Blogging on a regular basis is one of the very best things you can do to increase traffic to your website, improve your search rankings, and build awareness around your brand. However, the content you create on your blog doesn’t have to exist in a vacuum,
In this article, I will outline six of my favorite methods for repurposing your posts elsewhere online. You don’t have to use all of these tactics, but if you use just a few with each of your posts, you’ll be able to generate more traffic for just a small amount of additional effort.
Now, let me get one thing out of the way before we begin…
Everything I’m about to tell you is based on the simple premise that the content you produce on your blog is of an extremely high quality. I am assuming that you put a lot of effort in each of your posts, so that your readers are left with highly relevant and authoritative content.
If you’re not already producing high-quality original content, these tips won’t help you much. Since there is already so much junk published everyday, you’ll just be adding to the content landfill if you’re repurposing unoriginal and uninformative drivel.
That might sound harsh, but that’s just the way it is these days. Content marketing is a highly competitive game, and only the very best content can rise to the top and get noticed.
With that being said, let’s get to the tips, shall we?
1. Create a slide deck on SlideShare
SlideShare might not get a lot of attention from bloggers and the press, but it is still a very valuable place to repurpose your content. If you’re not already familiar with the platform, here’s a little bit of the backstory directly from the source:
SlideShare was founded in October 2006 and acquired by LinkedIn in May 2012. It allows users to easily upload and share presentations, infographics, documents, videos, PDFs, and webinars. In Q4 of 2013, the site averaged 60 million unique visitors a month and 215 million page views. SlideShare is among the top 120 most-visited websites in the world.
In order to use SlideShare effectively, you’ll need to create slide decks (PowerPoints or Keynote presentations both work great) and publish them on your own channel.
Simply take your main points, create a different slide for each one, add some graphics, slap on a title slide and voilà! When you’re done, you can even embed your presentation elsewhere online.
2. Create a podcast
Podcasting sounds complicated, but it is actually pretty simple stuff. You can start a podcast in no time at all, and you can use the content that is already published on your blog as the basis for your episodes.
All you have to do is record an audio narration of your articles, add a little something extra for your listeners, and publish it on iTunes for people to find.
You don’t have to go all out and create hour-long episodes. You can start by simply narrating your written articles. Someone who does this quite well is Facebook expert Jon Loomer. I routinely listen to the audio versions of his blog posts as I’m driving to work.
3. Shoot a video
Let’s face it, many people just don’t like to read. If all you’re doing is writing blog posts, you’re missing out on a significant portion of your potential audience. To capture these non-readers, podcasting certainly helps, but video usually works even better.
When we think of online video, we usually think of YouTube, so that’s where you should start. You can begin with the same strategy outlined above for podcasting; record short episodes based off of the content of each of your blog posts. If you can add some graphics and visual flair to each video, that’s even better.
4. Generate social media updates
If you’re publishing quality content, then each of your posts contains several valuable insights that can be used for social media content.
For instance, instead of sharing the same title of my blog posts on Twitter or Facebook again and again, I like to find three to five short sentences that summarize the main points in the post and publish those instead.
By doing this, you’re generating fresh content for your social media channels while repurposing your existing content. Give it a try, because this really works.
5. Design an infographic
You might have to hire a graphic designer for this one, but with the right content and the right audience, an infographic can be well worth the investment.
Infographics are some of the most frequently shared content online today. People love them because they are informative, fun, visual, easy to consume and easy to share. And infographics are only going to become more popular as people consume more and more content on mobile devices.
In order to repurpose one of your blog articles as an infograpic, you’re going to have to start with an article that has a fair amount of data, facts, and figures in it. Infographics that turn boring statistics into exciting visual representations usually do pretty well.
To find an infographic designer, I recommend looking on Elance, Fiverr, or some of the more specialized infographic design sites such as Visually (although their packages start at $1,995).
6. Refresh older articles
Nothing lasts forever. This applies to blog posts as well. If you’ve been blogging for a while, you probably have some articles that are not as relevant today as they were when you originally published them.
Instead of letting these posts collect dust and show their age, you should consider refreshing them with updated information, while still keeping the original structure. The key to refreshing your blog posts is to use moderation. Don’t try to reinvent the wheel. Look for a few strategic changes you could make that will make it relevant today.
When done correctly, you can take old content and spruce it up with just a little effort, leading to higher search rankings and even more traffic long after the original publication date.
How do you repurpose your content?
These are just a few of the popular ways you can repurpose your blog content. If you have other suggestions not mentioned above, I’d like to hear about them. Please leave a comment below or reach out on Twitter. As always, thanks for reading!
