With technological advancements greatly affecting the corporate landscape in unimaginable ways, every business has now picked up some common ways of establishing an online presence for itself.
Businesses of all sizes have their own websites these days. If you do not have one, take a few minutes to look at this web development company from London which offers amazing software services. Websites serve as a great platform to spread the word about all the products or services you sell. It is like an online showcase. If you already have a website, then you might also be familiar with blogging.
Blogging is a great way to communicate with your clients. It establishes two-way communication between you and your customers. You post an article and your readers leave their comments under it. You can also respond to their comments. Hence, blogging is a great way to find out what is on your readers’ minds. However, high-quality blogging requires time, energy, and effort. You need to come up with something unique that will also catch the eye of your current and potential customers. So, where can you get an unlimited supply of fresh ideas from?
Another way to reach your customers is through your social media accounts. According to a report by Our World in Data, Facebook alone has over 2 billion users. With that kind of reach, you need to keep posting content that is relevant and fun, and that will also get your visitors’ attention.
There are plenty of other ways to spread news about your business, but with so many platforms and so many resources available, it is difficult to regularly come up with 100% original, creative, fresh and unique content. This is where content repurposing comes into play.
Today, we’ll tell you not only what content repurposing is, but also we’ll help you understand what kind of content you should choose for repurposing. We’ll also give you some great ideas on how to repurpose your content in the right way. So, let’s get started.
What is content repurposing?
Content repurposing is a way of recycling or reusing your previously-published content without allowing it to lose its value. It may or may not be an exact “copypasted” version of your old content. That depends on how you decide to go ahead with repurposing content.
Why do you need to repurpose content?
Many people are not major believers in the power of content marketing. Therefore, they stay content (no pun intended!) with a few pieces of new content every few weeks. Such people might think it is useless to put so much effort into repurposing content. But we are here to convince them otherwise!
Here are a few reasons why most businesses consider it a necessity.
It saves time and resources
If you have any idea how long it takes to come up with original and fresh content, you realize exactly how useful it can be to repurpose your ideas.
Imagine going through the whole process of brainstorming for novel ideas, getting them approved, thoroughly researching and estimating their chances of success, and then going ahead with them, spending a few days or weeks on writing, proofreading, and finalizing them. It would take a long time and a lot of effort and resources.
Instead, you could quickly skim through some of your old, popular content, freshen it, and put it out there. You could then direct those saved up resources and time into something more important.
It puts old content to good use (again!)
You must have put in hours of research, care and thought into everything that you posted on your website or social media in the past. That information is valuable. If you decide to reuse it now, there is absolutely no harm in doing that.
So, put that information to good use again, and have a go at it from a different angle using some of our repurposing ideas!
It improves SEO
Search engine optimisation (SEO) represents a very thorough process which helps improve how your website ranks in search engine results.
Firstly, repurposing content gives you a chance to revisit your content and improve it by implementing better SEO practices that you may not have been aware of in the past.
Secondly, SEO practices have now moved way past the heavy in-text, out-of-context keyword usage in blog posts. Now, they also place value on other formats and ways of content marketing, such as properly tagged images, videos, infographics and other off-page SEO techniques.
It brings once-popular but now-forgotten content back to life
The information overload that the now extremely fast-moving world has brought along has resulted in people quickly forgetting what they came across on the internet. This places some major nostalgic value on older content. It would, therefore, be a great idea to make use of some of your “old but gold” content in order to pull at the heartstrings of your readers.
It helps you reach a wider audience
Putting your content into multiple formats gives you the chance to reach more people than you did before.
A simple blog post would most probably reach your regular visitors, or maybe a handful of others, IF they chose to click on your social media ad and got directed to your website.
However, if you posted that same content in the form of a video via your social media account, the chance of people viewing your content would increase. You could also target the younger generation with interesting images or creative puns and memes based on your original content.
What kind of content can you repurpose?
Can you apply your content repurposing techniques to all the content that you have published before? What if you start spending all your time repurposing your old content and only half of it proves to be useful for your business’s marketing campaign?
Instead of wasting your time on things that might fail to capture the audience’s attention, keep in mind the three types of content you should focus on when repurposing content:
Content that is popular
If a certain part of your previously published content has proved to rise in popularity over time, it would be a smart move to use it to its maximum potential by repurposing it. Chances are that the newly repurposed content will also be a hit among your audience just like the original content was.
Content that is evergreen
Have you ever heard of trees that stay green all year round? They are called evergreen. In the same way, there is some content that never gets forgotten: it is evergreen. There are some topics that people always want to know or talk about, regardless of the time period. They never lose their relevance. It is much wiser to repurpose this kind of material because people will always remain interested in it and search for it.
Content that needs a little updating
You may have written a post or an ad about a product which has now been updated with more features. Maybe you quoted some statistics in a blog post you published in 2015 but they no longer apply. Perhaps your target market has now changed from school students to office employees. For these situations, you would need to update your old content and make the necessary changes before presenting it to your audience. Thus, this type of information is a great candidate for content repurposing.
What are some creative ideas for repurposing content?
Here are a few repurpose ideas that you can use for your old content.
Turn text-based blog posts into a different format
Businesses who have their own blogs have a very hard time coming up with long articles on interesting, relevant topics that their readers would find engaging and useful. Many of them also hire expensive writers to write the perfect pieces for them to publish. In such cases, it is recommended that you turn the content of these blogs into a different format.
One very straightforward way to do this is to turn your blog post into an infographic. An infographic is where you write your information, that is, your content, in an image format, that is, a graphic. Many businesses have now started to turn towards memes since they are a key internet element nowadays. Plus, they make you look cool!
One more thing you can do is take chunks of text from your blog post and put it into an image. You could pick a nice background or supporting image that goes with the text in the image. These images can then be posted on your website or a social media site, or even placed in an online ad. The possibilities are endless.
You can also make videos, small animations or presentation slides where you could reuse the old content. This would give the content a fresh twist and also let it stay as valuable as it used to be.
Tip: If you want to create some good visuals using your old content, you can take a look at these tools for creating and editing visual content.
Turn text-based blog posts into podcasts or e-books
Another way to recycle blog posts is to release it in the form of podcasts or e-books. You can easily compile related blog posts into a collection and then give it away to subscribers.
Turn interviews into pictures with quotes
Look at this picture from AiThority. They conducted an interview with Chao Han from Lucidworks and then employed the tactic of turning a quote from that interview into an image.
Use old raw interview/questionnaire data as original, fresh statistics for new blog posts
Some data that you may have collected in the past but were unable to find any good use for can now come in handy. You can incorporate it into a new blog post you are about to publish. You can use it in your new blog posts and cite the report that you once published those stats in. In a similar manner, you could also reuse interview material.
Pick up content from older marketing platforms and post it on newer ones
We have come a long way from the simple times when newspapers and television ads were the main means of marketing.
Marketing is now moving from websites to social media accounts such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and even Snapchat. By posting your content on multiple platforms, you can reach many more people. Just modify your content a little bit according to the requirements of every marketing platform and you are good to go!
We hope that we managed to give you some ideas about transforming your old content into something new while retaining its original flavor. The material, format, and technique that you choose for content repurposing depends on your needs.
Wrapping Up
Make sure that you don’t overdo it. Try to strike the right balance between your brand new and repurposed content, and be ready for success!
About Author: Emily Williamson is a Technical Writer at Goodcore Software, a bespoke software development company in the UK. We focus on helping entrepreneurs, small, and medium businesses create competitive and winning software. Emily is passionate about exploring and writing about technology innovation, mobile apps and software solutions.
Image 1 from aithority.com
Image 2 by Patrick Tomasso from unsplash.com
Original article Published here >
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