How to Creatively Repurpose Your Old Content!!
Today, online success goes hand in hand with content creation.
Quality content helps businesses engage their customers, as well as attract new website visitors and convert them into buyers.
However, creating a steady stream of quality content requires time and often causes frustration.
As a business owner, you can get more benefits from your content by extending its life and reusing it in different forms.
The following tips will help you learn how to save time and improve website performance by repurposing your existing content instead of creating new content.
Let us first see why you should do it and what types of content are fit for repurposing.
WHY?
So, why should you do it in the first place?
First off, as different people prefer different formats (e.g. some like articles, some enjoy videos), by repackaging your old content you can reach a new audience with the same topic.
This process thus enables you to maximize your previous efforts and reinforce your previously conveyed message.
Of course, you will be able to save valuable time, which is a great advantage for your business.
Last but not least, repurposing your old content enables you to do some good old SEO boosting – when you create multiple formats that revolve around the same subject, you get a chance to target desired keywords all over again.
WHAT CONTENT?
Web development experts describe content that stays relevant for a long time as evergreen.
Such timeless content does not become obsolete and outdated, so websites always appear fresh and engaging to visitors.
This is the type of content you should repurpose, while staying away from outdated information and yesterday´s news.
You can use Google Analytics to discover the most popular old content on your site and repurpose it with a fresh spin to appeal to an entirely new group of potential customers.
HOW?
To understand how repurposing works, let´s first stick to one example.
Concretely, let´s consider text-based blog posts and see how you can turn them into new formats in order to give them a longer life and a broader reach.
New Posts
For this example, suppose you had a successful article called “Top Ten Skills Needed for Customer Service.”
The article, of course, was written as list of those skills.
What you can now do is break each item into a separate post.
For example, you could take the section about confidence and turn it into a post called “Why is Confidence Important for Customer Service?”
If you did this for every listed skill, you would have the original article and ten more articles, for a total of eleven.
Similarly, you can create a new article that summarizes your pre-existing series of blog posts.
Either way, you can extend the utility of your work, increase the benefit of your time investment, and boost the SEO qualities of your site.
Email Series
After maximizing the use of the content on your website, you can break it up again and send it as an email series.
As in the example above, you can divide a single article into a series of ten daily or weekly emails or create one new in-depth report from ten of your old blog posts.
Of course, you can occasionally blend new material with the old one in order to make your emails vibrant and relevant in ways that collect leads and subscribers.
Guides And e-Books
Another interesting way of repurposing your old blog posts is compiling them into guides or e-books, which are considered more formal and educative.
For example, you could take an old collection of articles that deal with different aspects of digital marketing and turn them into “The Ultimate Guide to Digital Marketing”.
This guide could be converted into a PDF-formatted e-book and placed on your website for download.
You can either use it as premium content or give it away for free.
Either way, you increase the benefit received from your original investment.
To attract more users, you can also consider uploading your guide to Slideshare.net, an online document repository.
Slideshow
Aside from repurposing your articles into a new set of blog posts, series of emails, or an e-book, you still have additional options.
Recommended by LinkedIn
Try creating a slide show featuring the topic from your article.
For example, let´s say you have an article entitled “Top Ten Content Creation Tools” – you can use it to create a PowerPoint presentation with an introduction, ten slides, and a conclusion.
You can then upload it to your website, or use an online slideshow creator to make it accessible to a wider online community.
Infographics
People are visual creatures and they like infographics.
Repurposing your content into a graphic, visual format will definitely extend its reach.
Although infographics contain textual elements, their visual nature often communicates messages better than plain text.
You can use online tools such as Piktochart or hire a designer to create compelling graphical representations that people will share with coworkers, friends, and family members.
Video
What you can also do to turn your old article into visually stimulating content is make a video.
Although creating video content requires time and effort, it often pays off because of its popularity among Internet users.
You can create a script based on your article, use a bit of creativity and create an engaging video that conveys the main points of the article.
To make the most of it, upload it to YouTube and increase its chances of being seen by a wider audience.
OTHER WAYS
You have just read about a few ways you can repurpose old content to get the maximum benefit from your investment of time and talent.
With a little creativity, you can convert your blog posts into multiple formats to extend their reach to new audiences.
However, this was just one example – there are, of course, many other ways you can switch between formats and make new uses of your old material.
In fact, you have a really wide range of options.
For example, you can turn a series of Tweets or Facebook posts into an article.
[bctt tweet="I've learned cool ways to repurpose my content online today! ...check this out!"]
Try converting a webinar into a video tutorial.
Consider compiling a series of interviews in an e-book.
Extract thematic images from a blog post and turn them into a Pinterest board.
Use statistics provided on your website and present them as a series of Tweets.
The possibilities are really vast, and you can do wonders if you decide to be creative and think outside the box.
INVOLVE YOUR CUSTOMERS
Whatever you decide to do, it is important to remember one crucial thing – you are creating content for your customers, not yourself, so always think of new ways to connect with them.
In fact, you can even make them participate and thus increase the level of their engagement.
One way of doing so is by soliciting feedback from your users to learn more about what tactics work and what types of content they want to see.
When they give you feedback, express your appreciation and put it to use.
You can also ask for collaboration by soliciting user-generated content such as stories or videos.
Afterward, you can stoke excitement among your customers by presenting an award to the best participant.
This way, not only are you maintaining the relationship with your current customers, but you are also attracting new ones.
CONCLUSION
Repurposing your content will engage and expand your audience, and add to your list of prospects.
Use that strategy to compete with other companies in your market that already have impressive and exciting websites.
Best of all, you can save time and money by adding value to your old content and making it work for you.