How to Repurpose Content like a Pro

repurpose content

A catchy tune just never seems to go away.

You hear it on the radio (too old-fashioned?) then it follows you wherever you go. It’s released as a single, on a full-length album, as a remixed version and as part of a “greatest hits” collection. It’s available on iTunes, YouTube, Pandora and Spotify. It’s performed live at music venues, recorded for late-night TV shows and converted into a music video.

Before long, this catchy tune – four minutes of strategically-assembled voices and instruments – has inundated your brain and tugged at your emotions. While the artist rides the wave created by the hit song’s momentum to stardom, you enjoy a piece of music that speaks to you and comes to nostalgically define a stage of your life. Everybody wins.

You, as a content marketer, may not be blessed with the voice of Lennon nor the riffs of Clapton, but why can’t your content have staying power similar to that of a popular song? Why can’t you be so green with your content that the longtime slogan “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” gets repurposed itself, subsequently referring to both recyclers and content marketers?

Continuously crafting fresh content proves difficult, expensive and time-consuming. Inefficiency in content production results in an estimated $958 million each year in excessive spend for mid-to-large B2B U.S. companies.

Many content marketers combat perceived inefficiencies by reusing existing content. There’s simply no need to always be original. Research indicates that nearly 60 percent of content producers repurpose their work between two and five times.

By repurposing your best content (notice I didn’t say “all content” or “just any content”) after it’s originally published, you can:

  • Maximize a piece of content’s longterm effectiveness
  • Reinforce your message across various channels
  • Bolster your content’s SEO ceiling
  • Reduce the resources consumed by your content marketing budget

Like concocting five turkey recipes from Thanksgiving leftovers, repurposing enables you to get the most of out of your content, extending its shelf life. If content is king, then long live the kings. Here are eight techniques for repurposing your content like a pro:

repurpose content

1. Develop Evergreen Content

Seek a lifetime warranty with no expiration date for your content. While some pieces may be timely and have limited usage, strive to make most of your content evergreen – continually relevant and fresh for readers. If you’re a retailer that holds an annual holiday sale, you want to avoid putting anything specific to a particular year on your sale signage so it can be reused each time the holiday season rolls around. Applying this same technique to your content affords you maximum usability and flexibility.

2. Craft Email Newsletters

Once you’ve published a blog post, it’s time to start maximizing that content’s exposure. Think “Often imitated but never duplicated.” Repurpose your post by converting it into a topic overview within an email newsletter that can be sent to your subscribers, directing recipients by hyperlink to the full post. By establishing a weekly newsletter schedule, you can ensure your top blog posts can be revamped and easily repurposed on a regular basis.

3. Compile Your Own “Greatest Hits” Collection

With Google Analytics and other Web metrics, you can determine which of your content pieces performed best during the last several months. Using this information, develop a “best of” blog post highlighting these top performers and linking back to each. This strategy enables you to extend the buzz surrounding your most noteworthy content achievements with a minimal time investment.

4. Utilize Social Media Channels

If you’re anything like me, you milk a nearly-empty bottle of toothpaste for all it’s worth. You paid good money – why waste any? You invested the necessary resources to produce original content and should reap the benefits bestowed by proper repurposing. Share your content on LinkedIn, Twitter and other social media networks most relevant to your industry. Cross-promote your content on Medium and other blog-publishing platforms. Stagger your social media strategy such that your content is visible on some social sites shortly after it’s originally issued and saved for rainy-day use on other sites.

5. Construct an eBook

As you strengthen your repertoire of content pieces regarding a particular subject, you can begin to emerge as a content marketing thought leader regarding that topic. Accordingly, you should consider writing an eBook. This lengthier project seeks to weave several blog posts into a unified theme or informational storyline, presenting an ideal opportunity to repurpose the best of your related content.

6. Submit a Guest Post

Speaking of thought leadership, your blossoming expertise with a topic will open doors to other opportunities. Offer to contribute a guest post to a fellow content marketer, repurposing your top blog for posting to another website. This tactic affords you easy reuse of your content while extending the reach and longevity of that piece.

7. Create an Infographic

Infographics represent evergreen, sharable assets that help diversify your audience. Research indicates that 40 percent of people will respond better to visual information than to plain text. Repurpose your text-heavy content into a visually-stimulating infographic and you will both convey expertise and gain viewership in the process.

8. Brainstorm a Spinoff

When your content well starts to run dry, it’s time to get creative in order to replenish. It’s easy to forget that some of the most successful shows in TV history – including “The Simpsons” and “Saved by the Bell” – were actually spinoffs from prior programming. Develop a spinoff of one of your top-performing blog posts whereby you take one interesting component of that original blog and morph it into new content. While this may prove more time-consuming than other repurposing options, the end-result will appear to be brand-new content.

Ultimately, nothing last forever and every piece of content has a finite lifespan. But rather than fading away completely, its impact can endure, its presence live on, thanks to strategic content repurposing. That catchy song is, after all, still playing on repeat inside my head.

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NgageContent Staff

NgageContent Staff

We're an inbound marketing agency in Cleveland, Ohio focused on helping you better understand how to attract, qualify and convert more leads on your website with content and design that keeps your customers engaged.



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