Make no mistake, content marketing is time consuming. Producing high quality content on a regular basis requires a substantial commitment of your own time or a decent outsourcing budget to pay someone else to produce your content for you.
For most people the results are worth the investment in time and energy but if you are in the position of trying to work on your business, in it and grow it all at the same time you’re going to want to find out how to produce the maximum amount of content in the minimum amount of time.
There is one trick that can help you double or even triple the amount of use you get out of each and every piece of content while still providing original, high value, original information to your audience. This trick is well known among copywriters and marketers but it’s often overlooked by individuals when trying to find ways to get more from their content marketing.
I’m talking, of course, about content repurposing.
What is content repurposing?
Content repurposing is not the same as content duplication. Reproducing a piece of content word for word and posting it on multiple sites or sending the same YouTube video to your email list over and over again is not a viable or recommended strategy and it’s only going to annoy people.
Content repurposing means taking a piece of content, or an idea for a piece of content and repurposing it into a different format. Think about all those old blog posts you have sitting on your website. Chances are that among them you have a few that hit the mark with your audience. Why not revive them by dusting them off and turning them into something else?
The many benefits of content repurposing
Content repurposing can benefit you in many, many ways from your search engine optimisation to giving you more time for the other things in your life. Here are four of the main benefits you’ll get from repurposing your content.
1. Save time. By getting more out of each piece of content you produce you can save hours on your content marketing. This is time you can spend working on future plans, managing your business or putting your feet up and relaxing.
2. Benefit even more from your ideas. Content repurposing lets you get more out of each great idea. If that blog post you wrote caused a spike in traffic, why not see what happens when you turn it into an infographic, or a script for a video?
3. Connect with people across different chosen mediums. Some people are visual people, others like to read. Some of your target audience probably like to listen to podcasts in the car while other might watch YouTube videos on their morning train ride. By having a variation of different content formats you can make sure you appeal to a broader range of your audience and increase your level of engagement.
4. Improve SEO. Having a range of different types of content on your website can do great things for your search engine optimisation. There are also benefits to cross linking between your different types of content – so you can post an infographic with a link to the blog post on the same topic, encouraging readers to delve further into the material.
Content repurposing doesn’t have to take much time. Some of it can be technical, like creating infographics but this is fairly easy to outsource and is less arduous than creating content from scratch.
How to repurpose your content
Depending on your audience’s preferences there are plenty of ways you can repurpose your content. Blog posts can be grouped together into an e-book or whitepaper. Alternatively, an e-book can be divided up into a series of blog posts or even an online course.
Changing formats can also include turning blog posts into video scripts for You Tube guides. Infographics can be turned into articles or slide presentations and podcasts can be transcribed and published as blog posts.
Take a look at your most successful pieces of content. Could they be repurposed and rejigged into a different format? It’s a good idea to get into the habit of creating multiple pieces of content from each idea – your content marketing strategy will get a big boost and you’ll save time and money on your content creation.