To repurpose content provides the answer to one of the most common problems bloggers face. Especially when a blog is newly created, it is quite difficult to get traffic to the site. The overall best way is to have Google recognize something on your site that is of interest to a search term that many people are googling.
The more content you have, the better your chances. But writing a blog post a day or getting to 100 posts in a year is quite a challenge. Try as I might, I don’t always have time to do that. I’m guessing you don’t either.
The more you recycle, the less you’ll need to write. Of course, you’ll need the blog content to get started. You can’t repurpose content unless you have it.
I use SubjectScripe to speed up the production of my writing, but the main thing is to keep producing content that people will be interested in and searching for.
Even with a lot of content, it is no guarantee of traffic. A good technique that a lot of bloggers turn to is repurposing content.
An Introduction on how to Repurpose Content
What is repurposing content?
This is where you take one work, such as your blog posts, and turn them into a new content form, such as a podcast or YouTube video. You can also take the reverse and turn a podcast into a blog post. For the purpose of this article, we will talk about transforming blog articles into new media.
Why is repurposing Important?
The reason you want to repurpose content is that this leads to a wider blanket of your information. Because you can share your work in many different places on the web, it is more likely to be seen and engaged with.
A few of the reasons why I repurpose content are:
- Less writing
- A wider audience for your content
- It can add to your authority
- SEO benefits
Ways To Upcycle Your Content
Do you think of Pinterest as a search engine? You should!
Pinterest is one of the easiest ways to promote your blog post. All you need to do is create a business account, make some pins, and upload them. The technical part is quite straightforward. I like to batch pin images in a single day and then add them later to save time.
Reading up on the subject, there is no end to theories about pinning strategy. I would suggest searching on Pinterest for this information and then following only the advice of people who are still pinning and have many followers. I took a course on Pinterest strategies once, only then to find the course creator stopped using Pinterest over a year before.
Make sure the information you get is up to date. Pinterest changes its rules frequently, and what once worked well may now be against the rules.
YouTube
YouTube is one of the best ways to repurpose content. It has been a great traffic source for me in the past, especially if the subject was a how-to type of blog post. This has worked very well with coding videos or how to set up something in WordPress. If your subject is a how-to, then you shouldn’t pass up on making videos. Anything craft-related, hands-on, or on-screen works really well.
YouTube is another site that many people don’t think of as a search engine, but it is. It is also easier and much faster to get into the search results than it is Google or Bing. I’ve seen my video in the search results as quickly as 10 minutes after posting. Not just on YouTube, but on the normal Google search results!
I use Camtasia for my desktop recordings but it is a bit pricey. It is worth it but there is a lot of free and cheaper software alternatives that can do this.
I use some software called TubeBuddy, which helps me get the search engine optimization right. It is only about $5 a month for new channels, and it helps me grow my channels fast.
Podcast
Podcasting can be an easy way to redistribute your content. Basically, you can just talk using your blog post as a guide. Try to make it sound like you are not just reading off of a page. These are much easier to make than a video. I use the free program Audacity to record my podcasts.
If you have trouble with an echo in your room, try recording under a blanket. This works wonders!
YouTube podcast
Did you know you can also put your podcast on Google? It is a trendy style to show the audio wave as you are talking in the video. I will record the audio using Audacity and then use a free video editor called VSDC.
Slideshare
Turn your blog post into a slide show and share it on Slideshare. This is a site that gets a lot of traffic and should be considered a search engine.
I’m just getting started with this, but an easy way to do this is to use Google Slides. Make a slide for each section of your blog post, and paste the information into the text fields. Add some images to the slides. You may need to break up your text into smaller sub-sections to get everything to fit.
After making your slide show in Google Slides, export it to a PDF and then upload it to SlideShare.com.
Infographics
If there are many statistics, numbers, or facts in your post, it may make a good infographic. People like to visualize data more than read about it. As a result, these tend to get shared a lot more often than blog posts. There are even directories that you can share infographics. Of course, it will also go well as a Pinterest Pin.
Ebook
If you have a fair number of blog posts on the same subject, you can turn them into an E-Book. You can give this away as an incentive to sign up for an email newsletter or sell it on Amazon. For simple give away PDFs, I would recommend Beacon, but for books on Amazon, software like Scrivener might be easier.
If you have an email list, you should certainly email them each post that you write. If you are setting up an automation where you send a set number of emails after a sign-up, and you need content for that, you can repurpose content by pasting an existing blog post as one of your emails. That’s what I’m planning on doing with this blog post!
Conclusion
As you can see, we can get a lot of extra mileage out of one blog post. Personally, I find that when I repurpose content because I’m using different mediums, I don’t get bored by doing just one thing over and again.
I hope you find this information helpful!
Happy Writing!
