How to Repurpose Content for Maximum Value

Intro

Creating content is time-consuming. You spend hours researching, writing posts and scripts, recording videos and podcasts, and creating graphics, only to upload them and start the process all over again. Even if you love what you do, the cycle can seem never-ending.

But what if I told you there was a way to avoid spending all your time creating new content? Better still, what if I told you this method helps you to get more of your most popular content in front of people?

This isn’t a gimmick - this is content repurposing.

What is Content Repurposing?

Content repurposing is the process of taking a piece of content and editing it or recreating it so you can use it elsewhere to offer more value to your audience.

For example, you may take a long-form blog post and break it up into small infographics to reuse on your social media accounts. These sections deliver powerful bite-sized information to your audience.

Alternatively, you can take a long blog post and repurpose into a video. Not only is this a great strategy to boost user engagement and deliver a better user experience, but it will also give your article more exposure on SERP.

What are the Benefits of Content Repurposing?

Saves Time

One of the biggest benefits of content repurposing is simply that it saves time. One blog post and its hours of research can now become a blog post plus 5 social media posts, including an infographic. An hour-long podcast can become a video, social media posts, and more.

With just a tweak in the way you think about how you create content, you’ve got more opportunities to connect with your audience. While you still need to create new content regularly, content repurposing gives you more time to create or promote your content.

Makes Content Multi-Channel

We often imagine that our audience follows us everywhere, but the truth is most don’t. Repurposing your content means you can reach your audience wherever they are with the essential and/or entertaining content you’ve created, without having to start from scratch.

Enhances User Engagement

We all love it when a piece of content takes off; we celebrate and then immediately set about replicating that success with new content. Repurposing content allows you to extend that content’s success, diversifying the ways your audience experiences your content.

For example, an extract of a recent podcast can become a YouTube video that opens a discussion with your audience in the comments. A demo of your product can be a powerful way to gather feedback and start a conversation.

Makes it Easier to Create and Maintain Your Content Strategy

Repurposing your content means you can spend more time on the topics that resonate best with your audience. It removes the need to talk about peripheral topics or essentially rewrite content you’ve already covered.

Again, you don’t have to start from scratch every time you want to start a new content marketing strategy or support another marketing campaign - you’ve already got content in the vault you can update and repurpose to work with your new content.

It’s Better for SEO

We all know that duplicate content is bad for your SEO, so you may naturally be wary of repurposing your content. The more content you have on a topic, the more opportunities you have to create content around that keyword. (For more SEO advice, see Ranktracker’s extensive SEO guide here.)

When You Can & Can’t Repurpose Content

Feeling excited about all the remarkable benefits of repurposing content? You’ve likely got a few of your top-performing blog posts in mind, but we need to put the brakes on before we move further.

Not every piece of content is suitable for repurposing; or more accurately, **not every piece of content is _worth _repurposing. **

One of the most attractive things about repurposing content is to cut down on how much new content you need to create. But you need to keep in mind that **every piece of repurposed content you put out into the world must have a specific purpose. **

In other words, it needs to offer real value to your audience.

Think of it this way, imagine a brand you follow repurposes one hour-long podcast across all their channels over a week, and you happen to see every piece of content they share. If they just throw up the same few points in different graphics, you’re going to become bored and irritated.

Yet, if they highlight different key points and even take them further so you don’t need to relisten and take notes, you’ll be happy to see their repurposed content and may actively look for it.

That’s the difference between delivering value and just making noise.

So, how do you put this into practice?

How to Repurpose Content: Your Content Repurposing Strategy

Below, we’ll guide you through the basic steps of forming a content repurposing strategy so you understand how to identify and repurpose content to offer your audience maximum value.

Define the Goals for Your Repurposed Content

Before you start repurposing anything, you need to know _why _you’re repurposing content. What overall goal are you trying to achieve with your repurposed content? How will it contribute to your overall content strategy?

Remember, repurposing content isn’t a shortcut, it’s a way to deliver more value from a single piece of content.

Perform an Existing Content Audit

No one’s excited about an audit, but a content audit is so useful that it’s definitely an exception! Look at all the content you’ve created and analyze your top-performing and evergreen content to find the best pieces to repurpose.

Also note any content that is underperforming. While you won’t want to repurpose this content, it’s worth analyzing it to figure out why these pieces didn’t resonate with your audience.

Also, look at your content and think about the pieces you haven't updated recently. Do searchers value freshness on this sort of content? If yes, schedule a content update for those pieces.

Identify the Content That’s Worth Repurposing

We hope that every piece of content we create will resonate with our audience and deliver value. But the truth is that some content does this better than others. You want to overlook those time-limited pieces that aren’t relevant today and skip any content that simply hasn’t performed well.

New content, evergreen content, and well-performing content should all be considered for repurposing.

Perform Competitor Research

Repurposing well-performing content is always a good idea, but doing it in tandem with competitor research is even better. Knowing what content your competitors are sharing and, more importantly, how their content is outperforming yours will allow you to strengthen your position.

Keyword gap analysis (also known as competitive keyword analysis) is where you identify the high-value keywords your competitors currently rank for, but you don’t. You then analyze why you aren’t ranking so you can make changes as necessary.

Updating and repurposing content can be an excellent way to do this. Creating new content that’s better than your competitors’, and then repurposing it to drive traffic to the primary piece of content, is another. Make sure you use Rank Tracker so you can track your improvements, and SERP Checker to see where your competitors are failing.

9+ Ways to Repurpose Content

So now we’ve covered the why behind repurposing, let’s look practically at how to repurpose content.

How to Repurpose Blog Content

Blog content provides you with a lot of information you can repurpose. Make the most of those high-value posts and turn them into other forms of content, such as:

1. Infographics: A blog post can become an infographic, either to explain the concept or quickly convey data talked about in the blog post. Sites like Canva and [Piktochart] (https://piktochart.com) make it easy to create infographics for socials for those of us without a background in design.

2. Social media posts: The sections in a blog post can be repurposed into social media posts where you can discuss a specific idea and spark a discussion about the information in the comments.

3. Short videos and podcasts: Blog content provides you with the perfect draft script for videos and podcasts. You can take the entire blog post as-is and turn it into one video or podcast, or break down the sections and go into more detail in a video or podcast series.

Better still, you can link back to the original blog post to provide further reading. It will also prolong your contact time with your audience, and drive more traffic to the post and your site.

How to Repurpose Video Content

Video content is now just as versatile as blog posts, thanks to all the different ways we can now post snippets of our video content.

4. Cut key points into shorts: You can take high-value points and turn them into Reels, YouTube Shorts, or videos for TikTok. If the original video is value-packed, you can get a huge amount of content out of that one video while making your key points more digestible.

5. Create infographics/instructographics: We covered infographics for blog posts, but another great way to use infographics is on Pinterest. Pinterest is a resource many businesses overlook, but if your audience is there, it’s a great way to get in front of them.

6. Turn videos into podcasts: Do you create videos that are packed with value and aren’t reliant on visuals? You could reach a new (or simply busy) audience by turning them into podcasts. There are 383.7 million active podcast listeners worldwide, and this number is growing fast. You can capture these listeners by isolating the audio on your videos and uploading them as podcasts.

How to Repurpose Long-Form Content: Webinars & Podcasts

Long-form content like webinars and podcasts give you a lot of content to work with. But all that content can be overwhelming to repurpose. The good news is there are dozens of ways, you just need to think about what method will deliver the best experience for your audience.

7. Video series: That webinar you presented was absolutely packed with value, so don’t let it go to waste! Many webinars are 1-3 hours long, so break the webinar up into a video series you can share for weeks or even months afterward.
8. Blog series: Similarly, why not get a transcript of your webinar or podcast and turn the key points into a series of blog posts? Companies like Descript have AI tools that can act as a basis, and human transcription of your audio will make producing a blog series even easier.
9. Create an email series or course: If your webinar or podcast talked your audience through a step-by-step process, turn each step into an email for an email series. This is a great way to produce content for your email newsletters or create an email course to capture new email subscribers.

How to Repurpose Content for Social Media

The key to repurposing content for social media is to deliver value as quickly as possible while providing content that is aligned with the posts that succeed on the platform. The interesting thing about social media is that what’s popular changes over time.

Take TikTok for example - the videos on TikTok are highly trend-driven, meaning a sound or topic may come in and out of fashion quickly. This puts a lot of pressure on brands to create content fast to meet each new trend. However, you can use old content and repurpose it to meet the requirements of each new trend. That means there’s a new twist on it and new eyes on it, both of which are good things.

Why Updating Old Content Matters

We’ve touched on this important point a few times in this article; updating your old content can help take a good old post and make it great. Sometimes the SEO isn’t up to scratch. Sometimes there are references or points in the article that are no longer relevant to your audience today. Fixing these issues gives you a great piece of content your audience is hungry for.

Value-Focused Content Repurposing Recap

We prize content repurposing for its time-saving benefits, but it offers so much more than simply giving us our time back. Content repurposing allows you to squeeze all the value out of your content and can help you find new avenues to explore.

Remember to keep the purpose behind why you’re repurposing a piece of content front and center. Question yourself if you find the answer is, “I just need to get something up today.”

Value-focused content repurposing will not only give you more time but will show your audience that you’re an authority on the topic.