Are you exhausted by the thought of having to create yet another piece of new content? Or maybe you’re looking at your blog and super sad at the fact that either the last time you released new content was over a month ago.
Whatever the case may be, you’re going to want to stick with me until the end of this article, because I’m going to outline for you five steps for how to repurpose your content and stretch your content even further. By the end of this article, I’m going to give you a free download with these five steps so that you can start repurposing your content today and tripling, if not 10xing the amount of content that you can get out of what you already have.
Let’s get started.
Step 1. Take stock of what you have and what’s most popular.
The first step, when it comes to repurposing, your content is to take stock of what you have and what is most popular. This will give you the biggest bang for your buck in terms of time.
So what I want you to do is I want you to do two things: The first one is pull up your Google analytics and sort by two views the last three months, as well as the last year. What I want you to do is I want you to look right for which posts are consistently getting you the most organic traffic. The second thing I want you to do is I want you to pull up SEMrush or your Ahrefs data. And I want you to look at what pages are giving you the highest percentage of traffic based off of their crawlers.
If you have, neither of these tools installed on your site, then ask yourself what your customers are constantly referencing in terms of the most popular pages on your site. And also be sure to install or start them using these tools ASAP because they provide you with super important analytics that will help you better understand how customers are interacting with your website.
The reason why we want to do this is because this helps us identify what is our evergreen content. Evergreen content is content that endures time without needing major changes over time in order to still stay relevant with our potential customer. Typically from my experiences, it takes at least 20 to 30 content marketing pieces before you will be able to should be good enough as well as have enough data points to have a so-called hit or a piece of evergreen content in your content arsenal. So don’t stress if you don’t have anything that’s super popular right now.
Step 2. Create a shortlist of the existing content pieces you think can be repurposed.
The second step to repurposing your content is to create a short list of content that you think can be repurposed. Now I want you to imagine a triangle and the points of this triangle, are print, audio, and visual. If something is in print form that I want you to think about, how could I make, is this in audio format or in visual format? If something is in visual format, I want you to think about, how could I make this into audio or print format? And if something is in video format or visual format, I want you to think about, how you could turn it into something that’s audio or print format?
Personally, I like to do this in a spreadsheet. So what I’ll show you on the screen now is a simple spreadsheet in which we have the existing posts have one column followed by audio, visual and print. And what I’m doing is I am marking as to whether or not I think that this content can be converted into a, another medium of content.
Step 3. Answer how you would make a bite-sized, condensed, or super charged version of the existing content.
The third step is to answer how you might make a bite size, condensed supercharged version of your content. This is very important for when you’re using your content on social media platforms like Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, or Pinterest. You can brainstorm how you’re going to repurpose your content by asking these three questions:
The first question is if I were to explain this concept or piece to a kid, how would I do so? The next question that I would ask is if I was trying to explain this to an expert, how would I do so? And the final question to ask yourself is if I wasn’t to change anything about this post, as it exists today, how would I promote this post in a way that I haven’t done so already today?
Here’s why we ask these questions. Your customers have different profiles. The beginners are going to want content that is as simple as possible whereas the experts are going to want you to prove to them that you know what you’re talking about. Audiences want to make sure that they are being understood and recognized into the content that you’re creating.
So for example, let’s say I have an existing post of 25 lawncare tips for homeowners. And I was thinking about different ways I could repurpose this. One way could be by creating a post along the lines of, Five Must Know Lawncare Tips for Homeowners. So this could be something that could be like a, another blog post, or it could be in the format of a short video that I could then release the audio version of as well in the original posts so that I have a different medium format.
Another way I could repurpose this content is I could put together in abridged version of this post where it could be something along the lines of, Seven Lawncare Mistakes to Avoid as a Landlord. So this is positioning slightly differently to a different audience from the original set of tips. And a final way that I could repurpose this content is I could break these 25 tips into a set of three tips every single week for a summer. And so in this eight weeks series, I could create a series along the lines of, Three Lawncare Tips for Homeowners in Under Five Minutes. So this could be a short video series that essentially reverberates the key tips that are already explained in this as long form posts, but in more bite sized chunks.
So from this one example, we’re taking it and stretching it two 10 new pieces of content. That’s super cool. Comment below if you agree with me there. So when you’re able to think about your content in bite sized pieces and batch it into different small supercharged and dense versions of itself, you’ll be able to stretch your content way further.
Here’s another example. Let’s say we have three, one minute videos testimonials from existing customers. We could repurpose that content by transcribing the testimonials into written form, and then putting those in select spots on our website. It could be, for example, even in our email newsletters that are right above the button that asks the person to schedule time for a consultation.
So these sorts of things could then build these things, social proof of our business. Another way we could reuse these transcriptions is we could combine these transcriptions into a one pager that goes along the lines of, What Somebody has to Say about XYZ company. So this could become a testimonial one pager that we share with any new potential customer that comes our way.
A third way that we could repurpose these videos is to simply put them all together and by doing so we could then have a go to video of testimonials on our homepage, in our newsletter or any key place where people would need to learn more about our company and the experiences of other customers. Another easy way to build engagement with your prospective customers and existing customers is to do roundups of the posts that you’re already releasing on your blog.
You can do this in one of two ways. The first way is to simply create a one to two sentence summary of each post, and then add a read more button to draw entry. And another way is you can write literally copy and paste the content that’s on your site, into your email newsletter to give the preview of the first few paragraphs of the posts, and then add a read more button. By doing so we are giving our customers as well as our potential new customers, a consistent way to connect with us and our brand and over time build that loyalty and that retention in terms of coming to us as the trusted source for XYZ niche or industry.
The final pro tip that I can give you with respect to repurposing in your content is if you already have video content from maybe a past workshop or webinar, you ran, you can actually transcribe that video into text format with some auto transcription services.
Otter.ai’s free plan at the time of this recording offers 600 minutes of free transcription time every single month as well as three uploads for the lifespan of your account and Rev.com actually offers 45 minutes of free transcription services when you’re first starting out with their auto transcription services. Lastly, checkout Lumen5, to take your blog content into video format automatically. Another competitor to them is Animoto.
Whatever the use case may be, the key thing I want you to remember here is always be thinking about how you can reuse your content in different formats without necessarily having to be create completely new content.
Step 4. Do or delegate. Get things done.
The fourth step to repurposing your content is to do or delegate. Apply the two minute rule by David Allen.
The premise is if you can’t do it in the next two minutes, then you should delegate it to somebody else on your team that can help you out here. The key thing here is to organize what you yourself have to repurpose and what you can outsource or delegate to get repurposed.
For example, you might want to outsource the Pinterest scheduling out to your virtual assistant to help you out with, and you might want to bring on some freelance writers to help you with creating the abridged versions of your existing posts, instead of you doing it yourself.
Whatever the case may be, I want you to focus on batching your repurposing. Have one person or one department focused on all of the things related to Pinterest repurposing, have another person focused on all the things on Twitter and have another person focused on all of the abridging and so on. By streamlining these into clearly defined work strands, it’ll be way easier for you to manage and lead your team in your repurposing efforts.
Step 5. Schedule every piece of content’s repurpose release date and promote where possible.
The fifth step is to schedule every piece of repurpose content release date, and to promote wherever it is that’s possible. What you want to do here is you want to make sure that your content calendar is always flowing with new things or modify derivative works of your existing content.
This is so that any potential new customers that came into your funnel, after you already released this content can have an opportunity to still derive value from the repurposed content that you’ve made on this particular piece. I recommend that you start thinking about repurposing immediately once you first published a post, but then also in the couple of weeks after that post has been published as well as a few months out and even a year out.
What this will allow you to do is it’ll allow you to start thinking about how to make the most of every single piece of content that you are creating.
Big takeaways
There are two big takeaways I want you to remember when it comes to this article.
- The first takeaway is I want you to always be thinking about how to create bite-sized versions of the content you’re already producing.
- The second thing is I want you to always be doing or delegating. Quickly figure out who on your team team needs to be doing this actual repurposing so that you can spend less time dragging your feet as a team and more time repurposing and promoting your repurposed content.
I’ve gone ahead and summarize these five steps as well as added some guiding questions for you to ask yourself as you start to repurpose your content. If you feel like that’d be helpful, as well as some of the other digital marketing tips and tricks I have for you, feel free to get that resource for free below.
If you liked this article, be sure to check out my YouTube channel to get new videos every single week. I’ll help take you from zero to self-starter as you grow your business, get more customers, and hone your business acumen. Also, feel free to share this with anybody that you think might benefit from learning how to repurpose their content and make their content stretch even further.
In my next post, I’m going to take a real-world example of landscaping companies existing content, and repurpose it using this exact five step method.