Stuck in a Creative Slump? Try Repurposing Your Old Content

When you manage a business blog, you quickly learn that one of the trickiest tasks is coming up with new, exciting content. After a while, it seems like you have said everything there is to say in your niche. Besides, most people need time in between posts, so they can find inspiration or do research. One way you can stay on schedule is by repurposing content. When you repurpose, you take portions of old posts or videos and rework them into new pieces. Let’s take a closer look at this process.

Why it’s Good to Repurpose Content

Remaking your pieces makes you efficient. Time is a valuable resource, and on the internet, it is even more so. People don’t have many hours to spare—they’re often online for work or study. Otherwise, you’re jostling with thousands of other media for their free time. Today, you cannot compete on volume, so you have to focus on getting your message to more people.

Repurposed content also gets an SEO boost. When you have different types of content discussing the same topic, you can have more opportunities to target relevant keywords. What’s more, if you publish your repurposed content elsewhere on the internet, like on Medium or YouTube, you can get high-quality links to your site.

These things help you reach a larger audience. Usually, your original piece would have only gotten to a small portion of your customer base. For example, if you specialize in make-up and write an article about the best color combinations for summer, only the customers who read blogs will be the ones who would have read it. If a considerable portion of your market only watches videos online, they would probably miss out on your post.

Finally, repurposing reinforces the brand and your message. A popular principle in marketing is the Rule of Seven, which states that buyers need to come in contact with your message at least seven times before they purchase or close a deal. When you re-release content, you can re-introduce your message to people who have seen it in the past.

How Do You Repurpose Content?

When you’ve decided to create new content from old pieces, your blog archive is the first place you could go. Here are several things you can do to create and share repurposed content:

1. Identify Which Posts are Evergreen: Timeless content that earns plenty of traffic qualifies as evergreen. Review your analytics to see which posts were most popular in the past months and year. Keep an eye out for content that consistently draws in the views—for example, a post published in July that earns plenty of traffic in September.
2. Convert Lists into Several Articles: Once you identify your top-performing content, you can study how to convert it into several pieces. For example, you can take each bullet on a list post and expand it into a full-blown post or video. Doing this lets you talk at length about the topics you surveyed in the original article. This is a great way to add background information or create tutorials on a topic.
3. Convert Multiple Posts into a Long-Form Guide: You can also take five or more posts and turn them into a summary post. If you usually write shorter articles on your blog, this is a quick way to produce comprehensive pieces. You can also link these posts to your pillar pages.
4. Make a Slide Show: You can also turn blog posts into presentations. When making a presentation, remember that one concept equals one slide; if you’re converting a long post, you need to divide it into several presentations—more content! Intersperse your informational, data-heavy slides with statistics, quotes, and the like. You can create your slide shows on design websites like Canva and Prezi and publish them on platforms like SlideShare.
5. Make a Video: For companies with more resources, video offers plenty of possibilities. You can create a YouTube channel for your posts-turned-videos—you can post everything from tutorials to behind-the-scenes peeks, interviews, and more. Besides YouTube, there’s also TikTok, which is more popular among younger users, and Instagram Reels, one of the newest video-sharing tools available.
6. Make an Infographic: Besides presentations, you could also make an infographic, which is a visual summary or outline of your post. You can break up your article into several graphics tackling different talking points if you have plenty of data. Non-designers don’t have to fret—you can create infographics using Piktochart, Visually, and similar applications.
7. Create a Case Study: If you have interviews with clients, you can turn those into case studies. These are in-depth discussions of a particular customer problem and how your product or service solved it for them. Case studies can be a great lead magnet, especially for businesses that sell to other businesses.
8. Create an eBook: You can take your case studies and ultimate guides a step further and turn these into eBooks. The return on investment on them is significant; besides being great for lead generation, eBooks are also a potential source of passive income.
9. Re-Promote Your Post Online: Once you have reshaped your content, you can share it again on your platforms. Don’t worry about boring your audience—people don’t mind reposts online, as long as you do it well. The main question you should ask is, “will my audience get the same value from this repost, if not more?” 
   

Conclusion

There’s no such thing as an original idea, as the saying goes, but leveraging that is not a bad thing at all. When you repurpose content, you save plenty of time for your marketers. Besides boosting your SEO and introducing you to new markets, it also helps you think differently about your niche. One repurposed piece can lead to several new pieces of content.

Trust Ranked to help you create a winning content plan for your business. We provide managed SEO services for enterprises and agencies, delivering everything from keyword research to reporting and auditing. Book a call with our team to learn more about our offerings, or start your free trial today!