How to Repurpose Content Like A Boss: Save Time While Expanding Your Reach
Are you spinning your wheels trying to pump content out because you've been told you need to have a content strategy, but meanwhile, you're hearing crickets from potential clients? Have you ever wondered how people find time to create massive amounts of content without burning out?
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We know how important content creation is, so we too often see clients spending massive amounts of time pumping out content, grinding to get it all done. But there is another way and we’re here to tell you the secret sauce. Repurposing. Repurposing your content is the golden ticket to an expertly crafted content creation strategy, taking each piece of content you create FURTHER.
So instead of creating content one time, posting, setting and forgetting, we’re challenging you today to imagine ways that you can take each piece of content you create, whether on your blog, podcast, youtube channel, or any other medium, and squeeze out every bit of juice you can.
We often underestimate just how much value lies within a single piece of content. Read until then end for ways to repurpose and a strategy to start saving time AND growing your reach. Now, this will still take work, but we know that a lot of you are solopreneurs or small business with small teams and less resources, so this is a way for you to really amplify your impact and get more bang for your buck.
But first, here are some of the advantages to repurposing your content
1. It boosts your SEO and builds your authority with Google.
2. It gives your brand multiple touch points. You’re seemingly everywhere all the time without actually having to work that hard.
3. Saves time by taking each piece of content further.
4. Prevents burnout so that you can stop creating new content every single day, week and month.
5. Increases your reach to a broader audience.
Helpful Hints For Repurposing Content
1. Every time you create content, make sure a good portion of it is timeless, high quality content that you can re-use. For example, if you create posts that are specifically about COVID-19, then when COVID-19 isn’t as much of a relevant issue, it is less likely you’ll be able to re-purpose, or re-post it (and in this example, let’s hope you never have to). This doesn’t mean you can’t create super specific and trendy content, but definitely make it a point to think in terms of timeless content for at least some of your efforts.
2. Do a review of your past content. Go into your analytics and find content you’ve already created. So, for example, if you have a blog, review your blog posts. Review your most popular content, as well as the content that received the most engagement. From there, you can create a list, so that you can either create re-freshers, spin-offs, or straight up repost some of that content that originally did well.
Just remember:
Ways You Can Repurpose Your Content (Both Past & In-Process Content)
1. Find ways to dissect, expand, or create spin-offs of your content. You can break lists and larger posts down into smaller posts, diving deeper into key points. Here’s an example. Take our post on creating a brand kit. You can take the key components of a brand kit and create posts for each key point. So within that blog post, we can expand on the points of color, font and logo creation:
How different colors reflect your brand story
What your font communicates about your brand and how to pick one
How to hire someone to create a logo for you
I could probably come up with many more ideas, but you can see how much juice you can extract from
one good post.
2. Create Graphics, or infographics for your posts to condense them into something visual and very digestible. So not only can you extract ideas for more long form content, but you can break your long form content into bite sized teasers and pieces for your social media outlets. Creating infographics is also a great way to work toward creating viral, shareable content, which will be tremendously helpful for building brand authority.
3. Every time you create a long form post, whether that be a blog post, youtube video, or podcast, create those bite sized pieces for each social media outlet you have. I would recommend initially creating at least 3 pieces of content to send people back to the long for content. I’ll discuss a method you can use in a bit, so keep reading!
4. Take a popular piece of content and turn it into a series. Content series are great because you can release segments of the series at the same time each week, so you can create a sense of expectancy, reliability and excitement around your content. As an example of a creative way to implement this concept, consider the branding kit post again. It’s a blog post, so I could create either a series of blog posts or switch it up and turn it into a video series (perhaps to expand our audience by switching the medium) with 15-minute videos releasing each Monday at 11am and cover the aspects of a branding kit and how they can be created in Canva to show people how each component of a brand kit can be implemented.
By the way, we can train you how to do that. Find out more here.
5. Create guest posts that piggy-back off of, or precede one of your pre-existing posts. Not only is guest posting with other professionals and influencers a great idea to get you more exposure by sharing your expertise with someone else’s audience, but you can link back to related posts, or continued learning posts so that your website gets more exposure and airtime. Again, we’re finding ways to take content further.
6. Create a webinar, or workshop. Give a one hour workshop or webinar on a piece of your content that you can then post, promote and re-use pieces of on your social media.
7. Create a Freebie that invites people to take action on a specific piece of content. For example, I could turn the Branding Kit post into a mini-workbook to help people make decisions on the different parts of their branding kit. This freebie could be gifted with or separate from the post in exchange for an email.
8. Get transcripts of podcasts and turn them into blog posts with show notes. You can also use the transcript to create more shorter form content, as well!
9. Turn podcast clips into Audiograms for social media. This is a great way to find gold nuggets from your podcasts and post them on social media in a visually enticing way to tease the content and draw people to listen in.
There are a LOT more options from here. You can create all kinds of things when you have high quality content. What other ideas do you have for repurposing content? Comment at the end of the post!
How to Integrate a Repurposing Strategy
So now you know all the ways you can potentially repurpose your content, but the bigger question becomes: How do you integrate this into your workflow?
There are many ways we can do that, and really, if you want a detailed strategy, we’re happy to work with you one-on-one, because different strokes work for different folks. That said, today I’ll give you a basic format you can use and tweak if you’re DIYing. ;)
1. Start with a batching strategy. I’m not going to go into that here, but we have a whole post with a free downloadable guide to make this easy for you! Start applying our technique for painless batching TODAY.
2. Create or hire someone to create 2-5 templates for every medium you post content on. These templates will be on-brand, but will also enable you to easily create your social media content with ease each time, while maintaining variety since there are multiple templates. They will also meet the size specifications for each medium. So, you might create templates for facebook/instagram, instagram/facebook stories, pinterest, linkedin, youtube, landscape blog graphics, quote graphics and more. Make a list of all the places you show up as a brand and what imagery you might need on a regular basis.
3. For each piece of long form content (blog, video, podcast, etc) you create for your batching period, create 3-4 social media feed posts per channel. Dissect quotes and specific clips of content and then turn them into assets that tease the content. Now, schedule them into your content calendar or social media scheduler. Get creative using the list above for ideas on how to vary your posts. For example, don’t just say the title and description of the post, write ‘link in bio’, and call it a day. Create a cool graphic, use a quote, create a teaser of some so that people are compelled to click for more. And don’t forget to utilize stories! Canva is a fantastic tool for creating social media graphics!
4. Do a Facebook, or Instagram LIVE based on your long form content. For every piece of long form content, get on IG or FB live and give a little glimpse into the post. This can be quick, think 4-15 minutes. You can then post the live on your IGTV channel so it’s housed. Give some quick takeaways, something valuable that will build on your authority and also peak their interest to continue listening/watching/reading your longer form version. Be sure to save your videos to your drive so you can repurpose them later!
5. Feature your content in your weekly newsletter. This makes sure your tribe is staying ‘in the know’ in case they don’t follow you on social or happen to miss it!
6. Don’t forget to schedule the blog and all the associated collateral you create to re-surface these posts in the future throughout the year!
If you follow these steps, you’ll have a nice little re-purposing process for each piece of long form content you create! Don’t forget that it shouldn’t stop there. You should use your content again and again, especially the most popular and engaging content. In addition to all of this, go back through old posts and schedule it according to when it fits in your content calendar. In theory, once you build up a body of content, you could have 50% of your content each month be re-purposed or refreshed content from prior months or years.
I hope this highlighted the potential for your content to not only expand your reach, but to save massive amounts of time in the long run. People think they need to reinvent the wheel all the time, but it’s not only unsustainable, but it’s also just not necessary. Work smarter, not harder.
That’s all folks! All the love to you.
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