20 Tips on How to Repurpose Content

Creating high quality content is a highly important aspect, not only for gaining high ranks but firstly for making users or readers happy. Yet, we all know that running a blog with constant valuable and high quality content might sometimes be difficult as it is a resource-consuming process.

You sometimes don’t want (or don’t have the means) to reinvent the wheel every time you create a new piece of content. Therefore, why not get the best out of the content that you’ve already worked on?

All you need to do is repurpose the content you already have. Not only will you save resources, but you’ll also extend the reach of your blog and maybe find new ways to reach your audience. Finding the proper ways to repurpose content could sometimes be a challenge. This is why I’ve put together a great list of the best ways to repurpose content:

1. Convert Your Old Blog Posts Into Hands On Guides

After having written about topics in the same field for a while, you eventually start to amass enough information and expertise to be able to train someone in the field (at least at a basic level). That’s true of all fields, not just SEO (think cooking, programming, DIY etc.) So why not put all that knowledge to use and create a guide on how to do something by collating parcels of valuable information you’ve distributed across many posts over time into one neat, organized, easy to follow user guide? Manuals, if written and edited in a clear and intuitive form, can have a very high re-reading value, as they are useful both as a beginner’s lecture as well as a reference book later on.

2. Turn Your Already Published Content into Podcasts

People still like to listen to other people talking. They just don’t want to tune in at a certain hour to be able to do it. So, podcasts are really the TiVo version of radio shows: they can be quite entertaining and/or enlightening and don’t require you to be active and can be “digested” any time you choose to. That last factor really hits a sweet spot in terms of convenience and accessibility: how many articles/videos can you read/watch while driving, running or doing house chores? The serial form also helps introduce new avenues and experiment with content and form, as long as you manage to ensure a certain level of technical quality. Even if some attempts might fail, listeners usually come back to a Podcast they like, once the initial attraction has been established (just like a TV show, not all episodes are going to be great, but you’ll always tune in to watch the show).

3. Make Use of Your Internal Data and Put It Together into Case Studies

If you like churning out copious amounts of data in the hope of finding useful trends that might inform your choices, there’s re-use value in analyzing those data. Of course, you might be more interested in the quantitative aspect, but there’s plenty to learn (especially for others) from a more qualitative approach. Trying to understand why something happened in terms of cause and effect can be very rewarding and it is an intriguing mental exercise, both for you, as the person behind the analysis, and for the reader, as a virtual Dr. Watson. A good case study is less rigorous than a study, but also more demanding from a creative stand point and if done right, it can get you an equal amount of fame.

4. Gather All Your Interviews into an Expert Advice E-book

If you end up doing enough interviews on a topic, you could try to compile them all into an expert advice e-book. There’s plenty of advantages to an e-book alone (more on that below), but there are some specific advantages of expert advice e-books. For starters, there’s not that many of them; even the first pages of a Google Search don’t turn up that many relevant results, which is not the case for most of the other examples in this list. The reason might be that it’s hard enough to get one piece of expert advice, let alone get enough of it to publish a book. There’s also the advantage of not having to come up with content on your own (though you still have to make the interviews happen).

On top of that, when the advice is coming from a variety of recognized experts, there’s a higher chance people will find it more relevant or more persuasive than if it came from a single source. Of course, you’ll still have some input in terms of structure, design and segueing the different sections of the book into one coherent story and that might be exactly what makes it possible to publish that content as an e-book, as opposed to letting it linger scattered throughout various pages on your website.

5. Transform the Quora Q&A into Valuable Blog Post

There’s value in having your post read, commented upon and shared with others. But there’s also value in opening up your content for a full and unforgiving debate. Which is what is likely to happen if you were to post some of your ideas as an answer to someone on Quora. Or if you were to use your content to stir up a discussion on a Reddit thread. Even though these two examples are quite different in a lot of respects (starting with the type of platform they represent), what they have in common is:

• A significant amount of experts who contribute to the platform (more visibly so on Quora, but present on Reddit as well) and
• Sets of involved core contributors and a strong sense of ethics.

So, while the reward might not always be an easy win, you can be sure that it will be the result of serious consideration and much exposure of your content and yourself.

6. Share Your Statistics Through Twitter Posts

Micro-blogging (as Twitter is usually defined) is all about saying a lot with very few words. Of course, brevity can also be achieved through images and that’s where things can really take off. The same information can be presented in a myriad ways with a different impact every time. When it comes to “share-ability”, nothing beats a well-designed statistic. Besides, a well-made infographic is not just eye-candy, but also a valuable educational tool.

7. Update Your Old Posts with New Information

Your content should be a “living” thing, as much as possible. It partially means that, as you get a clearer or more complete view of reality, you update previous posts with the newfound knowledge. It’s not as much about recycling as it is about bringing things back into relevance with a new more insightful look at them. Just as you initially thought a certain SEO tactic was good and useful, others may have believed the same. So coming back now, after additional research, and proposing a more nuanced approach, could help others as well. It might also help people who are new to the discussion and didn’t have a chance to witness the original post and the comments around it.

8. Create New Blog Posts and Articles from Spinoffs

Once you’ve tackled a subject, it doesn’t mean it’s a done deal. Innovation is rife in every field, particularly technological ones, so what you found to be true last year might not apply anymore (or what you found to be true last month for that matter). So much like in Hollywood, sequels are a likely occurrence. There are many reasons why a follow-up article might be relevant: something has changed and there are now more reasons to do (or not do) something, or more ways of doing it; you’ve interacted with readers and industry experts in the meantime and discussed the topic, finding out that there are more worthy items for your list than you could have thought of initially; one secondary “character” in your original article has now suddenly become more relevant and can be the protagonist of their own article or blog post, etc. Whatever the case might be, seize the opportunity and expand your article pool.

9. Create A Slide Deck & Upload To SlideShare to Reach New Audience

You can turn your content into a slide deck presentation and upload it to sites like SlideShare. The site allows you to search slide decks both by topic and user, giving uploaders the benefit of a “channel”-like fame. Despite the general feeling of “death-by-powerpoint” in class and corporate settings, going through a presentation on your own can be quite an entertaining prospect. It’s more engaging than a paper and more interactive than a video. Moreover, it allows you to impress the reader on more than content (think about how important design is and how much it can say about you).

10. Build an Infographic to Make the Best Out of Your Old Content

Creating a good infographic can be quite challenging. It needs to show all the relevant information, do away with any redundant or useless data, make sense, have scientific validity while also catching the eye of the casual viewer by being both original and good-looking. In fact, it might be less difficult to gather the info you want to present to your audience than to design the way you’re going to present it. But it might be worth the price of admission: a well-crafted infographic will be shared, liked, commented, shared, included in mainstream publications, shared, etc. Besides, you don’t have to start from scratch or have a team of wiz-designers, as there’s plenty of templates and tools to go around if you’re just starting out.

11. Put Your Current Content Together Into an E-book

When you’ve published content for long enough, you might think that you’ve got enough material there for a book. And that might just be true. So if that’s the case, why not actually create a book, or rather an e-book? There are advantages to an e-book both for you and for your readers. As a publisher, an e-book offers you tremendous flexibility and variety in terms of structure and design, allowing you to come up with an absolutely unique product. As a reader, an e-book is easy to carry and easy to access (whether it’s on a laptop, tablet, mobile or e-reader). It also doesn’t take up too much space (if any at all), you can easily navigate between chapters and sections, as well as highlight or bookmark paragraphs or pages.

12. Write Guest Posts on Topics You Already Have Expertise On

Being knowledgeable on a topic means you are no longer confined to just your own soapbox, but you can jump on others’ as well (at least for a short while). Once you have enough expertise on a topic or niche, you might have what it takes to write guest posts for other people, who might have entirely different audiences than you have. There are plenty of websites that allow for guest posting and quite a few pieces of advice on how to do it successfully and get the most out of it.

13. Promote Your Existing Blog Posts from Multiple Points of View

This one is pure marketing at its best. The modern-day culture equivalent of this would be the recent trend of having multiple teasers and trailers for a movie. Which is pretty much what you’d be doing: selling your post from multiple points of view (and for multiple audiences, potentially). This way, you can be sure that when you’re sharing a different image and a different tip every day, you might pull in a different crowd. People love variety in lists, because it means that if they don’t like one suggestion from your list, there’s a lot of other ones they can try.

14. Turn Your Existing Content into Videos

Our culture has increasingly turned from reading to visual. This is apparent not just from the tremendous amount of video content uploaded each day to YouTube and other similar sites, but also from the pervasiveness of video content on pretty much every other platform that’s not dedicated to video management (such as websites, blogs, social networking sites, etc.) That’s where the great advantage of turning written content into a video lies. A written post tends to signal effort, saying “Hi, you’ll need about 5 minutes to read me, 10 if you’re tired”. A video doesn’t say anything, it just gives you no warning. Especially on mobile Facebook, videos are just meant to start running as you scroll down. If something catches your eye, you’re likely to watch it until the end, even if you wouldn’t have clicked on it otherwise.

15. Conduct Podcasts with Industry Leaders Following Themes You Are Already Familiar with

The most important elements that can influence the success of a Podcast are not necessarily related to what you say. Not because content is irrelevant (it totally is), but because the responsibility of providing said content does not need to rest solely on your shoulders. In fact, you can build a sustainable strategy based mostly (or entirely) on interviews, whether it’s with authors, musicians, comedians or any other type of expert. So if you don’t feel confident enough to dispense advice of your own, why not try to get industry leaders to give it? It requires an entirely different set of skills, but it also comes with some built-in advantages (like the fact that industry leaders already like to talk about how and why they’re industry leaders, so you’ve got half of your work cut out for you).

16. Compile Your Clients’ Questions from Support into an FAQ Page

FAQs are seriously underrated. They represent compilations of useful information which has been statistically proven to come in hand. How could you not be interested in that? As with pretty much every other example in this list, there are rules to how to create good FAQs, both in terms of content and structure and in terms of design.

17. Pull out the Best Questions You Get on Support and Turn Them into Individual Blog Posts

If you’re running into writer’s block, let your audience be your muse. With experience and knowledge you gain not just information but also a certain way of thinking about things. Which means you also lose a certain way of thinking about them—a more naive, but very likely original one. So it should be no surprise that some of most interesting questions you will try to answer will come from your readers, people who are counting on your help to further their knowledge. Of course, there are many websites out there which bring people together and which can be used to get answers to one’s burning questions. But, nothing beats keeping a personal relationship with your readers and trying to find an answer even when you don’t know what it might be beforehand. Besides, if your readers themselves have blogs or websites, turning one of their questions into a full post might yield a significant amount of good-will in terms of relationship building.

18. Convert the Testimonials from your Users into Quality Content

There’s something in the way Users learn from their peers that can’t be matched by the traditional interaction. Seeing someone else who’s just like me using your product and being successful is likely going to be more effective than all the data in the world. Of course, you can’t just throw people’s words out there and hope they will inspire, you have to pay attention to how and when you do it and always try to stay true to the original message, as it was written/recorded.

19. Make Use of Your Clients’ Photos or Videos Using Your Product

This is an even more powerful variation on the testimonial. It’s also a bit removed from the testimonial, as it can be less of a proactive initiative, and more of a fair exchange. That being said, it’s still a true message. You’re not asking your clients to make up things, or pretend they like your product when they really don’t. It can be a video that they themselves come up with, or something you’re putting together and they just agree to show in it. Either way, the customers’ presence in the video needs to feel real and honest. It might even be more persuasive if the experience shown is not 100% positive (maybe they had a difficulty in the beginning, but they overcame it, or maybe they didn’t know how to use a functionality, but your customer support provided a solution).

20. Mix Your Blog Posts Into Valuable Online Courses

All content can be educational, but depending on the form in which it is presented, some instances are more effective than others (and they usually involve making learning an active process where the learner has goals and incentives to achieve them). With a little bit of editing effort and some understanding of the psychology of learning, you could take existing interviews, blog posts, Q&As etc. and turn them into a series of (short) online courses.

Hope you’ll get the best out of these methods of repurposing content. If you know some more other great ways of repurposing content, just let us know in the comments.

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