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.
First things first, how does content repurposing help your content marketing strategy?
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:
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.
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.
Take to Google Analytics to find out which of your posts are driving significant traffic.
“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.
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.
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.
Here’s how to repurpose content in different ways.
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.
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:
One thing to be mindful of here: make sure you resize the blog graphic to the correct image dimension for each social channel you share it on.
Visuals such as infographics have the potential to grow readership by 80%. This explains why 67% of B2B marketers invest in creating infographics.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Finally, here are examples of how other companies are repurposing content.
They repackaged their guide on choosing a logo font into a YouTube video on the same topic.
“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.”
Here’s an example of Sparktoro’s Marketing Architect sharing their article for Adweek as a Twitter thread:
This Instagram post is repurposed from their annual video marketing survey.
This episode is live as a blog post, too.
James Clear regularly shares snippets from his book, Atomic Habits, in his newsletter.
Here’s a thread sharing how Zapier grew organically from one of their team members:
This newsletter content then directs readers to the original blog post so they repurpose content for different channels.
“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.
The Hootsuite team plucked data from their Digital 2021 Report and packed it as 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.
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.
First things first, how does content repurposing help your content marketing strategy?
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:
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.
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.
Take to Google Analytics to find out which of your posts are driving significant traffic.
“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.
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.
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.
Here’s how to repurpose content in different ways.
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.
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:
One thing to be mindful of here: make sure you resize the blog graphic to the correct image dimension for each social channel you share it on.
Visuals such as infographics have the potential to grow readership by 80%. This explains why 67% of B2B marketers invest in creating infographics.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Finally, here are examples of how other companies are repurposing content.
They repackaged their guide on choosing a logo font into a YouTube video on the same topic.
“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.”
Here’s an example of Sparktoro’s Marketing Architect sharing their article for Adweek as a Twitter thread:
This Instagram post is repurposed from their annual video marketing survey.
This episode is live as a blog post, too.
James Clear regularly shares snippets from his book, Atomic Habits, in his newsletter.
Here’s a thread sharing how Zapier grew organically from one of their team members:
This newsletter content then directs readers to the original blog post so they repurpose content for different channels.
“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.
The Hootsuite team plucked data from their Digital 2021 Report and packed it as 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.
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.