Creating content is not an easy task. It takes time, energy, and brainpower. Once you’ve put together a great piece of content, please don’t use it once and let it die. One of the biggest and most time-consuming mistakes people can make when creating content is pigeonholing it into one area and never thinking about it again. These are your original words and thoughts—take a little effort to give them new life in a new form.
Use these ten ideas to repurpose your existing content – I bet you can save a ton of time if you implement at least half of these.
- Email or newsletter material – incorporate your blog posts (or even more in-depth social media posts) into your email newsletter or drip campaigns. Your email list doesn’t see every blog or social post you publish. By repurposing this content, you can create purposefully streamlined messaging across your owned channels.
- Share it on social media – pull pieces from a longer-form article or email series to use for your social media campaigns. Long-form content is an excellent place to source Reels or TikTok content – look for the main subjects within a long-form content piece and make them short and sweet!
- Thought Leadership Content – flip your social media or email campaigns into longer-form blog content. You can add additional information to a social media post, use some high-ranking keywords to bolster SEO, and create a thought leadership piece to use on your website as owned media.
- Use award applications for blog content – if your company nominates employees for awards, applications can easily be flipped into a personal spotlight Q&A content piece. If they win the award, be sure to link to the media coverage in the content.
- Pitch it – some industry publications accept thought leadership content and will publish them in full (for free)! More publications are moving into an advertorial space where you have to pay to run a content piece in full, but this is still an option if your desired publication doesn’t accept by-lined articles. You can also pitch the story idea as an interview to a reporter with some key bullet points pulled out to show what you will be talking about during your interview. You can even attach the content piece to give them a little preview of the interview.
- Use it as a marketing piece – if your company has a booth at a trade show or is the sponsor of an event, print the content and use it for handouts at your booth or stuff it into take-away bags.
- Create a Listicle – if you have a few articles with a common theme, create a listicle that is its own piece of content but links back to each individual piece of content you have already created. This method is excellent for driving SEO through backlinks.
- Give it a refresh – revisit old blog content and look for ways to make it relevant again. Is there a survey or study that you sourced you can update? Are there new trends that have changed some of the points you made in your original post? You should set time aside to comb through back content and pull-out pieces to refresh regularly.
- Build an infographic – pull points out of a blog post and transform them into a visual, sharable infographic. You can use this on more visual platforms like Pinterest or Instagram.
- Turn it into a video or audio script – a lot of people would rather listen to an audio recording or watch a video rather than read a long-form content piece. Use your content as a starting point for a script and record a video or audio piece about your topic.
The possibilities of repurposing content are essentially endless. With a little bit of planning and reworking, you can use content in different media and across various platforms. When I create content, I like to plan out 2-3 ways to use each piece as soon as I draft it. That way, I can make sure I don’t forget about it and waste time trying to come up with fresh ideas all the time!