After reading about how crucial engaging, original content is to your overall content strategy, it may seem like an about-face to talk about repurposing content. If Google’s only interested in original information, is it still possible to get more value from the business content you buy? When you repurpose content without boring your clients or duplicating content already published online, you can.
Repurposed content isn’t mechanically spun or given a new introduction on the same text; it’s not a way to cheat the system or take a short-cut. It’s a way to reach different audiences with the same message. If you’ve ever heard a jingle on the radio and heard it again attached to a television ad, you’ve seen repurposing in action. Once your content team has created your message, they can give it greater value by recycling it in different formats, expanding it and using it as the foundation for new content marketing strategies.
E-books
E-books have become huge business. If you’ve maintained a blog or marketed your articles for any length of time, you probably have at least one e-book just waiting to come together around a unifying theme. An e-book positions you as an authority in your field – and you’ve already bought most of it just by ordering high-quality content in your chosen niche. Take a look at the content you already have and think about ways it could coalesce into a book; chances are you’ll have at least one title already. You may even have enough material for multiple books.
Newsletters
Google looks at published material on your site, but it doesn’t read your emails (at least, not yet). The awesome blog post you just published could also make an excellent centerpiece for your newsletter, and Google won’t mind a bit that you’ve simply added a little wraparound text to an already published article. Doubling up on blog posts and newsletters opens your potential audience wider, but to keep your loyal readers who visit both the blog and the newsletter happy, add extras to the newsletter to reward subscribers.
Videos
Short blog posts are fantastic starting points for videos. Depending on how they’re written, you may not need to change more than a few words to have a great voice-over. Add a couple of lines of dialogue, and you have the script for your own miniature movie. The average speaker on a video reads between 100 and 120 words per minute, so a brief blog post makes a good short video, while longer articles could translate into a whole video series.
Retrospectives
Every TV series has the occasional flashback episode that showcases some of its highlights. It’s a great tool for drawing in new viewers and revisiting some of the show’s best moments. A retrospective article serves a similar purpose, bringing new eyes to older posts. Your retrospective can be a way of noting how far your company’s come or a way to thank regular readers for spending time with you. Feel free to quote and link previous posts heavily in your retrospective, but keep enough new content wrapped around those links to keep regulars interested.
Series
Take a look at your analytics, and you should notice a few patterns in your published content. Those patterns can be the beginning of a series of similar articles drawn from a single popular piece. If they loved your article on home décor, use it as the starting point for a series focusing on each room in the house or on this season’s color trends. Taking your most popular material and expanding it into a series of two or more articles not only gives your readers more of what they want, it also makes content creation a breeze for your team.
© Business Content, Inc. 2013 All Rights Reserved.
