A complete guide to repurposing content [including 9 real-life examples of repurposed content]
Masooma Memon
GatherContent Contributor, Writer
Repurposing your content not only gets you more mileage from the content you create but also helps distribute it better. But here’s the thing: simply copying and pasting a piece of content from your blog to social media isn’t content repurposing.
Instead, the correct way to recycle evergreen content is to tweak it to meet the expectations of each marketing channel.
Want to learn how to squeeze more value from the quality content you’ve been creating?
Read on to learn how to identify what content to repurpose. We’ve also got 9 real-life examples of how others are reusing their content.
Dig in.
Benefits of repurposing content
First things first, how does content repurposing help your content marketing strategy?
Assists with content distribution. Repurposing content, say by changing its format from written to audio content, helps you expand the content’s reach. This in turn ensures you aren’t solely focused on creating new content; you're promoting it, too.
Helps you maintain your publishing frequency and grow online presence. By repurposing content, you can continue pushing out high-quality content on different channels without having to stress over creating new content around the clock.
Meet your audience’s content demand. Not all people in your audience like to consume text-based content. Similarly, not all prefer consuming video content. Instead of alienating a slice of your target audience by creating a specific content format, repurpose your content. This way, you can meet your audience’s content demand by repackaging it into new formats.
Grow your online presence and reach a new audience. Reach audiences on new marketing channels by recycling content according to each channel’s requirements.
Boost your SEO. Having multiple content pieces on a single keyword improves your position in search engines. To boot, you can control the anchor text by linking the repurposed pieces back to your site.
How to determine which content to repurpose: 5 steps
Repurposing content isn’t limited to adding new life to evergreen, existing content. Instead, it’s an essential step to include in your current content creation strategy as you plan content.
Keeping this in mind, here are five ways to identify content to repurpose:
1. Highlight evergreen content
Go through the library of old blog posts you’ve created so far to see which content is high quality and relevant. Make a list of these evergreen pieces to add to your content repurposing stack.
2. Repurpose all new content
All long-form content that you create – be it blog content, research reports, whitepapers, etc. – deserves repurposing.
The reason? Repurposing content helps with content distribution. Therefore, a good first step is to add repurposing to your content workflow. This way, you wouldn’t skip it.
Need to know: Create a list of steps that go into your content creation process. Then, use GatherContent, a content collaboration platform, to add those steps into a project workflow. Example: ideation > briefing > draft writing > editing > publishing > distributing (repurposing content).
GatherContent lets you create a workflow so you can create quality content without missing any vital steps in the process.
3. Find out which posts are excelling
Take to Google Analytics to find out which of your posts are driving significant traffic.
"Ask yourself: 'What’s still earning visits, even though it’s buried? Why are people still interested in this topic?"
“Ideally, the core idea [of the content you plan to repurpose] should be valuable and interesting enough to the audience to need to be consumed across a variety of formats, and if it has evergreen staying power, all the better — you can use what you create longer,” writes Crawford.
4. Use Buzzsumo to identify socially popular topics
Enter keywords you’ve created content on in Buzzsumo. It’ll show you which of these keywords have popular posts on social media. This will give you more posts to repurpose.
5. Do some keyword research
This one’s a hat tip to Marie Lamonde, a Content Marketing Specialists at DashThis.
The best way to identify what content to repurpose is to do keyword research.
"Take a look at what your audience is searching for on the different platforms you’d like to tackle. For example, do YouTube keyword research, and depending on the results, you can repurpose some blog articles into videos that tackle these topics,"
Here’s how to repurpose content in different ways.
1. Repurpose a whitepaper or research report into a blog post
Highlight the key takeaways from the whitepaper or the main findings from a report and repackage them as a blog post.
Better yet, create a blog series highlighting the main takeaways, and release them over the course of a month to drive demand.
2. Turn a blog post into a Twitter thread or LinkedIn post
Take the sub-headings from your original post, add some context under each and share as a Twitter thread.
You can also do the same for creating LinkedIn or Facebook content. Instead of summarizing the entire blog post into a social post, take a single point and expand on it. This will give you 3-4 updates for social from one blog post.
Upwardly’s CEO, Aaron Gregory calls this “'chop-shopping’ content pieces into a handful of social media posts across the different social platforms”
The idea is simple:
"[Invest in a little] design work and a few clever captions to repurpose a single SEO optimized article into a half dozen social media posts."
Need to know: Include resizing blog graphics into your visual content creation checklist for the person responsible for creating visuals for your content. Then, add that checklist to your GatherContent brief for that person.
Highlight steps or takeaways from your blog post and convert them into an infographic. You can also share this infographic on social sites like Pinterest.
5. Create video content from your written content
This could be a video sharing key findings from your research report or a video discussing the topic you covered in your blog post.
Don’t have a YouTube channel? You can still leverage video by creating Loom video tutorials from your blog content. Embed these videos in your blog to increase the time visitors spend on your site.
You can also share these Loom videos on your social profiles and email newsletter.
6. Create audio content from blog content
Another way to repackage blog content is to create an audio file and share it on your blog post. This way, content consumers who prefer to listen to your blog content can tune in rather than read through all the text.
Finally, you can also repackage blog content as podcast episodes or vice versa.
7. Turn similar topic blog posts into an ebook
Alternatively, convert newsletters discussing the same topic into a round-up blog post or an ebook. You can also share the takeaways in slides and upload them to SlideShare.
8. Convert blog posts into PDF or gated content
Either let readers access blog content in PDF format or take the steps you share and convert them into a checklist or template. Now gate this content so you aren’t only repurposing content but also growing your email list.
9. Share blog content as Quora answer or email content
You can also reuse blog content as email content. Or, tweak the content and share it as answers to Quora questions. You can also create a week-long email course from the content you’ve already created.
Real examples of content repurposing
Finally, here are examples of how other companies are repurposing content.
1. Looka created a YouTube video from their blog post
“We noticed that a blog post we did to help international students answer basic questions about the U.S. financial system was resonating with our audience,” shares Gregory.
“So we took that blog post and turned it into a 20-page e-book guide that seeks to answer those common questions more comprehensively.”
3. Amanda Natividad reused their blog content as a Twitter thread
Here’s an example of Sparktoro’s Marketing Architect sharing their article for Adweek as a Twitter thread:
Influencer marketing is more than partnering with celebs and huge social accounts.
I wrote about this in Adweek, which is free today.
This newsletter content then directs readers to the original blog post so they repurpose content for different channels.
Foundation repurposes blog content into newsletter and social content.
8. Moz converted a Google doc template into a web page
“We had a blog post from 2014, sharing a content strategy template that lived within a Google Doc,” shares Crawford from the Moz team.
“Though the post still earned traffic, it was diminishing over time — but with analytics, we could see that clicks to the linked document were still high. People didn’t want the blog post so much as they wanted the template inside,” Crawford observes.
“I pulled the information from the document, updated the content, broke it into easily digestible sections, hosted it as its own one-page guide on the site, added contextually relevant CTAs throughout, and redirected the original blog post to the new template page.”
The result? “Now, the new page is discoverable on Google, earns a steady amount of traffic, and actually drives conversions, no longer hidden within a Google doc in an ancient blog post,” Crawford shares.
9. Hootsuite turned their research report into a blog post
And, that’s a wrap. Remember, you don’t have to create new content all the time. Instead, repurpose old content to distribute it better and to share different types of content formats.
But first, get your house in order by planning all content projects – new or repurposed ones in a content collaboration platform. Try GatherContent for free today.
"you don’t have to create new content all the time. Instead, repurpose old content to distribute it better and to share different types of content formats."
Instead, the correct way to recycle evergreen content is to tweak it to meet the expectations of each marketing channel.
Want to learn how to squeeze more value from the quality content you’ve been creating?
Read on to learn how to identify what content to repurpose. We’ve also got 9 real-life examples of how others are reusing their content.
Dig in.
Benefits of repurposing content
First things first, how does content repurposing help your content marketing strategy?
Assists with content distribution. Repurposing content, say by changing its format from written to audio content, helps you expand the content’s reach. This in turn ensures you aren’t solely focused on creating new content; you're promoting it, too.
Helps you maintain your publishing frequency and grow online presence. By repurposing content, you can continue pushing out high-quality content on different channels without having to stress over creating new content around the clock.
Meet your audience’s content demand. Not all people in your audience like to consume text-based content. Similarly, not all prefer consuming video content. Instead of alienating a slice of your target audience by creating a specific content format, repurpose your content. This way, you can meet your audience’s content demand by repackaging it into new formats.
Grow your online presence and reach a new audience. Reach audiences on new marketing channels by recycling content according to each channel’s requirements.
Boost your SEO. Having multiple content pieces on a single keyword improves your position in search engines. To boot, you can control the anchor text by linking the repurposed pieces back to your site.
How to determine which content to repurpose: 5 steps
Repurposing content isn’t limited to adding new life to evergreen, existing content. Instead, it’s an essential step to include in your current content creation strategy as you plan content.
Keeping this in mind, here are five ways to identify content to repurpose:
1. Highlight evergreen content
Go through the library of old blog posts you’ve created so far to see which content is high quality and relevant. Make a list of these evergreen pieces to add to your content repurposing stack.
2. Repurpose all new content
All long-form content that you create – be it blog content, research reports, whitepapers, etc. – deserves repurposing.
The reason? Repurposing content helps with content distribution. Therefore, a good first step is to add repurposing to your content workflow. This way, you wouldn’t skip it.
Need to know: Create a list of steps that go into your content creation process. Then, use GatherContent, a content collaboration platform, to add those steps into a project workflow. Example: ideation > briefing > draft writing > editing > publishing > distributing (repurposing content).
GatherContent lets you create a workflow so you can create quality content without missing any vital steps in the process.
3. Find out which posts are excelling
Take to Google Analytics to find out which of your posts are driving significant traffic.
"Ask yourself: 'What’s still earning visits, even though it’s buried? Why are people still interested in this topic?"
“Ideally, the core idea [of the content you plan to repurpose] should be valuable and interesting enough to the audience to need to be consumed across a variety of formats, and if it has evergreen staying power, all the better — you can use what you create longer,” writes Crawford.
4. Use Buzzsumo to identify socially popular topics
Enter keywords you’ve created content on in Buzzsumo. It’ll show you which of these keywords have popular posts on social media. This will give you more posts to repurpose.
5. Do some keyword research
This one’s a hat tip to Marie Lamonde, a Content Marketing Specialists at DashThis.
The best way to identify what content to repurpose is to do keyword research.
"Take a look at what your audience is searching for on the different platforms you’d like to tackle. For example, do YouTube keyword research, and depending on the results, you can repurpose some blog articles into videos that tackle these topics,"
Here’s how to repurpose content in different ways.
1. Repurpose a whitepaper or research report into a blog post
Highlight the key takeaways from the whitepaper or the main findings from a report and repackage them as a blog post.
Better yet, create a blog series highlighting the main takeaways, and release them over the course of a month to drive demand.
2. Turn a blog post into a Twitter thread or LinkedIn post
Take the sub-headings from your original post, add some context under each and share as a Twitter thread.
You can also do the same for creating LinkedIn or Facebook content. Instead of summarizing the entire blog post into a social post, take a single point and expand on it. This will give you 3-4 updates for social from one blog post.
Upwardly’s CEO, Aaron Gregory calls this “'chop-shopping’ content pieces into a handful of social media posts across the different social platforms”
The idea is simple:
"[Invest in a little] design work and a few clever captions to repurpose a single SEO optimized article into a half dozen social media posts."
Need to know: Include resizing blog graphics into your visual content creation checklist for the person responsible for creating visuals for your content. Then, add that checklist to your GatherContent brief for that person.
Highlight steps or takeaways from your blog post and convert them into an infographic. You can also share this infographic on social sites like Pinterest.
5. Create video content from your written content
This could be a video sharing key findings from your research report or a video discussing the topic you covered in your blog post.
Don’t have a YouTube channel? You can still leverage video by creating Loom video tutorials from your blog content. Embed these videos in your blog to increase the time visitors spend on your site.
You can also share these Loom videos on your social profiles and email newsletter.
6. Create audio content from blog content
Another way to repackage blog content is to create an audio file and share it on your blog post. This way, content consumers who prefer to listen to your blog content can tune in rather than read through all the text.
Finally, you can also repackage blog content as podcast episodes or vice versa.
7. Turn similar topic blog posts into an ebook
Alternatively, convert newsletters discussing the same topic into a round-up blog post or an ebook. You can also share the takeaways in slides and upload them to SlideShare.
8. Convert blog posts into PDF or gated content
Either let readers access blog content in PDF format or take the steps you share and convert them into a checklist or template. Now gate this content so you aren’t only repurposing content but also growing your email list.
9. Share blog content as Quora answer or email content
You can also reuse blog content as email content. Or, tweak the content and share it as answers to Quora questions. You can also create a week-long email course from the content you’ve already created.
Real examples of content repurposing
Finally, here are examples of how other companies are repurposing content.
1. Looka created a YouTube video from their blog post
“We noticed that a blog post we did to help international students answer basic questions about the U.S. financial system was resonating with our audience,” shares Gregory.
“So we took that blog post and turned it into a 20-page e-book guide that seeks to answer those common questions more comprehensively.”
3. Amanda Natividad reused their blog content as a Twitter thread
Here’s an example of Sparktoro’s Marketing Architect sharing their article for Adweek as a Twitter thread:
Influencer marketing is more than partnering with celebs and huge social accounts.
I wrote about this in Adweek, which is free today.
This newsletter content then directs readers to the original blog post so they repurpose content for different channels.
Foundation repurposes blog content into newsletter and social content.
8. Moz converted a Google doc template into a web page
“We had a blog post from 2014, sharing a content strategy template that lived within a Google Doc,” shares Crawford from the Moz team.
“Though the post still earned traffic, it was diminishing over time — but with analytics, we could see that clicks to the linked document were still high. People didn’t want the blog post so much as they wanted the template inside,” Crawford observes.
“I pulled the information from the document, updated the content, broke it into easily digestible sections, hosted it as its own one-page guide on the site, added contextually relevant CTAs throughout, and redirected the original blog post to the new template page.”
The result? “Now, the new page is discoverable on Google, earns a steady amount of traffic, and actually drives conversions, no longer hidden within a Google doc in an ancient blog post,” Crawford shares.
9. Hootsuite turned their research report into a blog post
And, that’s a wrap. Remember, you don’t have to create new content all the time. Instead, repurpose old content to distribute it better and to share different types of content formats.
But first, get your house in order by planning all content projects – new or repurposed ones in a content collaboration platform. Try GatherContent for free today.
"you don’t have to create new content all the time. Instead, repurpose old content to distribute it better and to share different types of content formats."
Masooma Memon is a pizza-loving freelance writer for SaaS. When she’s not writing actionable blog posts or checking off tasks from her to-do list, she has her head buried in a fantasy novel or business book. Connect with her on Twitter.
Share on Facebook
Share on Twitter
Share on LinkedIn
Share with email
