Yesterday, Mitch Mitchell of I’m Just Sharing led us in an older, yet important, topic on one of our weekly hangout videos. The work we put into writing great blog content can be used to create other useful content. We call this re-purposing your content.
Although this is a topic that’s been around for years, most bloggers are not taking advantage of it. I thought it worth revisiting, if for nothing else, it may help newer bloggers that were not aware of reusing blog content on other platforms.
Download 16 Ways to Re-purpose your Blog Content
Newer Blog Content
In the video (embedded below), Mitch made the point that we could take older posts and bring them up to date and republish them on our blogs. Many topics hold their relevance over the years and with just a little editing and minor updates, we can create new content.
Power Point presentations
Sheryl used to take blog content and create powerpoint presentations from it. It wasn’t mentioned in the video but there are websites where powerpoint documents can be submitted for others to see and use. This can expand your reach if done properly and I highly recommend you checkout and use Slideshare.
Other ways we can repurpose our blog posts could include:
Email Series
If you have a nice how-to post, or series of posts, taking the key points and scheduling an email series using an autoresponder($) can help build your email list. Many bloggers and marketers use an autoresponder email series or E-course as a bonus for subscribing to their lists.
E-Books
Once you have a group of posts that covers a great deal on a particular topic, you could take that information and write a detailed ebook. This e-book could be offered as a product, giveaway or used as a subscription bonus, just as the email series above.
Videos
Blogging and video have a natural connection and taking your well researched blog post and putting a nice video together can be a valuable resource for your YouTube subscribers, as well as compliment the original post. The video can be as simple as a screen shot recording or a nicely edited video of you and/or others. We, of course, are having a ton of fun with Hangouts On Air.
Podcasts
Podcasts are actually growing in popularity, even though they’ve been around for a long time. Creating a podcast can be a simple matter of reading your blog post into the mic, taking the audio from a video recording or just taking the topic and key points and running with that in an original podcast.
Social Media Topics
Bloggers are quickly learning that our social media pages need interaction, just as our blog do. Taking your blog post topics, with a few selected points can be a great way to initiate interaction on your Google Plus business page, for example. These discussions are imperative on your Facebook pages with EdgeRank filtering out your posts from anyone not interacting with your page.
Webinars
A great blog post series could inspire a creative blogger to set-up a webinar. With the right topic and promotion, webinars are great for building authority, increasing your exposure and even selling a product or your services.
Infographics
You don’t have to be on Pinterest to know how popular infographics have become. The right post can easily be used to create an awesome graphic. You can use the infographic to help promote the original post. I recommend you start with Pinterest and Scoop.it.
Blog Series or Recap Posts
If you have several older posts that would have made a great series, do your readers a favor and put it together. This will require a little rewriting but the majority of the content is already there, right?
Many bloggers like to create short recap posts that highlight popular or important posts they’ve written. These posts link to the original posts and help build interaction, lower bounce rates and introduce new readers to content they may find valuable. Write a nice topic description for each post and don’t forget a call to action. Tell your readers why they should click over to each post you highlight.
Two More
I can think of two other ways to repurpose blog content. Iâm not big on either one of them but I thought It’s throw it out there, for whatever itâs worth. The first is creating articles from your blog content and the other is turning it into a press release. Personally, with Google’s latest updates, I think both are a waste of time. If you do decide to go that route, be sure you rewrite the content before submitting them to another website.
There you go, twelve ways to repurpose your content. I would like to clarify that we’re referring to YOUR content that you created. Please don’t take another blogger or writer’s work and repurpose that. Another caution I’d like to throw out there is when you’re taking older topics from your blog, resist the urge to copy and paste. You don’t want duplicate content all over your blog.
Credit Where Credit Is Due
I’d like to thank Mitch Mitchell for this topic with both his video and his recent post. I avoided reading his post until after this post was written as not to unconsciously duplicate anything. Now that I’ve read it, it looks like we came at it from two different directions. That’s perfect because now you can get another perspective by visiting that article.
Your Thoughts?
Do you think reusing blog posts for other content is a good idea? Is it worth the time and effort? How do you re-purpose content? Your opinion counts here and I’d love to hear it.
About Brian D. Hawkins
I usually repurpose my blog content two ways, and that’s by writing new posts and adding some of the old content to the new posts (or links to the old posts) and by adding the content to my weekly newsletter. That’s about it. I have thought a lot about writing ebooks based on my old posts, and that’s probably going to happen sometime this year.
And speaking of newsletters Jens, I love yours! It makes sense they are coming from posts because they’re so detailed. Awesome content. Last week’s had some great tips on making an ebook.
I’m going to put the link below in case anyone wants to subscribe to Jen’s newsletter, I never miss an issue:
http://slymarketing.com/newsletter/
HI Brian,
Perfect!
This can serve 3 purposes:
1. Timeless information can be passed on to the newbies like me.
2. Revised version can be built upon making it more special, like history book (First World war 1914-1918, Second world war and third world war)
3. Giving it a new lease of life by bringing it on various social media and specially by converting it into infographics, which can be made viral.
This post of YOURS will remain TIMELESS for sure.
Thanks for sharing this.
Sapna
Thanks Sapna, you have a way with words. 🙂 I love the new lease of life reference.
Hi Brian,
They are great things to do for old content, but one of the most effective things that I believe it will get you back a really high ROI is video. It helps readers relax more. But if anyone who’s not familiar with video, ways listed above are the best methods to repurpose blog content.
Thank You – Ferb
Thanks Ferb, I included video but, you’re right, video goes a long way and when product sales are involved, it’s always a great idea to consider them.
Wow. Thanks a lot Brian. And I really enjoy your newsletter as well 🙂
My pleasure, thanks 🙂
Awesome post, very useful for new bloggers, who want to improve their sites popularity as well as ranking too.
Interlinking can be a great help to refresh some old posts without editing them. But when we are talking about really rewriting the article then infographic is the solution. Well, at least for me) Thanks for the useful tips1 You are always up-to date!
Thanks Evan, the great thing about infographics is all of the places they can be submitted to, starting with Pinterest.
Podcasting is an interesting idea for repurposing content, and something I think more and more people are starting to take notice of. It seems to me like web goers today are looking for more digestible content that just text articles. Getting a podcast going could turn people on to what your written content is all about, and encourage potential visitors to give your site a try if the podcast content is good. Going multimedia these days is important I think.
I agree Paul, Podcasting is pretty exciting. Pat Flynn has the best video how-to series for starting podcasting that I’ve ever seen. How to Start a Podcast – A Step-By-Step Podcasting Tutorial by Smart Passive Income.
I definitely agree that Videos is one of the best ways you can employ to refurbish a blog content because audience loves seeing dancing photos and music on slides. It easily caught their attention.
Actually, since I’m Mitch (lol), I started off by making the point that one can probably find hundreds, if not thousands, of files on one’s computer that can probably be repurposed as blog posts if one is writing on similar topics to things they’re written on in the past. For instance, on one of my blogs I talk often about leadership, and I have lots of articles on my computer regarding that topic.
I hope y’all watch the video though, because we covered this topic nicely.
I agree Mitch, that video turned out really well. There’s a lot of great information for the viewers. I like that we came at the topic from too different directions. My way is a little “been there, done that” sort of thing but I wanted to readdress it anyway. It’s one of those topics that has been written about a thousand times over but you did a great job of taking a common topic and spinning it with your own outlook. Like Jennifer Lopez likes to say, “You made it your own”. 🙂
Hi
This makes perfect sense you write a good article so why not make the most out of what you have written. It is your property on your computer. In your comment above you say about all the material you have on the subject of leadership. Just by reading through our own posts hopefully will give us inspiration to write more on the subject.
For great advice thanks lee
No problem Lee. Sometimes we get focused on other stuff when things are sitting right in front of us that can help us along the way.
I find myself constantly reusing blog posts in different mediums. I find it necessary, because I simply cannot come up with entirely new information every day. For example, I might rewrite a blog post several times and submit it to a few article directories and a blogs as guest posts. I change it up a bit, but the fundamental idea will likely be the same, just clothed in different language.
It is my first time to ever heard of re-purposing content. And I totally think it’s fantastic. I’m already very excited to try it. Podcasting is an interesting idea for repurposing content as well. Thank you for this information.
Great ideas here. I think it’s a great idea to re-use blog content as long as someone is not doing it too much.
One of the easiest ways to reuse your existing content is to take a blog post, and turn it into a speech, podcast or video. You can even take a series of blog posts around the same topic, and easily create 20-30 minutes worth of material.
These are great tips. I am trying to implement more things, but the time frame these can take is wild and I am one busy momma. lol
One step at a time.
Holy damn, this article is one of the best I have seen on here!
I really mean it. 🙂
You gave so many ideas away that you should have no more excuses to make your content better and bring awesome content before back to the spotlight.
The first I would do is create a nice Email Series and send them to my subscribers.
Secondly, create a podcast since it is taking blogging by the storm!
I just started my blog (less than a month ago; it’s a Babyblogâ¢), so I can’t use a lot of this just yet, but I’m so glad I saw it tweeted. I’m pinning it (Pinterest isn’t just for crafts anymore, yo) because this is GOOD CONTENT. I will be using it. Thanks!
Its important to know that we have these many marketing mediums and channels to podcast our information. People have to use them efficiently to reach out to the target audience. Video presentations will have a better reach.
I have been on a re purposing kick lately but I have no idea on how to do it.I have just making series out of related post but I like the ideas here especially the powerpoint
Writing about previous blogpost, is a great way to make to get new inspiration and develope ideas, and over a period of time make them more advanced.