You know you need to produce content and you know you need it on a regular basis. That’s the easy part. The challenging part is to come up with ideas that are fresh and useful to your target audience.
There are many different strategies to come up with ideas for content, one of which is repurposing some of your older stuff. Keep in mind, there is a huge difference between repurposing and copy and pasting. The idea is to change it up and make it even better than the first time around.
Here are some tips on how to make it happen:
Change the Format
If your original content was a blog post, change it to a video or a podcast. If it was a video, make it a blog. Change any online material to an offline format, such as a trade paper or newsletter. You get the idea, and you won’t have to worry about any duplicate content issues when you change formats this way.
Make an Infographic
Infographics are sleek, they are easy to consume and people seem to love them. Plus, you could take one blog post, podcast or video and create a few different infographics from it. An infographic works well as part of your email marketing or on social media because it’s easy to digest and easy to screenshot. Just be sure to include your company name or URL so it’s easy to see.
Change the Angle
When you want to repurpose your old content, it’s not too difficult to change the angle of a blog post to create a new one with the same information that appeals to a different segment of your audience. Here are a few examples:
“How to Create Killer Headlines” could be changed to “Don’t Make These Mistakes When Writing Your Headlines”. The first post would include what you should do, and the second one would have the reverse info, showing what to avoid.
“5 Tips for Finding Great Blog Ideas” could be changed to “The Content Writer’s Guide to Coming Up with Great Blog Ideas”. The first would be a bulleted type list, while the second would be more of a summary.
Update with New Information
If your original content included stats, graphs or other topical information, repurpose it with new, updated information. Make sure to re-word it so there aren’t large chunks with duplicate content, then enter the new info to make it fresh. You can create a new title for posts like this or even use the word “Updated:” with the original title.
Go Deeper
No matter how deep you went on the first go, it’s always possible to go deeper. If you aren’t going to replace the first version, rewrite the original sections so they aren’t duplicate content, and then add more. Dig deeper into the information you already had with stats, background info, etc. You can also change the original post to an ebook or whitepaper to use as part of your marketing materials.
As an example, “5 Ways to Write Email Subject Lines” could be changed to “The Ultimate Guide to Writing Email Subject Lines”.
Change Longer Videos to Clips
If you have produced longer videos as part of your content marketing, consider chopping them up into shorter clips. These would work well in your social media posts or in emails where attention spans are often at a minimum.
Create an Entire Series
Instead of just expanding a blog post into a longer one, consider creating a series based on that topic. Instead of “The Ultimate Guide to Writing Headlines”, you could write several different blog posts, one for each facet of crafting the ultimate headline.
These are a few ways to repurpose your older content and make it fresh and new again. If you’ve been using other strategies that work, feel free to leave a comment below. And if you’d like to talk about your own content needs, book a free consultation today!
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