The Power of Content Repurposing: The Ultimate Guide

Pat Flynn, back in 2009, started his started a ten-blog post series on how to write, publish, market and automate an ebook. But to incentivize his email list, he decided to package the whole series. The result was Ebooks the Smart Way, an e-book that has now been downloaded over 150,000 times since 2010 and, to this day, continues to grow his email list.

This is just one story. The power of content repurposing accounts for countless others. This post is dedicated to giving you a full round-up on:

What is Content Repurposing?
Some ways you can get the most bang out of an original content
Tools and Tips to getting started

Let’s dive right in!

What is Content Repurposing?

Content repurposing is the process of taking your original content, and spinning it into entirely new content. It's similar to spinning your own kind of wool, or knitting sweaters — you do it over and over again until your sweater is exactly how you like it. Content repurposing is an iterative process — a series of steps that you repeat until the end result is perfect.

As Salma Jafri, writing for Search Engine Watch, points out about content repurposing – Create Less, Promote More. But promotion doesn’t mean posting the same link across social media all day! This is what got people back in the day, to think that repurposing was simply a Copy-Paste exercise. But ever since Google started catching spun articles, the grey-hat practice ended.

Today, repurposing is – Upgrade + Add Additional Value + Change Format Accoding to the Platform. And as far as breaking the rules of content reuse is concerned, there are no limits:

Blog Posts
Ebooks
Interviews
Podcasts
Blog posts
Presentations
Social media posts, and more!
Webinars
Speeches or Key Notes
Video clips, vlogs, Reels

We’ll breakdown the entire process in a bit.

Why Should You Repurpose Content?

Aside from the fact that less is more, here are other benefits of content repurposing:

1. Expands Your Reach To Newer Audience

The fact is people consumer information in different ways. While some may read your blog, others will prefer a video tutorial. By simply repacking your original content, you get the ticket to keep audience in the loop, and interact forever.

2. Reinforces Your Brand Message

According to Marketing’s Rule of Seven, You need to reiterate your message times to ensure the buyer closes the deal. That’s how important reiteration/repititon/reinforcing is in marketing.

As marketing maestro Seth Godin rightly says, when you repurpose, you’re simply giving your customers several angles to see what you do. This not only increases retention but also helps you push “thinking-to-buy” customers down the funnel.

3. Improves SEO

As cohesive content experience becomes the holy grail of marketing, creating multimedia content is the most scalable way to catch up with lost metrics.

The more the quality content, the more links for users to trace back to your site. This leads to increased backlinks and hence an increase in search engine rankings.

9 Ways to Repurpose Content

Content Repurposing involves a lot of creative fuel. There are several ways to reuse one piece and turn it into a marketable piece of content. But it’s important to stay up-to-date with the latest content repurposing trends to make the most impact.

We’ve complied a list of 9 successful ways to turn one piece into several other formats – with relevant examples.

1. Turn a blog post into an ebook/guide or vice versa

You already saw above how converting blog posts into downloadable ebooks can activate your marketing funnel.

And not just Pat Flynn, the team at Zapier also used the similar technique to boost their email list by 10,000.

The reverse works equally good. Writing a few blog posts by taking cues from the pillar topic won’t hurt. But remember, you’re blogging to rank in Google, so you have to optimize it. Some best practices you must follow:

Use related images
An end-of-post CTA
Links to your site's other blog posts or webpages
An effective promotion strategy by sharing newsletters, social media posts, blog posts

2. Leverage video content to publish multiple content pieces

Videos are worth a lifetime of content. But unless you’re a full-time YouTuber, you don’t have much time to shoot authentic videos frequently. With content repurposing, you not only free yourself the time but also create a month’s worth of endless content.

Convince & Convert’s Jay Baer uses this tactic often. His repurposed formats include:

Podcasts
Transcribed content for Convince and Convert blog and Jay’s Personal blog
LinkedIn Pulse posts
Medium blogs
Weekly Newsletters
Social Media Promotional Posts

3. Craft Email Series

The average return you can expect from email marketing is $42 for every $1 you invest. With repurposing, this ROI could grow even more. It is possible to chunk up blog posts, videos, webinars, and interviews into bite-sized emails.

Here are three key ways you can reuse your current content into engaging email campaigns that will boost your business.

Share UGC Content

People trust real people. And that’s why UGC content is on the rise as the new face of word-of-mouth marketing. 8 out of 10 customers say UGC has helped take better decisions.

In case of emails, you could send in a monthly “Post of the month”, or “User of the month” to respective user with permission. Or you could send promotional content to the person who tagged your brand in a campaign.

Share Social Media Poll Results

Polls make it fun for the audience to interact with your brand. You could share results you ran on social media and ask your email list if they agree with the result. Or you could share a comparison newsletter on how different email & social media audience are.

Create a “Round Up” Newsletter

A round-up newsletter could be:

Links to all the blog posts you wrote in a month
Compilaton of all the blogs and videos on one pillar topic, eg. SEO
Links to all the company updates (launches, hires, relocations, etc.) in a month

4. Record new podcast episodes from published content

The popularity of podcasts is expected to grow to 160 million by 2023, so it's not surprising that marketers are jumping on board.

You could do a word-by-word voiceover of the existing blog post and add a plugin at the top, like Jeremy Frandsen and Jason Van Orden of Internet Business Mastery. It was a hit as the these "audio blogs" saw downloads 60 to 100% higher than their podcast package.

This is a good starting point but original content is what gets you to the best spot. This is where Copyblogger makes a strong statement with their series, The Lede Podcast. They hold discussions on various marketing related topics like copywriting, entrepreneurship, persuasive marketing, blogging and more.

5. Make a slide deck for SlideShare

The key to turning a blog post or a podcast episode into a slide deck is identifying the juiciest bits of information. And to make it skimmable, you need to include visuals (images, GIFs, short videos, charts, graphs, etc.)

Here’a presentation from Adpresso’s Slideshare channel on Social Proof Marketing. By simply, using the information from the long-form blog post, the slide deck amassed over 3900 visits in the first ten days alone. Additionally, both their blog and slide deck gained rankings in terms of high-competition keywords, such as Social Proof Marketing and Social Proof.

6. Design infographics from available content

A step beyond slideshare is the infographic, a concise and data-driven summary of long-form content. When you accumulate a lot of data, infographics are a great way to transform those slides in a bite-sized format.

Litmus, an email marketing platform, does this exceptionally well with infographics based on original research and industry expert analysis. Here’s a snippet of an infographic on responsive email design.

Here’s how you can repurpose your content into an infographic:

Extract the meat of your content and create an outline. Remember to go over the outline at least twice to remove unwanted language.
Now comes the easy part - structuring & designing. You can design an infographic on your own by using tools like Canva, Piktochart, and Venngage which offer drag-and-drop builders and templates.
Now, that you’re done with creation, it’s time for repurposing. Either you can reach out to infographic loving websites like Hubspot, MarketingProfs, and Search Engine Journal. Or you can reach out to influencers (Facebook Groups/Twitter Chats/Instagram DMs) who may be interested in your content.

7. Repurpose Queries From Quora, Reddit into a Blog Post

The beauty of community forums like Quora and Reddit is that it establishes a way to converse with your audience in real-time. Answering their questions is an important part of customer relationship management, but you can also respond with a long blog post.

Buffer used this exact tactic to turn an indepth Q/A Quora post on “How Do I Get An Interview at Buffer?” into a full-length blog post. This helps you close the feedback loop and present your brand as an attentive listener.

8. Turn a webinar into a YouTube video or blog post

As far as content marketing is concerned, webinars are a gift that keep on giving. You can slice and dice the content of an hour-long video event into several valuable pieces. Here are four effective ways to turn a webinar into a stream of quality linkbaits:

1. Convert webinars into full-length videos

A straightforward method would be to host your webinar as a full-length video and put it on YouTube or website. Just add a title card to the beginning and an ending card to the end. Now, you can use it as a free-to-play or an on-demand gated educational tool. This is an excellent way to build your email list and offer valuable content at the same time.

2. Chop Into Short Snippets for Webinar Marketing

Not all people can devote a full hour to watch your webinar but if you convert it into three to four minute short videos, it will be handy for skimmers to watch and share.

You could either use them for social media as thought leadership clips or incorporate short clips into email drip campaigns.

3. Transcribe for SEO

Search engines can’t crawl through the rich content on your webinar. This impacts your rankings depsote putting quality content. So, what you can do is transcribe the entire webinar and put the text as SEO optimized blog posts or descriptions on your YouTube channel.

Further, with the text content, you can even turn it into white papers, ebooks and other lead generating materials.

4. Create Q/A Post From The FAQ Section

Webinars are armed with a FAQ section at the end. This data can be used to create SEO-friendly Q/A blog post, video series, industry journals, and many other formats.

Answering real questions would set your brand as an authority to the readers.

9. Repurpose or Repost on Social Media

It might seem counter intuitive to repost same content on social media, but research has found this tactic to be effective in reaching new audience, different timezones, A/B testing headlines.

Tom Tunguz found that reposting can bring in 75 percent of the engagement of original sharing.

For example, from their guide, “300+ Best Coping Mechanisms For Entrepreneurs,” HubSpot created a tweet for each of the different statistics presented:

And not just the statistics, this blog has quotes, business ideas, a bar graph that can be repurposed into social media posts.

You could also create Instagram caroursels from headers within a blog post or make Twitter threads from bullet points. Here’s an example of how VistaCreate turned their top-performing into Instagram post:

An intagram carousel made from a full-length blog post on “Ins and Outs of Digital Marketing”

Struggling to Create Original Content – It’s Time For Content Repurposing

No matter what size your business is, you will always want to expand your reach, and increase your traffic levels. Content repurposing can be a great way to help you increase your online visibility and attract new customers.

Simply by recycling already existing content, you can boost engagement, rank higher in search engines, and drive traffic to your website. Take these tips and examples listed above as a starting point to refine your repurposing workflows and deliver best results possible.

And as always, make sure that you are not violating any copyrights, and credit the original author for his/her work of art.