Chances are you’ve heard the term “content is king,” famously coined by Microsoft founder Bill Gates. As it turns out, a lot of people in the marketing world seem to agree with him. 90% of organizations utilize content marketing, and for good reason considering 90% of consumers find custom content useful and 82% of consumers feel more positive about a company after reading custom content. Content marketing is known for getting attention, improving brand loyalty, generating leads, and increasing direct sales. Better yet, it does all that while costing 62% less than traditional marketing and generating approximately 3x the leads. That being said, although your blog is one of the most valuable assets in the world of content marketing, developing original content requires a considerable amount of time.
So, when you create a blog that meets all your performance goals, how do you ensure you get the most out of it? If you ask us, repurposing content is one of the most effective ways to guarantee it continues to perform.
Lucky for you, we’ve compiled four best practices for repurposing blog content:
1. Publish your blog content on various platforms.
By posting your blog content on places such as Medium, an online publishing platform, or LinkedIn Pulse, a feed within LinkedIn where users can self-publish, you can access a whole new audience you might not have reached otherwise. If necessary, make slight tweaks to your existing content.Then, publish it elsewhere and link back to the original post on your website.
Popular blogger Ben Hardy, known for writing about various industries including advertising, technology, and marketing, began repurposing his content on Medium to grow his following. One of the blogs on his Medium account went viral and in a matter of six months, his website went from zero to 20K subscribers.
Another blogger, Matthew Woodward, who specializes in SEO and marketing content, decided to repurpose some of his blogs for LinkedIn Pulse. He added a link to a landing page that resulted in over 300 new subscribers to his website.
Publishing on platforms such as these in addition to your blog page is a simple way to repurpose content that can result in a great deal of reach without much additional effort.
2. Update your blog content to keep up with the times.
Another effective way to quickly repurpose content is to revisit past blogs that performed well and update them with new information. By doing this, you can ensure your old content remains relevant and continues to attract readers.
Odds are you have plenty of old posts that would benefit from a refresh. This can come in the form of adding a recent relevant case study, checking that the statistics are up to date, or summarizing the latest research findings on the topic. This shows consumers that you’re an attentive industry expert who stays up-to-date with all the newest information, increasing your credibility and boosting your search engine rankings.
You should also look into trending topics when repurposing older content. When Facebook changed its logo in 2016, the team at Marketing Envy noticed an increase in blog posts about logo creation. They saw an opportunity to make slight adjustments to a blog post from a few months prior on the same topic and reshared it, also publishing it on LinkedIn. They reported that this was an easy way to use existing content that resulted in new views.
3. Create social media content from your blog content.
“Content is fire. Social media is gasoline.” At least that’s what Jay Baer, a popular marketing and customer experience keynote speaker says.
While sharing a link to your blog is a good way to promote the original post, the opportunity for unique and valuable social media content that comes from a well-informed blog post is too good to pass up. Select a blog that had high traffic, positive feedback, or just a lot of valuable information and look for highlights that could be adapted to social media posts.
Twitter and Facebook, for instance, can be used as micro-blogging platforms. Try posting small bits of digestible, shareable information such as fun facts, statistics, or quotes to catch their attention and link back to the original blog. Pinterest and Instagram, on the other hand, lend themselves more to visual content, which is important to take advantage of since we consume visual information 60,000 times faster and visual content improves retention and comprehension. These platforms are a great place for appealing infographics or other forms of imagery.
4. Convert your blog content into different formats.
A best practice of repurposing blog content is publishing the content in different formats to appeal to a wider variety of content consumers.
Many have found great success in repurposing blog content by creating a PowerPoint presentation and posting it to platforms such as SlideShare, where users can engage with your content in a more interactive manner. CopyBlogger, a company focused on creating consumable digital marketing blogs, repurposed one of their most popular posts into a PowerPoint and received 55,000 new views on SlideShare.
You might also consider converting the content from a blog into informational videos and uploading them to YouTube or producing a podcast that has an episode corresponding to each of your blogs, or just the most popular ones. Of course, there are tons of formats in which you can present the content from a blog post, and some require more time than others, but if you study your target audience(s) and determine which medium will best attract their attention, one or more of these methods might be worth your while.
The numbers don’t lie; it’s clear that a strong content marketing strategy is a worthy investment, and in order to make the most of it, repurposing content is an smart move. By utilizing one or more of the above best practices, you’re signing up for wider reach, more traffic and engagement, and a stronger relationship with your consumers.