Repurposing content: Should you post the same content to multiple places?

repurposing content featured image

Is reposting content to different websites and social media channels a good idea? We recommend repurposing content instead.

Congratulations! So you’ve published a value-packed podcast episode or an insightful thought piece on your blog that you know your target audience will benefit from. You pushed it out to your social media channels using a social media scheduling tool, and you might have even sent it out to your moderately sized list via your email newsletter.

Pretty good effort, but there’s only one problem…

You review your Google Analytics data a week or two after you initially hit publish, and you’re rather disappointed by what you see…

Your content was not as successful as you’d hoped it to be.

This is a pretty common scenario, and we see business owners struggle with getting traction with their content all the time.

If you publish, they will not automatically come.

via GIPHY

So what went wrong?

Well, either you’re lacking a content strategy or you haven’t answered two critical questions about your content marketing.

There are a couple of things you’ll need to check to ensure that your content publishing activities are actually doing what you intend it to do. Let’s get into it, shall we?

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1. Is your content actually as good as you think?

Blog content is prolific and Worldometers tells us that (at time of print) there are over 3 million blog posts being published per day.


blog posts written march 28, 2018

The truth is, the majority of content being posted online is average – not engaging, not worth consuming and definitely not worth sharing around.

So what makes your content stand out?

You need to be creating 10X content!

Say what?

If you’re new to the concept of 10X content, here’s how Rand Fishkin at Moz explains it:

“… this is the idea that, because of content saturation, content overload, the idea that there’s just so much in our streams and standing out is so hard, we can’t just say, “Hey, I want to be as good as the top 10 people in the search results for this particular keyword term or phrase.” We have to say, “How can I create something 10 times better than what any of these folks are currently doing?” That’s how we stand out.”

Incidentally, you’ll want your 10X content to be your pillar or cornerstone content.

Here’s how Marieke van de Rakt explained cornerstone content on Yoast.com:

Think of four or five pages you would like someone to read if they first visit your website. These articles should be the cornerstones of your site. Which articles are most precious to you? Which articles are the most complete and authoritative? You should write cornerstone articles about the keywords you definitely want to rank for.

 

READ  How To Leverage Customer Testimonials On Your Website

How to create 10X content

Here’s a handy video of Rand sharing his tips on how to create 10X content:

While we’re on the topic, I highly recommend you read 10x Marketing Formula: Your Blueprint for Creating ‘Competition-Free Content’ That Stands Out and Gets Results. This will change the way you look at content marketing in general (You can download the first chapter free here).

Now assuming that you’re creating high value i.e. 10X content, you can move onto the next question.

2. Are you promoting your content enough times, and in enough places?

This is an important question to answer because oftentimes we’ve seen business owners put a lot of emphasis on creating and publishing content, but not enough effort on promoting their best content.

Considering all the time, money and effort it takes to create great content – wouldn’t it make sense that you invest a good deal of effort into getting that content in front of as many potential readers/listeners as possible?

Yes, we sure think so!

Is it enough to simply copy and paste the same blog post to different channels eg. Linkedin?

Well that’s a start, because it means that you’re exposing your Linkedin followers to the content that they otherwise would be missing out on if they’re not actively visiting your site, following you on social, or subscribed to your newsletter.

Adding to that, we recommend you repurpose your content to better leverage all the great work you’re doing to produce high quality content.

Erin Everhart defines repurposing content as:

“repacking one piece of content across many different media. Each time, you’re adding to it (or taking away from it), and making it unique for the source, the medium and the user who’ll be reading it.”

[bctt tweet=”Considering all the time, money and effort it takes to create great content – wouldn’t it make sense to get that content in front of as many potential readers/listeners as possible? #content #marketing” username=”anferneec”]

Does repurposing content work?

Yes, yes it does. Here’s a data driven answer from Neil Patel.

Repurposing content for SEO

Here’s an interesting point raised on a post about repurposing content on SEM Rush:

There are many factors to consider when ranking for a keyword with your content: page quality, competition, the age of the post, backlink profile, and others.

Therefore, content quality is just one of the many factors that you have to meet so you can fully reap the benefits of your SEO efforts.

What most marketers fail to realize is that SEO is not the only game in town!

Since users share content across different platforms, it can also be re-made into something better and more interesting for your audience.

With enough research and ingenuity, you can come up with new strategies that let you recreate your old posts into a different format to boost your online reach and remove yourself from depending too much on SEO.

How good is that?

READ  026: Why is Content Marketing Important? 5 Reasons

Alright, we’ve spoken about the benefits of repurposing content but how do you actually do it?

Great question!

Let’s look at how you can repurpose podcast and blog content.

[bctt tweet=”Want to repurpose your podcast content and better leverage the great content you’re creating? Follow these 7 steps. #podcasting #content #marketing” username=”anferneec”]

 

How to repurpose podcast content in 7 steps

1. Publish your podcast episode to iTunes.

2. Use repurpose.io to automatically turn the audio into video format and push the podcast to youtube and facebook.

3. Embed the podcast audio onto your blog, with shownotes and full text transcription of the audio (you can use a service like Rev.com to get a text transcription overnight)

4. Hire a writer to pull out 1 or 2 key lessons from the podcast episode, add their own research, and turn it into a blog post. (This is something that we do for our clients)

5. If your target audience is on Linkedin, get your VA to put a summary of the blog post on to Linkedin as a Pulse article and link back to the original post on your website.
6. Schedule all content to go out via social channels according to a social media schedule (I recommend a tool like MissingLettr or Coschedule which can automatically recycle your social posts. MissingLetter is the more affordable option for startups)
Here’s where you take you take repurposing content to the next level…
7. Implement a link building outreach process for the content, and reach out to websites that have high domain authority and a lot of site visitors each month on their website.
Check out the guides by Moz and Backlinko on how to effectively do link building outreach.
We know that many businesses struggle with implementing link building outreach internally as they might not have the resources or sufficient knowledge to do it. So we are currently considering the feasibility of offering a separate blog promotion service in the near future, and will be looking to pilot the service at a reduced price with a few businesses who might be interested. Contact us if you’d like to participate in the pilot. 

 

Now what if you’ve only got blog content? Don’t worry, we’ve got your back. Keep reading.

 

6 ways to repurpose blog content

Remembering that repurposing content is all about repacking one piece of content across many different media, here are a few ideas for what you could do with your blog and article content:

1. Create an email autoresponder series

You could break your epic 10X content into a multi-part email course/series that people can opt in to.

Alternatively, if you’ve yet to create your 10X content, you could take a bunch of your best blog posts and turn those into an email course.

That’s exactly what we did for a couple of our clients recently.
Here’s how one of our clients’ email drip series looks like (the blue boxes are the blog posts that we’ve turned into automated drop emails):
sme email drip series
(To see this drip series in action, opt in for the free Perfect Tech Stack For Mid Tier Professional Services Businesses and watch the magic happen.)

2. Make it visual with an infographic

Depending on your budget and time available, you could hire a graphic designer or agency to turn your text content into an easy to digest infographic, or you could DIY with any of the cool tools available.
This content can then be shared to social platforms where people prefer visual content over text content eg. Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, etc.
Here’s an infographic that we create ourselves in Canva:
SCM Podcast VA Process

3. Turn it into audio

Whilst many people like to read, there are just as many folks out there who prefer to learn by listening.
So it’s a great idea to take your existing blog content and record some audio about it.
This is exactly what we did with our recent blog post on the 5 Key challenges to making marketing work whilst maintaining profitability.
I used a neat podcasting app called Anchor.fm to record a short audio version of the article, and automatically syndicate it to itunes, Google Play Music, and Pockstcasts.
Once published to Anchor.fm, you can then embed the audio to your website like this:
Note: Anchor.fm will only allow a max recording time of 5 minutes per episode, which is perfect for short and punchy podcast episodes (eliminates the waffle!).

 

4. Slideshare it!

You could take the key ideas or concepts in your content and then created a presentation slide deck, and upload it to slideshare for easy distribution.

READ  How to stay consistent with content marketing?

Here’s an example (shout out to my awesome graphic designer Colleen Keith who made this look professional!):

The nice thing about doing this is that you could then use it for an actual presentation, which leads to our next tip…

5. Turn it into a live talk or webinar

Obviously this is going to require more work, but there’s nothing like the feeling of getting your content in front of an engaged audience – be it in person or online.

6. Video-ize it

Saving (possibly) the best for last… turn your content into video.

Did you know that 79% of Internet traffic will be video content by 2018? (source: marketing profs). 

growth in video web traffic
(source: marketing profs)

 

So you’d be missing out big time if you’re not putting video into your content marketing mix.

Here’s an example of how our client Paul Higgins of Build Live Give took his content and repurposed it as a short 3-minute video for Linkedin.

As you can see from the screenshot below, the video got 3,229 views – which far exceeded the reach the original blog content got when it was shared to Linkedin via a social media scheduling tool.

Paul Higgins Linkedin video screenshot

If you’re interested, you can watch Paul’s video here.

You can use a tool like Loom to record simple “talking head” videos (like Paul’s above).

Now what if you don’t want to do a talking head video like Paul did as you prefer to stay behind the camera?

All good!

You can also use Loom to record  “over the shoulder” instructional-type videos where your screen is being recorded whilst you walk your viewer through a tool or process.

Just like I did here:

But wait, there’s still more…

If you’ve got “listicle” type content (you know, something like “The 10 Worst Marketing Mistakes” post we did), you could also create some fun and engaging videos like this:

The above video was created using an awesome and easy-to-use tool called Rocketium (it’s a lot like the “Canva” for video, worth checking it out).

Still want some more ways to repurpose blog content? Read this post on ProBlogger.

By the way, don’t forget the importance of doing link building outreach for blog posts too (refer to step 7 above in the repurposing podcast content section). 

Additional Resources

Want more help with your content strategy? Here are some cool resources published by a few of our peers that we’ve found helpful.

Final Thoughts

Some companies just don’t have the time, money, and resources to continually create new content or come up with new content ideas all the time.

Actually, they shouldn’t need to.

In content marketing, a great idea that’s engaging and helps people is much more important than a specific content type, or where it’s published. It’s about taking that powerful idea and sharing it far and wide.

So how do you solve the lack of resources problem, and at the same time get your great ideas in front of as many people as possible?

Answer: Repurpose your existing content!

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