multiple buyer personas at multiple stages simultaneously. This kind of redirecting of focus across the funnel stages not only allows for a more personalized targeting but also expands avenues of exposure.

Step 3: Choose your Repurposing Techniques

Time to get to work. ‘Content repurposing’ comes with a number of stellar techniques, which you can use to give your chosen content piece(s) startling new forms. For instance, if you have selected an old blog post that is extraordinarily lengthy and textually intensive enough to bore audiences, you can resurrect it by converting it into a:

• Slide Deck – A long-form post immediately gains a professional charm once it is siphoned into pithy and to-the-point slides. Slides, which you can post on SlideShare, and get due attention from its 50 million visitors & 3 billion viewers per month. Imagine what this traffic wave can do for your old content piece once it is repurposed into an elegant slideshow!

You can transform any blog post into a SlideShare deck by breaking it down into the most important sections and then allotting each slide a value-giving point. Remove excess detail and incorporate visuals for a more data-focused result. For further information, check out this guide.

AdEspresso’s social proof marketing piece serves as good example of a content available both as a blog post and a slideshow in the SERPs.

• Infographic – The visual appeal of a concise infographic is precisely what keeps it at the top shelf of the content marketing toolshed today. A website’s traffic gets a nice 12% boost with the addition of an infographic, making it easier for the viewers to get as much information as they can in as little time as possible.

In a similar vein, you can convert your dead blog post into an evergreen infographic by setting aside the main content meat and using tools like Piktochart, Canva or Venngage to give it a gorgeous form. For further information, check out this detailed guide.

Do you recall Warner Bro. CEO Kevin Tsujihara’s scandal and his corresponding ouster? Well, its news piece has a very apt infographic, which can serve as an example of a blog post turned into an infographic.

• Podcast – Audio-content has its own hype and a dedicated user base, which is why, instead of perusing a 2k word article, people usually prefer to listen to the bite-sized info that it provides in a light, conversational tone. Podcasts are becoming increasingly popular with over 98 million US citizens listening to the shows on an annual basis.

Similarly, you can record your old content piece, edit it with a fine tool like Audacity, and finally hold weekly sessions like Michael Hyatt does. To learn how to convert your blog post into an audio podcast, check out this guide.

 

• eBook – A single digital compilation of your blog’s top-performing content pieces, related to a particular niche, can bring in more profits than you or I can imagine. Only last year, the revenue from ebook sales in the U.S. rested at $771 million, showing the propensity of the medium to attract especially the Gen Z readers, aged between 18 to 29 year olds.

You can repurpose your old content pieces into an ebook by selecting a popular niche that you’ve previously researched and written on, assembling individual blogposts in the form of chapters, sandwiching them between a smart introduction and a conclusion, getting it designed, and add the right CTAs at the end. HubSpot often publishes post compilations in the form of ebooks online (downloadable PDFs), and offers an exclusive how-to-make-your-own guide on the side.

• Online Course – Content that educates is a content that sells. You can repurpose any old blog posts or even a SlideShare deck (if you have one) to compose a full-fledged online course, which attracts the attention of the 1 million student base that is engaged in such pursuits today. What you would need to do is pick a comprehensive topic on which you hold authority, mold the course content from the blogposts, structure the curriculum into 5-10 minute lesson videos, approach a credible party like Udemy or Coursera (optional) and publish your online course, while promoting it across social media channels. For more detail check out this <arel=nofollow href=”https://foundr.com/blog-posts-into-online-course/”>guide.

A case in instance would be Darren Rowse of ProBlogger, who conducted an expert round on his blog, jam-packed all that wisdom into an online course and drove a massive amount of traffic to his site successfully.

The list of repurposing techniques goes on. For more info, go here: https://www.quicksprout.com/advanced-techniques-for-repurposing-old-content/.

Step 4: Choose a Profitable Platform

Visibility matters, and it matters tremendously especially when it comes to your ‘content repurposing’ strategy. Because, there is just no use selecting a dead blogpost, determining the perfect audience for it, breathing life into it with a new form and then posting it on channels where no one will get to see it. That is why you need to find the ideal platforms to go with your repurposed post. BuzzSumo can help with this. Simply log in to your account, and see where the audience engagement is concentrated the most on social media channels, as regards a topic. You can even change the filters and get a near-accurate result. For instance, according to BuzzSumo results, my friend’s ‘best home security systems 2019’ blogpost (from the first example) will be best repurposed as a short video and shared on Facebook, as the following figure shows.

So, make sure to pick the right platform to promote your repurposed content on.

• If it’s a slide deck, leverage SlideShare (96 million visits everyday)
• If it’s a quick read article, leverage Medium (60 million monthly readers)
• If it’s a factoid or a content snippet, leverage Twitter (336 million monthly active users)
• If it’s a podcast, leverage Stitcher (12 million app downloads)
• If it’s an explainer video, leverage Instagram (500 million daily active users)

The point is to be smart while spreading out across multiple platforms at the same time and tracking progress with tools like Hootsuite, SEMrush, Moz, Google Analytics etc.

Success Case

Benjamin Hardy & Medium

The author of Slipstream Time Hacking, Benjamin Hardy began seriously blogging in the May of 2015. However, no one except his wife knew about the existence of his blog, making all that exceptional content go to waste with the lack of exposure. That is until he created a profile on Medium and repurposed his original blogposts to suit this article submission site. Three things happened after that:

1. His subscriber count jumped from 0 to 20,000 in SIX months only, as traffic moved between his Medium profile and his original blog seamlessly
2. Influencers started recognizing him and endorsed his work
3. His blogposts featured on reputable sites like The Huffington Post etc.

In May 2015, the stats for his Medium posts (number of views, number of reads, percentage of views x reads, and number of social media recommendations) rested at:

In December 2015, the stats (number of views, number of reads, percentage of views x reads, and number of social media recommendations) for his Medium posts jumped up to:

So, as you can see, Benjamin witnessed a steady rise in exposure and profitability because he believed in the effectiveness of ‘content repurposing’ strategy. If he had not tried his hand at it and given a new life to his original blog posts, he would have licked the dusts of obscurity, just like thousands of bloggers do on a daily basis, sadly.

Conclusion

In order to prevent a burnout, you should cease cranking content like a machine, and retrace your steps cleverly with a beneficial content ‘repurposing’ strategy. Not only will it enable you to popularize your profile, pump up your SEO rankings, experiment with new avenues, but also bring a sort of dynamic element into your website’s ROI, removing the static curse. All with a single content piece – wielded well and repurposed with care.

 

Author Bio:

Farhan Suleman

Having completed his studies in Marketing and Media, Farhan Suleman has ample experience in the field of content marketing. He regularly writes blogs pertaining to the ongoing trends and never fails to inspire his readers with an interesting read. Apart from writing, he is an enthusiastic chess player with a rating of more than 1800 Elo.

Twitter: @farhansule007

Quora: Farhan Suleman

LinkedIn: Rao Farhan Suleman