Creating fresh content regularly is an essential component for online business success. In these days of rolling Google updates, it has become vital for every internet marketing strategy to include the development of original, relevant, and unique content for websites, social network profiles, information products, videos and podcasts.
You may not realize it, but you are probably sitting on a goldmine of content that can be repurposed into, for example, press releases, webinars, document sharing, videos, podcasts, tweets and blogs. The key is to repurpose or take pieces of great content and rework them into other formats, or even products. Repurposing content will also give you a better return on investment for the time or money you spent on its original creation.
Content for repurposing
Accuracy and relevance are the only limiters to which of your content you can repurpose. Ideally the material should be rich in information about your business, niche or product, and current challenges and solutions for your target audience. You might find these in brochures, blogs and company websites.
Videos and podcasts may be reworked into webinars while tweets may be used as the basis for eBooks. The possibilities are endless if your starting point is an information-rich content source.
Ideas for repurposing various types of content
Print material: Companies often invest heavily in marketing collateral, much of which contains brand and business-focused information. Content in your printed material can be used for creating blog posts, website articles, online press releases, Facebook updates and Twitter tweets. Relevant data found in your printed brochures can be restructured into infographics, which have become extremely popular in delivering written material in a user-friendly visual format. Infographics are exceptional for sharing on social media sites – because they present information quickly and combine colors and images that are visually appealing.
Website content: Your business website will contain information about your business, its products and services. The About Page, which is ordinarily used to introduce the company to Internet users, may be expanded into a more detailed history of the company and a description of its vision.
Revisit content in your website’s pages and rewrite an article for use in a blog or an email newsletter. If you have an FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) page, this too might provide a source for repurposing. Develop these ‘how-to’ or ‘why’ articles or blog posts featuring an in-depth discussion.
Tip: Turn your FAQs or customer questions into a series of videos, upload them into YouTube, load it, and a tra,script to your website, add it to your Facebook page……. this gives you an easy opportunity to engage your Facebook followers.
Blog post: Select a blog post which received the highest number of comments and views, rewrite it and record it as an audio file for a podcast. A blog post with plenty of information can also be turned into a slide show presentation. Combining the audio file with the slide show presentation gives you another opportunity to load to YouTube and share (see above).
Powerful statements in blog posts may be lifted and turned into Tweets or infographics for sharing, too, on Facebook, or as a status update. Revisit old blog posts, select the best ones and re-create them as chapters of an eBook.
Tweets: Your Twitter profile may contain Q and A tweets that are still very relevant. Take the Q & A tweets and feature them in your email or physical newsletters.
Webinar: Do you have a recorded webinar? Why not identify highlights and discuss them in more detail in white papers or blog posts.
Email campaigns: Email newsletters, depending on the service you use, can be tracked to show their open rates and click through’s. Look at these stats to see which email campaigns obtained high open and click-through rates and rework specific topics into blog posts, articles, videos and podcasts.
Fresh content
Repurposing is not plagiarising or copying content verbatim, but instead reworking, rewriting and restructuring it to appear fresh. Just like any other type of content, repurposed content requires time and effort for creation and development into other formats and use in various Internet platforms.
Take a cue from current events and see if a previous blog post or web content is relevant to what’s happening and rewrite content to suit the times.
The outcome of repurposing should be fresh-looking content for readers to appreciate and share in their networks and for search engines to rank well.
On a final note, before adding any repurposed content to yours, or a third-party site like Facebook, invest in a Premium subscription to Copyscape. It only costs around a penny to add your new text to the Copyscape system – a small price to pay to avoid any duplicate content issues with the search engines, and for maintaining the integrity of the content you publish.
Leave a Reply