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Repurposing blog content does more than save time and effort. It’s good for your traffic and it benefits your audience. In today’s blog post, I’ll talk about why you should repurpose your blog content, which posts deserve to be repurposed, and how to repurpose blog content.
Recycling certainly isn’t a new concept. Turning an old thing into a new, useful item is inherently satisfying and benefits everyone.
So why not do the same for your blog posts?
Don’t get me wrong, though. Delivering fresh, relevant content should be a priority for any blogger.
However, you might be too focused on delivering new content that you neglect to show the old ones off to newer audiences. Repurposing blog content should, therefore, be a part of any blogger’s strategy.
In today’s article, I’ll talk about the whys and hows of repurposing blog content.
Repurposing your content shouldn’t be about simply reusing old content; otherwise, it just becomes a pointless exercise in reposting. It should be about tweaking your existing content so that you can provide more value to your audience. As with everything else in your blogging journey, striving to provide value to your audience will always make your efforts worthwhile.
There are plenty of good reasons why you should consider repurposing your content. Here are the most important ones.
Repurposing your content can attract a new audience to your blog. Your blog post may have attracted readers, but repurposing your content, especially by converting it into another medium, could allow you to attract a different audience.
Repurposing your content strengthens your authority. Writing about a topic once means you know a lot about it. Being able to put a new spin on it means you know so much about the topic that you can think of new ways to present it.
Repurposing your content builds traffic. The combination of attracting new audiences to your content and establishing your status as an authority figure should bring about increased traffic to your blog.
One of the great things about repurposing content is that you don’t need to look far to get the source; you only need to look at your blog post archive. However, not all of your blog posts deserve to be repurposed. Here are some ideas on what to look for in your older posts to ensure they’re worth repurposing.
Look for evergreen content. When I say evergreen content, I mean content that remains relevant even through changing times. Try to find older blog posts that are about topics that people are still interested in.
Check your most popular posts. This is where your analytics will come in handy. Review your monthly report and see where the traffic is coming from. You may have posts that you published months or even years ago that are still getting traffic, being shared on social media, and/or receiving comments. If they were popular with your audience in their original form, they’re likely to be popular if you repurpose them.
Scan your less popular posts. While you’re at it, don’t ignore your less popular posts. Not all of your evergreen content may have been popular when you initially published them. Repurposing these posts with a different keyword or putting a different spin on it may just be what these posts need to pique readers’ interest.
Go over older blog posts that you may be able to expound on. You may have learned something new about a topic you’ve written about some time back. Or that topic may have changed since you wrote about it. Either way, you may have something to add to an old blog post you’ve previously published.
If you’ve noticed, there isn’t only one type of blog post that is exclusively fit for repurposing. What matters is that if it is an article that you can add value to and benefit your readers. If you’re not able to add value to your existing content, repurposing them is a waste of time.
Once you’ve identified which blog posts you want to repurpose, you can now start thinking about how to actually do it. Here are 11 ways to repurpose your blog content.
Possibly the simplest way you can repurpose your blog content is to derive new blog posts from existing ones.
One way is to break apart articles with lists (i.e., listicles) into individual posts. For example, a listicle with 10 items can give rise to 10 individual articles discussing each item in greater detail. Some of the items may not be good enough to warrant a stand-alone post, but you should have enough items to create a few articles around.
Inversely, you can put together a single article from multiple related posts. If you normally write punchy, narrow-focused articles, doing a compilation can be a nice departure from your usual style and may attract a new crowd to your content.
If you have a sound social media strategy in place, then you’ve probably already posted your old articles on your social media. Sometimes, repurposing your content is as simple as reposting your old content but with an added twist.
It sounds redundant or even futile to repost older content, but when you do it right, it can spark renewed interest in your content from the same audience AND bring in new readers at the same time.
What you can do is instead of simply posting a link to that old post from social media, you can take the most captivating snippets or excerpts from that article and post those in your social media as a teaser to that blog post. Writing a compelling social media post to share your article is a great way to resonate with both old and new followers.
A slide deck can be a great alternative way to present information, particularly for blog posts that have numerical or statistical data. Slides are easier to digest than blocks of text, and will probably be compelling for people who like information but don’t like reading posts that are too long.
Slide decks are quite simple to create. If you’re proficient in Keynote or PowerPoint, creating a slide deck from an existing blog post should be a breeze. You can then upload the resulting presentation to publishing sites such as Scribd or SlideShare.
Make sure you add an introductory slide as well as a concluding one that has a link to the original post. You want to drive traffic back to your blog, after all.
Turning your text-based blog posts into more visual media is another great way to repurpose your content. One way you could do it is by turning data-heavy blog posts into infographics. If you’ve been living under a rock the past few years, an infographic is a visual representation of data, usually through charts and graphs, so that information is presented quickly and clearly at a glance.
An infographic explaining what an infographic is. (Click to zoom)
Aside from infographics, you can also create instructographics, which are less popular, but nonetheless powerful. An instructographic is a more specific form of an infographic, which is for illustrating procedures and instructions.
Instructographics are best shared on Pinterest, where they’re popular. So if you already have a Pinterest business account (and if you haven’t, you really should), this is one type of content you can share.
If you have an account on Medium that you now don’t know what to do with now that you have your own blog, I have some good news for you.
You can republish your blog posts on your Medium blog, as well as in other platforms such as Quora and LinkedIn. Posting in other platforms is a good way to present your content to new audiences who may not have found your blog otherwise. More eyes on your content is always a good thing, even when they’re not seeing it on your actual blog.
However, there’s the issue of duplicate content and the penalty from Google on your search rankings. You can prevent this penalty by placing a canonical tag on the URL of the original blog post. If this seems a little too advanced for you, this support article by Google themselves can help.
Medium published a useful article about duplicate content, and they have tools in place to make it simple for anyone cross-posting their content on Medium. But if you’re using other platforms, make sure that you attach the canonical tag to the URL of the original blog post.
If you already have an email list, you can take older, related blog posts and schedule them into an email series through your email service provider or autoresponder. You can even set it as your welcome email series, especially for your evergreen content.
An ebook is always a useful tool for a blogger. For example, a condensed ebook with useful information but can be used as a lead magnet, while a more substantial ebook can be sold as your own digital product.
If you do decide to go this route, don’t just copy and paste your content. Do your best to add value to the ebook by adding more information or more images.
Some of your audience may not like reading so much, and like watching videos or listening to podcasts more. Give them what they want by converting the content that your readers like into videos or podcasts. Maybe even both.
Aside from attracting a new audience, converting your blog posts into different media gives you a chance to add more to your blog posts; more commentary, more context, more information. You also get bonus content that you can use as lead magnets if you want to.
Guest posting is yet another great way to reach new audiences. While I don’t recommend submitting the exact blog post you’ve already published on your site, using them as inspirations for your guest posts can work.
Your best posts tend to get buried after a while of creating content. You can draw attention to these posts, especially for those visitors who are new to your blog, by creating a page solely for listing links to these posts.
You can then create a link to this page on your navigation menu, as well as send a link to this page to new subscribers to your email list. I would also recommend grouping them into categories and writing a blurb or a two-sentence introduction so that readers can go straight to the posts that interest them most without having to sift through a long list of links.
An excellent example of a Start Here page is the one on Smart Blogger.
Could repurposing your content be as simple as updating them?
Sometimes, it can be.
Reviewing your blog posts could reveal some excellently written posts that may have outdated information. Sometimes, it’s as simple as updating these posts so the information is more current, and then simply republishing them.
You can do this one of two ways: either create a new post or edit the old one and publish it under the original URL.
If you need to make major changes to the article, it’s best to just create an entirely new post. If you go this route, make sure that you indicate that it’s an update of an old article. You can place a note in the beginning or the end of the post that it’s an updated version and then include a link to the old one.
By contrast, if you’re editing only some parts of the article and leaving most of the original article intact, then you can simply update the old post. You can indicate the date it was originally published and then the date it was updated, with a note disclosing what you changed.
Let’s review the different ways to repurpose blog content:
That should be enough to inspire you to rifle through your blog post archives and look for content that’s actually worth repurposing. Before you do that, though, let me leave you with one final piece of advice.
I’ve stated this at the beginning of this post, but this needs to be stressed. Repurposing blog content has loads of benefits for you as a content creator, but your focus should never be on what you stand to gain.
Your focus should always be on your audience and how much value you can provide them.
Don’t just repurpose content because you’re going to save time and pump up your traffic; do it because your old blog posts can still provide value to your audience. They don’t stop being valuable just because they got old.
It’s now on you to present this content to new audiences or serve it up to your existing audience with a new flavor. Either way, don’t let your content fade into oblivion.
What other ways to repurpose blog content can you think of? Is this something that will fit your blogging strategy? Which of these tips will you probably apply first? Let me know in the comments!
JoAnne is your average, everyday, sane stay-at-home mom who believes in the power of the internet to make dreams come true. She has an insatiable appetite for chocolate, as well as all things internet marketing. She keeps up with the latest trends in blogging, affiliate marketing, e-commerce, and more.
