6 Ways to Repurpose Your Content and Save Your Creative Sanity
From ideation to outlining, drafting, editing, to formatting, consistently creating content for your business can feel like a never-ending to-do list. No sooner are you done with one blog post, vlog, or podcast episode, and it’s time to move on to the next one.
But what if instead of creating more content, you could just add just a few extra steps to the content you’re already taking the time to create and turn it into two, three, or even four additional pieces of content?
That, my friends, is what’s called content repurposing, and if you do it strategically, you can save a ton of time along with your creative sanity.
Pros for Repurposing Your Content
Not everyone is going to see what you're sharing everywhere. With content repurposing, you can effectively carry your message out to more people in more places.
People need to hear messages multiple times and sometimes in a couple of different formats for it to sink in and for them to act on it.
Six Ways to Strategically Repurpose Your Content
1) Turning a Facebook Live into a Blog Post
For entrepreneurs who don’t love to write, sitting down to create a 1,000+ word blog post a few times a week (or even once a week!) can be a slog. Even if you do love writing, it’s no secret that blogging is one of the more time-consuming methods of creating content. But it’s also one of the most valuable, since it significantly increases your website’s SEO.
Rather than sitting down to write out a blog post, you can knock out two pieces of content at once by recording a Facebook Live that you can repurpose into a blog post. Here’s how:
Come up with a useful and entertaining topic for when you go live and outline the main points you’ll be covering. It’s important to remember that even though speaking is much faster than writing, you still want to stay on-topic and focused.
Once you’ve published your live video to your page, download the video and get it transcribed. You can do this by typing it up yourself, or by hiring a VA, or uploading it to a transcription service like Rev.
If you have a VA to do the task of transcribing, you could also have them format and edit the transcription to work as a blog post, or you can take on that task yourself. It will still take time, but not nearly as much as writing a post from scratch.
So now, in addition to leveraging Facebook Live to bring your business page some love and giving you an opportunity to have off-the-cuff conversations with your audience in real-time, you’ve also created a solid piece of written content to work into your blog’s editorial calendar.
2) Turning Your Facebook Lives into Your Podcast
Along the same lines of repurposing your Facebook Live into a blog post, you can also use your time recording your Facebook Live session to create the content for your podcast.
Now there’s one caveat to this kind of content repurposing as opposed to turning your Live recordings into reading material: you need to ensure quality audio and record it separately.
See, when you’re recording Live video, people aren’t typically picky about crystal-clear sound quality because they can see you. They also understand that live streaming makes it hard to produce Hollywood level camera and sound work, which isn’t the point anyway.
But, if you plan to repurpose your material and kill two birds with one stone, here’s how to do it successfully:
Prep Work: create your topic and outline and find a filming space that’s quiet and has good light.
Fire up your separate audio recording set-up with a plug-in USB microphone and your recording software (like Garageband or Audacity).
Hit record on your audio recorder and then head to Facebook and go live.
After you’ve wrapped up your session, you can take your audio and edit it yourself or have someone edit it for you to take out filler words or things you don’t want in your podcast recording (like saying "thanks for joining me live"), adding your intro music, or adding any ads or podcast-specific calls-to-action.
3) Turning Your Newsletters into a Podcast
If you’re one of those people who loves to write (I’m right there with ya, sister), you can give your writing new life and expose it to new members of your audience simply by reading your written content aloud.
One of my favorite online influencers, Paul Jarvis, does this with his weekly Sunday Dispatches newsletters by first sending them to his list and then uploading the audio to his identically-titled podcast.
Personally, I’m a fan of reading his articles, but some people would rather listen to a 5-10 minute episode on their commute to work or while they fold laundry.
With any of these content repurposing ideas, it’s important to think about how your audience consumes content and how to meet them where they are. Just because you prefer creating content in one medium doesn’t mean that it’s the best method of sharing your ideas, entertaining, or educating your audience.
4) Turning Evergreen Blog Content into Newsletter Content
If you’re relatively new to your business and just starting to create content for your brand, this isn’t a content repurposing method I would recommend right off the bat. However, if you’ve created a robust library of evergreen (i.e. non-time sensitive, always relevant) content on your blog, it’s time to breathe some new life back into those posts!
One reason I don’t recommend this repurposing method for everyone is that if you’re new to creating content for your business, you want your emails to have a level of exclusivity to them. If you’re sending your subscribers the same thing they can currently find on your blog or in your social media feeds, they don’t have much of an incentive to keep you in their inbox.
On the other hand, if you’re someone who’s been consistently creating content for a while, chances are that there a lot of people on your list who haven’t read your earlier blog posts. Also, if someone has been a blog reader since your early days, they probably won't remember reading it (no offense to your writing, most people just need to see information several times to recall it).
Here are a few ways you can repurpose your blog content and newsletter content:
Take one of your older blog posts with still-relevant takeaways, brush it up to make it new if you feel like it needs a little reworking, and send to your list.
Do the reverse and take one of your older email newsletters and repurpose it into a blog post. This is also an excellent way to incentivize people to join your list! Add a note to your post that says, “This article originally appeared in my [insert name of your email series if you have one]. To get new articles to your inbox every [let them know when they can expect emails from you], sign up here.”
In a similar fashion, you could also create a drip sequence so that your killer emails aren't one-and-done. A drip sequence consists of putting your content in a queue so that no matter when someone signs up for your list, they start receiving the first email in your drip sequence, not necessarily your most current newsletter. Again, this won’t work for everyone; this is better for someone who primarily writes evergreen content for their email list.
5) Rip Your Content Apart for Pull Quotes
You know you need to be sharing your original content across your social media channels and sharing those updates repeatedly. After all, you spent all that time creating something you hope your audience will love, so it doesn’t deserve to sit in your archives gathering virtual dust!
So, in addition to recycling those social media posts promoting your older content, you can also repurpose bits and pieces of those blogs posts, vlogs, or podcasts and turn them into new soundbites for social media.
No, it’s not the same as re-promoting your content, although you could do that simultaneously, I’m suggesting that you take a great punchline or pull-quote from your longer pieces of content and turn that into a whole new “micro-blog” on social media. Some ways you could do this are turning it into a motivational quote or one-minute video on Instagram, creating a longer tip post on Facebook, or a story on Snapchat.
The idea here is that you’ve already put out valuable ideas and information, so you can spread your ideas further by reworking them and expanding upon them to fit the medium and audience on your other channels. This is also a nice way to mix up content so that you're not always directing people to a link and are instead giving them value right where they are.
6) Repurpose your Live Engagement into Your Lead Magnets
Lead magnets are arguably one of the toughest pieces of content to create because they’ve got to be enticing enough that the idea and headline alone makes people want to hand over their precious email address, plus, you have to make sure you truly deliver on your promise and deliver the goods.
Nothing is worse for someone who decided to take an act of trust with you, than being let down by a subpar freebie when you promised them the moon. #wompwomp
So, to ensure that your lead magnet is:
something your audience will love, and
something you can speak to and create an awesome freebie for.
Listen to what your audience tells you they want!
All those questions you get at the end of webinars? Turn them into a lead magnet.
Questions and comments you get on your blog? Dig into those deeper in a freebie.
Those concerns, frustrations, and struggles you see over and over again in your Facebook groups? Give people the solution they need in your opt-in!
If you truly know and love your craft, you’ll have no problem taking a someone’s question or a post you commonly see in Facebook groups or in your blog comments and expanding it into a whole new resource for your people.
Don’t let those opportunities go to waste. If someone trusts you enough to ask for your thoughts on their question, increase that “know” and “like” factor by giving away more than they expected.
So, there you have it! Six ways to repurpose your content so that you're not only providing more value for your audience, but you're also reaching more people and making the process of creating original content a heck of a lot easier on yourself.
Win for them, win for you — everybody's winning! *written in my best Oprah voice*
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
As a content strategist and copywriter, Danielle helps businesswomen craft heartfelt online content that sparks meaningful real-life connections with their dream clients and customers. A storyteller at heart, she believes that creating content for your business doesn’t have to make you want to rip your hair out and that everyone can find the methods that work best with their storytelling and strategy style. When she’s not punching away at her keyboard, you can probably find Danielle getting her nature geek on while hiking in one of America’s National Parks or being a bookworm with one of her five books in constant rotation.
