Why Repurpose Content
This is a great way to update your strategy without having to start from scratch. There are many benefits of repurposing your content. Perhaps the most important is that you’ll save time in the content creation process. You’ll also be able to boost your SEO by demonstrating to search engines that you are regularly publishing good volumes of content about your areas of expertise. Other favourable benefits are reaching new audiences, reinforcing your message and gaining authority.
Which Content to Choose
In order to achieve this you need to start by identifying your best content. This can be evergreen content that stands the test of time, the most popular content you have, or any content that is still relevant but might need updating. Focus on tips and advice or tutorials, as they are likely to be relevant for a long time.
Post on a Different Website
A simple way to repurpose content is to post it on a different website, giving you the ability to reach new audiences. The content should be adapted slightly to suit the platform, for example adding images and graphics if it’s text heavy. You’ll probably want to tweak it a little, but there’s no need to totally rewrite the article. It’s a good idea to credit yourself on the republished content (without being too salesy). Also add a bio and links to your own website, landing pages and social media so you can generate some leads.
Refresh Existing Content
You can update and refresh your existing content on your own website. New content is not solely responsible for generating traffic; if you posted good quality content that is still relevant it can continue to drive traffic. You may have outdated posts that provide incorrect information. If so, use the same URL, don’t redirect because of the negative SEO impacts of duplicate content. You can repurpose the content and adjust the goal. Add a new introduction to match your goal. Change the call to action to freshen it up as well. Update outdated information such as dates and statistics, remove dead links and update the meta description.
Combine and Enlarge
Repurpose a number of blog posts by collating them into a whitepaper or ebook to get your content out to a wider audience. Some people prefer to have comprehensive, in-depth guides instead of individual posts. Gated content, behind an opt-in form, is also an excellent way to generate leads. Don’t just copy and paste it though, organise the content logically. Add transitional phrases, expand on points with more information and background, and make it easily digestible for the user.
Split and Extract
Inversely, you can break down large posts into shorter snippets that will work brilliantly on social media. Your posts are a great source of statistics, facts, quotes, tips and advice that your audience will find useful. Make these snippets more visual to grab the attentions of your audience. Use photos, screenshots, graphs, memes and video to optimise your posts. Why not turn your fact filled posts into infographics. There are some good tools out there now, even for those with limited design skills, to create stunning infographics. It may take a little more time to produce, but they are immensely popular and engage well with audiences.
Expand
Take a popular post, list blogs are good for this, and expand on some of the points to create a series of follow up blogs. Why not tweak the content of a blog to resonate with a different demographic. By coming at a topic from various angles you can engage with other segments of your audience. When you’ve worked hard to create some awesome content and it has proved to be popular, it’s important to keep that momentum going.
Hub and Spoke
By adopting a Hub and Spoke model you can gain good traction and drive more traffic to the same content. The Hub is your main piece of content that you’ve shed blood, sweat and tears over. It needs to be high quality, rich content that someone will be willing to trade their email address for; it can be an ebook, whitepaper, complete guide to or webinar. Have an opt in form to generate those sought after leads.
The spokes are several pieces of content that relate back to the hub. They can be in various formats and on various channels including blogs, tweets, facebook posts, press releases, paid adverts, infographics or videos. The key is that they must all support and promote the hub content.
Change the Format
A good way to repurpose existing content is by using a blog post and turning it into a podcast or video. This can work well if you have a series of posts around a particular topic, you could find it produces 20-30 minutes worth of audio/visual content. The extra bonus of this technique is that you avoid any negative impact on SEO of duplicate content because it’s in a different format.
Conclusion
With repurposing, you already have a head start on the creative process, saving you valuable time in creating content. Done well and done regularly, it can raise the profile of your company, build audience engagement and entice new searchers to click. Repurposing content can turn one story into many pieces of content. All of these advantages make it an essential part of your content strategy for 2017 and beyond.
For more information on content strategies, you can contact our team. Atelier is an award winning digital marketing agency in Hampshire.