Repurposing Content: Is It Still Working Today?
Annie is the Content Manager here at Express Writers, has managed multiple teams in the past, and has been a journalist and expert copywriter for years. You want to create great content for your readers but you’re short on time, right? If you haven’t considered repurposing content, it may be time to give recycling your old work a second thought. Be advised, though, that repurposing work doesn’t simply mean copying and pasting or rewriting an old article word by word. In addition to being a waste of time, repurposing content in this fashion will end up being ineffective and frustrating. As the wonderful Mary puts it: Responsible and effective repurposing entails careful reformatting, updating and repackaging in order to reach new audiences or simply revive great content. In addition to stretching your hard-won content further than ever before, carefully repurposing content has the potential to give your site an SEO boost among other things. Here is everything you need to know about repurposing content: Why Repurpose Content? Repurposing content can be a great way to drive more traffic to your site and produce increased reader engagement. Unless a piece of old content has been adequately back-linked by high-traffic sites, there is a definite chance that it isn’t getting as much traffic as it deserves. Repurposing that piece of content can fill it with new life and serve the purpose of simply getting it out in front of your readers again. Additionally, repurposing content in order to develop several pieces of high-quality material around a certain topic can produce an SEO boost. By targeting a specific keyword and producing a high level of quality backlinks from other reputable sites, repurposed content can easily prolong the lifespan of your original post. Additionally, repurposing content can help you extend your site’s reach in order to connect with new audiences who either didn’t see your original work or don’t frequent the media formats in which your original work was published. For example, if you typically write blogs but you take one of your blogs and turn it into a carefully crafted podcast, you have the potential to reach an entire audience of podcast listeners who don’t read blogs but may be very interested in what you have to say. By making sure you are utilizing a multi-channel marketing approach, you stand a better chance of engaging various types of audiences from around the web. Finally, skillfully repurposing old content can help you underline and reinforce your message. Marketing experts have known for decades that, in order for a customer to convert, click or make a purchase, the customer needs to know you and your message well enough to feel as if he or she has a solid sense of what is being promoted through your work. Repurposing content can help reformat and underline your message in order to facilitate better customer understanding and increased conversion rates. How to Determine Which Pieces of Content Should be Repurposed Generally, the content that deserves to rise from the ashes of your collection is evergreen content. Evergreen content is content that is perpetually relevant, regardless of when or where it was published. Repurposing an old post about the then-current happenings of the Clinton administration, for example, will not do much good, unless you are committed to seriously re-working the piece in order to make it relevant to today’s population. Evergreen content, on the other hand, will require little or no heavy-duty re-working in order to be relevant to current audiences. After you’ve determined which content is evergreen, spend some time looking at your analytics software in order to determine which of your evergreen posts have been the most popular. More likely than not, each of these posts will share a common trait that has increased its popularity and made it more readable among your followers. Do your best to identify this this common thread so that you can incorporate it into future blogs. Finally, determine which, if any, materials within these posts need updating. Regardless of how evergreen or popular a post was, chances are it will still be somewhat outdated and will require a bit of work to update the post. The Repurposing Process There are many ways to repurpose content. Contrary to popular belief, however, repurposing content absolutely does not mean that you get to simply copy and paste an old post into a new platform. One of the best ways to repurpose your high-quality content and ensure it stays popular in the future is to transform previously published content by plugging it into a new format. For example, a webinar can become a video tutorial and a blog can be reformatted and dissected in order to become a podcast. By repurposing popular content into new formats, you can ensure that you reach new audiences, drive more traffic and extend your best content to all of your readers through multi-channel marketing. Here are some of the most popular ways to repurpose old content in new formats: Blog Post to How-To Guide If you’ve written a blog post that got a great reader response, consider transforming that blog post into a how-to guide. For example, if your topic of choice is cloud-based marketing tools and you’ve written extensively on the subject of cloud computing, you could create a short how-to guide for companies just getting started with the cloud. Keep in mind that an effective how-to guide should include more pictures and step-by-step information than most blog posts. For maximum visibility, consider uploading your repackaged content to Pinterest or a niche-focused forum for increased reach and more reader engagement. Podcast to Quora Content Quora is a popular online platform for Q & A’s, and it serves as an ideal place to repurpose old Podcast content. Simply take the transcript from the podcast and use pieces of it to ask or answer Quora questions. Doing so can help drive new readers to your site and further establish you as an authority in your area of expertise. PowerPoint … Read more
