Repurposing Your Content
Many people simply write blog postings, toss them online and that’s that. Others syndicate those posts to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or other social networks of choice. But there are still other ways that you can get mileage from the valuable information you are sharing with your blog reader. Content Repurposing is hardly a new concept, but a lot of content writers and managers still overlook this simple and effective method when developing their content strategies.
Strategize How You Will Repurpose Your Content
It can be difficult to come up with new and exciting information to share with people, but if you change the format of the information you are sharing, you can reach more and more readers and potential customers. Repurposing content means taking the content that you currently have and turning it into video postings, audio postings, e-books, reports, white papers, seminars, webinars and more. This does not mean using the same words over and over, however. You will need to change things up a bit in order for this strategy to work.
It is important to note that when you repurpose your content into new formats, that you make each new version unique, and that you customize your message for your new intended audience. Facebook fans want photos, videos and topics to discuss and comment on. Twitter followers want brief information. Video watchers want interesting information presented in an exciting manner, but they want you to get to the point. Article, report, and white paper readers want in-depth information. Knowing your new audience is one of the keys to making repurposed content work.
Not everyone you want to reach knows how to find your blog, or even cares to find your blog. Blogs are a great starting place, but repurposing your content into new formats and posting it new places on the web, broadens your potential audience and increases your visibility. Not only that, but you save yourself the time, energy and manpower of coming up with new ideas for these new formats.
Making Your Old Content Work Like New
The text of a blog post can very easily be recorded as an audio podcast, or even a video. You can post the audio version of your blog alongside the text, you can submit podcasts to iTunes and you can create your own YouTube channel. One post is now available in three formats, but each format is still generating the same message and the same call to action.
Repurpose old content for YouTube
Conversely, you can take audio or video that you already have and turn it into text. If you have given an audio interview, consider converting it to text and making that text available on your blog.
Text-to-text is another great way to repurpose content. If you have a great blog post, you can expand upon it and submit it to article directories. This requires rewriting it, and you may want to consider changing up the keywords a bit. Sites like Ezine and Articlebase are well-respected by the search engines, and this is an easy way to get your information in front of millions of new readers and potential customers.
If you have a blog post hiding out in your archives somewhere that was once very popular, you can dust it off and change it up a bit. Turn it into a “Top ten” list or a product review, or something very reader-friendly.
For enterprising bloggers, you can also take some of your most informative articles and blog posts and turn them into long-format e-books that you can either give away or sell to potential customers.
When repurposing content you are really only limited by your imagination. There are hundreds of ways you can take something old and make it new again, and in the process, reach an entirely new audience.