How to Turn Your Email into High Ranking Articles: Repurpose and Rank in 6 Steps

I’ve spent a lot of time on email. We all do. It’s just so time-consuming. Unless we are careful, it’s very inefficient. Each week, I spend an average of 14 hours reading and responding to email messages. That’s a lot.

So of course, it’s hard to find time to write articles. The tyranny of email is a big reason that 29% of bloggers write at nights and 31% write articles on weekends (source). We’re all too busy fighting our inboxes during business hours. Confession: I’m writing this paragraph at 6:43am on a Sunday morning.

So marketers sometimes find themselves saying this:

“I don’t have time to write. I’m too busy with email.”

Sound familiar? It also sounds crazy. Because time spent on email is time spent writing. You just need to learn how to turn your sent emails into marketing content.

Here are the step-by-step instructions for turning email time into marketing time, magically transforming your outbox into high ranking articles. I’ve also added details on how I turned three years of email into almost 100 pages of content, including some high ranking posts.

1. Find the emails that will work well for content marketing

Certain emails are your best raw material. Here are the things in your outbox that are best suited for content marketing:

• Answers to questions from clients, prospects and friends
• Each topic is pre-vetted as relevant because it was provided to you directly from your audience
• Contributions to roundups
• A lot of marketers decline to contribute, but as you’ll see here, there is a huge advantage of accepting virtually every request to contribute to round up posts.
• HARO responses (Help A Reporter Out)
• Even if your response rate is low, the responses themselves are content, which you can repurpose by converting into high ranking articles.
• Email interviews
• Faster and easier to create than guest blog posts, if you have ever been interviewed over email, this is also excellent material for repurposing.

Once you begin to think this way, you’ll find other source material you’ve already created.

• Blog comments
• Responses on social media
• Meetings, phone conversations and just about any interaction offline

To make these emails better source material, go big. Add lots of detail, formatting, images and links. Work harder at the advice you give over email, knowing that you’ll be coming back to these later. You’ll also find people’s responses are very grateful.

Here’s the response to some very detailed advice I sent over email. Was it worth the extra time? It earned me both content I can repurpose… and an offer for a beer.

What I did: For three years, I answered every question, responded to every round up invitation and accepted every email interview. Each answer was super detailed, included images, links and bullet lists.

2. Collect these emails