18 Ways To Repurpose Blog Content (And Why You Should)
Sue Davison
May 13, 2024
Publishing regular blog content is a costly exercise for businesses. It takes time to develop a strategy and write targeted content that engages your audience, and if you outsource your blog writing, you'll want a decent return on investment. Yet so many small businesses publish blog posts and then forget about them. But here's the thing. Blog posts keep on giving. It's just a matter of knowing how to get more bang for your buck.
Smart marketers are strategic about their blogging efforts and use their best-converting articles to create additional marketing assets at very little cost. Digital marketers call this process 'repurposing content', i.e. taking something that exists already and repackaging it into something new.
Why repurpose blog content?
It takes effort to develop new content, so it's important to get as much mileage out of your blog posts as possible.
Repurposing your high-quality posts allows you to:
Bring more organic search engine traffic to your website
Reach potential customers via a broader range of marketing channels
Gain greater brand exposure and build your reputation
Keep visitors to your site engaged, which makes them more likely to convert
Always have new material for your content marketing strategy
Focus your marketing spend on developing content that you know works
Be more efficient with your marketing spend because you've already created the bulk of the content
Devote more time to making sales.
But how do you know which posts to repackage? Let's talk about the 80/20 rule.
The 80/20 rule
Have you ever heard of the Pareto Principle? It states that 80% of your results come from only 20% of your efforts. Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto first observed the rule in 1896 when he identified that approximately 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population. In business, this means that 80% of your profits come from just 20% of your clients or sales. And in marketing, the same rule applies.
Applying the Pareto Principle to your business blog
When you analyse your blogging efforts, you'll find that 80% of the traffic that your blog drives to your website is from 20% of your articles. It may seem like a depressing ratio at first glance, but knowing this information is the key to making your blog work much harder for you.
So, the first step to getting more from your blog is to identify which posts:
Drive the most traffic to your website
Get the most engagement on social channels
Receive the most backlinks from high-authority sites.
Having this information allows you to identify two things:
Which 20% of posts contain information that people need/want
Which 80% of posts are bringing you little of a return on investment.
What can you do with these insights?
Identify which high-performing posts can yield a greater return through a repurposing strategy.
Consider which of your lower-performing posts can be repurposed into content that will perform better.
How to repurpose your blog content
When you use your imagination, there are countless ways to reuse good content at minimal cost. Here are 18 proven techniques to get you started.
1. Use snippets in social media posts
Every blog post, even the ones that aren't performing as well as you'd like, contains nuggets of information that will benefit your target audiences. Pull out key information and repackage it as bite-sized insights. These snippets of information make brilliant, high-value social media posts. And it's so quick and easy to do. Use a free design app like Canva or Adobe Spark to make your posts stand out, or if you're short on time, just add an image.
Get more from your snippets by:
Sharing them in groups as well as on your profile.
Searching Quora for a question related to your blog post and posting the snippet as your answer.
Including a link to your blog post for more information on the topic.
2. Link old posts to new posts
If you're writing about a topic that overlaps with one of your existing blog posts, include a snippet of information from the old post and link back to it for more detailed information. This works really well with the pillar page and topic cluster approach to blogging.
3. Create an infographic
Hire a graphic designer to create powerful infographics. Or, if you have the time and design flair, you can create them in-house. Take the key points from a blog post and use free online software, such as Canva, Venngage or Piktochart, to turn your words into a quick-reference visual.
4. Publish a podcast
Podcasts are growing in popularity, and they're easy to create if you follow this step-by-step tutorial by Podcast Insights.
5. Create a slide deck
Turn the main points from your blog post into a slide deck and upload it to SlideShare. This Hubspot article guides you through the process.
6. Make a short explainer video
Video is here to stay. As a visual species, humans find videos more engaging, more memorable, and more popular than any other type of content.
Not everyone has the time or inclination to read a blog article, but they will hit play on a short explainer video. You can appeal to both the readers and viewers in your target audience by:
Using your blog posts as the basis for video scripts.
Using your videos to inform blog posts.
7. Run a blog round-up
You want people who read your blog to keep coming back for more, right? The easiest way to do this is to get them to subscribe to a regular blog round-up.
8. Hold a webinar
Would your blog post make a good foundation for a Keynote presentation? YouTube and Google Hangouts make it easy to stream your talk to a live online audience. The tutorial below gets you into the swing of it. Don't forget that you can get even more value from your content by uploading your webinar as a YouTube video, too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SH30xrg5mKY
9. Create a PDF download
There's so much mileage with this one. You can take key points from one or multiple posts to create downloadable checklists and cheat sheets or use blog content to produce detailed guides on a range of topics. Downloads make great opt-in bribes for building your email lists.
10. Write a course
How about using your blog content as the foundation of an online or face-to-face training course? If you're writing quality content and an expert in your field, you have valuable insights to share. Platforms like Teachable and Udemy make it easy for you to present your online courses as a professional package, and they have your marketing covered, too.
11. Write a book
Blog posts don't just make good downloads; they can be the chapters of an E-book or physical book, too. Look through your content and see if you have enough material to cover every aspect of the subject that you want the book to be about. If not, get writing, and you can share those missing chapters on your blog as well. Be prepared to do a little extra work. Readers expect your thoughts and comments to be backed up by solid evidence, so those bullet lists in your blog article might need to become fuller subsections.
Good old Hubspot has some easy-to-digest guidance on how to approach writing an E-book, along with a few free templates.
12. Develop an email marketing campaign
Email campaigns are far from dead. Turn your content into an easy-to-digest 'Did you know?' or 'How-to" email series. This kind of campaign is a win-win. It gives your readers valuable and actionable content while raising your brand awareness and trust.
13. Publish an update
Keeping existing content fresh with updates or adding more detailed information is great for SEO, and it gives you a reason to put old content in front of your audience again. If you have archived articles that refer to a particular year, such as "Search Engine Optimisation Best Practices in 2019", update them annually to keep them current and relevant.
14. Combine old to make new
Remember that 80% of content that isn't working so hard for you? Consider combining related posts to make more in-depth articles that give greater value to your readership.
15. Write a case study
Write client case studies that illustrate the points you make in a popular blog post and link the original post to the case study. This will help with SEO, build trust in your brand, and improve conversion. Optinmonster does this well.
16. Build authority with an expert round-up
This technique is another twist on reusing an old article. Take the topic of a popular post and ask a selection of experts to answer a question on the subject. Publish their answers in a round-up article and link back to the original post for more detailed information on the topic.
17. Write a guest post
Lift the main points from a blog article and re-write the post as a guest post for a high-authority site. Take a look at Backlinko's Guest Blogging: The Definitive Guide for ideas on how to create a guest posting strategy.
And finally…
18. Syndicate it
Content syndication is when third parties re-publish your online content, exposing you to new audiences. You can do this with any content – blog posts, infographics, videos, etc. Find out more in this Hubspot article.
The bottom line
When you repurpose content, you get a higher return on investment. Businesses that repurpose their content are strategic. They look for every drop of return that they can get from a single marketing asset and make it work its socks off. Building a repurposing strategy also highlights gaps in your marketing arsenal. You'll be able to identify:
Gaps in high-performing content for specific stages of the purchase cycle or audience segments.
Topics that you could cover in more breadth or detail.
Additional topics that may interest current or new audiences.
Repurposing top-quality content makes sense on every level. It adds value to your initial content marketing investment, and it makes creating new content a low-cost activity.
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