11 Ways to Ace Content Repurposing

Have you ever concluded that one or several of your content pieces have performed exceptionally well? Even significantly better than other pieces?

Your content (and all those involved in it’s creation) deserves a hearty pat on the back, as well as songs of praise. But once your content performance parade reaches its end, what do you do with your treasured work?

How it All Began…

At Roojoom, we found that the topic of content repurposing was one of our top performing pieces of content. Our blog post 23 Tools for Content Repurposing, that was published on Outbrain, got us more qualified leads than any other piece of content that quarter.

And so, we started looking for formats that were new to our audience, that we can use to repurpose the same idea.

We debated between an ebook and a white paper, or a podcast.

Why? Well, we blog frequently and have done webinars, events, content journeys and infographics. We had never done an e-book or a podcast.

With a few other considerations (which you will learn of at the end of this post) — we decided to take the e-book route, and after a few weeks of hard work and with the help of Ron Sela we published The Complete Guide to Content Repurposing.

Let’s Start From The Basics: What is Content Repurposing?

content●repurposing

verb: taking the same idea and applying it to a new piece of content, but with a different goal.

1. Changing the content’s form.
2. Changing the target audience.
3. Both

noun: repurposed content: customized/reworked/adapted content that is able to appear in new formats or mediums.

1. the same basic information, now available to a wider audience.
2. the same information, now available through multiple delivery channels.

Repurposed Content Marketing

At Roojoom, we’re big believers in Content Repurposing. It’s always easier to sing something’s praise when you know from experience that it was a good deal. This is why we created the complete guide to content repurposing – which you can download for free.

For those of you who are just starting out with content repurposing, here are some commonly asked questions that might settle your content repurposing doubts:

Why shouldn’t I stick to one format of content?

By sticking to one format, your content is only capable of attracting the attention of one portion of your audience. Different readers gravitate to different content mediums.

What skills do I need to repurpose content?

Repurposing content does not require any special skills — as tools are readily available for simplifying creating images, animations, infographics and different types of presentations.

What’s an example of repurposing content?

Making a video based on a presentation and writing a post on your blog based on the transcription and adapt the post into a podcast.

Each piece of repurposed content could feature your top keyword for search engine ranking and be linked back to your main blog or website.

How does content repurposing affect SEO?

When repurposing your most popular content, it is most likely to attract additional search traffic for your target keyword if you know it has attracted traffic previously.

Now that you’ve seen the most commonly expressed skepticism about content repurposing, let’s dive in.

Choosing  Which Content to Repurpose

Not sure which content to choose? For repurposing, the best content to choose is something that’s performed well since its initial release. You can identify this based on traffic stats, especially pageviews. This is a good way to evaluate which content is most worthy of your time. If it was well-received in the past, your content is likely to have similar feedback in the future, even in its new format.

Another way to repurpose existing content is updating or optimizing old content that is now out of date. You can also rework your content by looking at people’s’ feedback, and expand on topics that they commented on or expressed general interest towards. This is a good way to keep the ball rolling with your customer or audience base.

Once you have an idea, or several ideas, of content topics to repurpose, it is also crucial to check  how the topics are currently trending on the web, regardless of whether they were successful for you personally in the past.

Why is this? Before going to the effort of adapting your content to be used again, you want to make sure that it will be well-received compared to what else is available on the web. A useful way to check this is by using  Buzzsumo.com

Performance is (The) Key

Once the content has been published on your website, it’s simple to track your traffic on Google Analytics. If some of your content was published on a website external to your own, then you will not have access to Google Analytics stats for it. In this case, you need to look at other metrics, such as the amount of traffic it brought to your site, or the amount of leads.

How our eBook came to be

We already mentioned that we learned that our blog post about 23 tools for content repurposing was one of our top performing pieces of content, and that we were looking for new formats to repurpose that content into. We wanted to choose a format that we hadn’t used before, and were trying to decide between an eBook and a podcast. One of the factors that influenced our decision is that we did not have the equipment to produce a podcast – although we could have solved that by borrowing or renting equipment.

But, the real deal breaker was the level of depth we wanted to achieve: Since we really wanted to delve into the topic of content repurposing, we felt that eBook format would be most effective.

When you set to choose the right format for your repurposed content, consider these:

1. What are the available formats? (see a few ideas below)

2. What is the depth you’d like to go into? For example, an infographic may be more engaging than a white paper, while a white paper can go into a lot more detail.

3. Which types of content resonate best with your audience?

11  ways and formats for repurposing your content:

1. Checklists

The oldest trick in the book, checklist seem to always work.

At a recent workshop with Neil Patel he was asked if list posts are not getting a bit old-fashioned, and he said – no, and they never will. They’ve been popular since the old days of flashy magazines and will outlive Wordpress… Create checklists of 10 ways to do… 11 ideas for….

Tips: The higher the number in your title the better. And oddly – odd numbers seem to outperform even ones.

2. E-books

Do you have a set of blog posts on the same topic? Get them together into one e-book. Some people prefer downloading complete guides or more in-depth information than reading separate blog posts online.

3. Emails

Newsletters still perform better than any other channel. Most of us only use email marketing as a way to get people to come to our blog, but it can be more than that.

In a recent newsletter by Content Marketing Institute, Joe Pulizzi  told the story of TheSkimm. TheSkimm publishes a daily e-newsletter that has 1.5 million active users per month and a 45% daily open rate (which is amazing). Its founders just received a $6 million investment to continue growing the company.

TheSkimm does not have a product. All they do is tell stories via email, and people love it.

Turn your top performing written materials into  newsletters and send away.

4. Images

63% of social media is made up of images. People are visual creatures and we respond better to visuals than we do to text. Luckily for you, you don’t need a graphic designer to create visual content – there are plenty of tools out there to help you create great images.

5. Infographics

An infographic takes a little more time and effort to create, but it’s worth it. Infographics are a great tools to lay out stats, tips and facts in a way that is engaging and easy to grasp. This is probably why people ted to share infographics more than any other type of content.

6. Podcasts

I already admitted: this is one type of content we haven’t tried t produce yet (we had the pleasure of interviewing for a few of them, but did not produce ne ourselves). Yet podcasts are growing in popularity these days, and for all the right reasons: unlike other types of content that require readers’ full attention, podcasts are the only type people can listen to while doing something else at the same time. You could be driving, cooking or any other activity and still listen to a podcast to observe new knowledge. Now how productive is that?

7. Slideshows

We recently had a very successful posts about interactive content tools. In the post we reviewed 13 tools and for each of the tools we featured a screenshot of the website. From there, creating this SlideShare, which basically discussed the same topic but in a more visual way, was very simple:

8. Social Media content

A long blog posts with tips can turn into dozens of social media “nuggets”. We did this with our past post – The 12 Commandments of Content Marketing – basically the post featured 12 marketers and their tips. We then repurposed these tips into Facebook, Linkedin and Google+ posts as well as short and catchy tweets.

9. Videos

Did you know that you can save a powerpoint file as a video?

Repurpose your latest webinar deck or any other engaging deck you have into a video. Simply add animation to make things interesting, add a sound-track and you’ve got yourself a video. You can also use Knovio to add audio.

Other ideas is to use tools like PowToon to create a whiteboard video or a marketplace like Veed.me to find a video artist that matches your budget and requirements.

10. Online Courses

This requires a bit of work, but it is the ideal way to build long term relationship with your audience.

Build an online learning course that is free & accessible on the web. Your course can feature written or audio content, combined with slideshows and/or videos.

Then get people to register for the course and start dripping the materials over. After 10 lessons, you and your brand will truly become thought leaders and have their full attention.

11. Webinars

Webinars are a great way to truly engage with your audience. Take your top performing content and turn it into a slideshow which you can present in front of an audience. The key here is to keep text to a minimum and base your presentation on visuals. Questions asked during the webinar or in a Google Hangout can also be converted into an effective FAQ page or serve as the basis of several blog posts, and so the repurposing cycle continues…       

Last Words

All in all, content repurposing can bring a wealth of resources to content marketers. Your time is precious, and content repurposing maximizes your efforts to infinity. Instead of investing hours and hours into new content creation, content repurposing lets you zoom in on your most successful content and reproduce its achievements without reliving the time you put into making it.

Are you repurposing content? What have been the most successful examples of repurposed content you’ve used or seen? Let us know in the comments below.