Our 5 Favorite Ways to Repurpose Content in 2021 (Number 3 will surprise you!)
We have content come out monthly in many places. It feels like we’re posting everywhere all the time, but it’s what works for us and helps us get our message across to more people in more places. On an average monthly basis, we have 8-10 blog posts, around 15 Instagram feed posts (not including daily Stories), 12+ total emails, 8-10 podcast episodes, and multiple posts to our Facebook groups.
For a small business, this is a LOT of content, which means a lot of time creating it. However, we definitely aren’t creating a lot of it from scratch. The key to saving time with content creation is to repurpose as much as you can. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel with everything you post!
So, in this blog post, we’re going to break down our top 5 favorite ways to repurpose content in 2021. (Spoiler alert: Number 3 will surprise you!)
Why You Should Repurpose Your Content
If not for the very obvious fact that you’ll be saving time and your creative sanity, there are other benefits to repurposing content. Not everyone follows you everywhere you are, and that’s just a fact. If you’re coming up with brand new content for every post on all your channels, there’s the huge possibility that those posts that are always different aren’t getting seen like they should. By repurposing, everyone has the chance to see your message.
And before you think, “But won’t that get old quickly for my audience to see the same message?”, the answer is no. 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. Ever heard of the marketing rule of 7? It states that people need to see or hear your message at least seven times before they take action.
Our Five Ways to Repurpose Content in 2021
1) USING MONTHLY THEMES
OK, so this first one is moreso a mix between content creation and content repurposing, but we promise it makes a heck of a difference in your monthly content strategy. What we like to do is establish a theme for each month, and then base our content around that theme— and we mean all of our content. This method is still fairly new for us, but from the change we’ve seen so far, we’ll never go back.
Our emails, social posts, podcast episodes, even our Creative Template Shop templates are all based on a central theme. This makes content creation ridiculously easy because we aren’t racking our brains for what to write about. We already know the main topic, and we just have to create posts based on that topic. And then, of course, we repurpose posts across our channels for consistency.
Of course, our themes are central to what we offer, so the content always works as a means of converting our audience into buyers (a.k.a. nurturing content). So, if you try this method, be sure you’re picking themes that are relevant to your industry and offer.
2) TURN YOUR BLOG POSTS INTO EMAILS
We send out a weekly newsletter to our list called our Sunday email. We would drive ourselves wild if we wrote up brand spanking new content each time! Before we implemented our monthly themes, we repurposed blog posts for these newsletters. It made perfect sense because we have hundreds of blog posts, and because we mostly write evergreen content (i.e. non-time sensitive), even our posts from 2015-2017 were still relevant and useful.
If you’re still fairly new to creating content for your business, this may not be a repurposing method for you. One reason is because 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.
But if you’ve built up a robust library of blog posts, chances are that there are 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.
3) TURN YOUR SHORT-FORM CONTENT INTO LONG-FORM CONTENT
We could have gone more specific with this one, like “Turn your Instagram captions into emails” or “Turn your TikTok videos into blog posts”, but it’s still the same method of repurposing at heart— turning your short-form content into long-form content. This is our new absolute favorite thing to do and we were mind-blown when we learned about this technique from Alisha Cohen.
It’s common to take your longer form content and turn it into short form content, but it can be overwhelming figuring out how to shorten something and still give all the necessary value. When creating long-form content, you start out with a small idea or outline anyway, right?
Alisha explained that her content starts with her 30-45 second TikTok videos. From there, it’s turned into written content with product links and the requisite SEO fluff, which gives her copywriter the basis to turn into a blog post. It’s then turned into a Pin, an Instagram post, and a Reel. If you’re a YouTuber, you can delve into that short TikTok video in a longer YouTube video as well. We don’t know about you, but this is an absolutely genius repurposing strategy to us!
4) GRAB QUOTES TO TURN INTO SHAREABLE GRAPHICS
We’re sure there’s plenty of great quotes throughout your content that you could turn into shareable graphics for social posts and Stories. You can then dive a little further into those quotes for a quick social caption. Shareable content increases your engagement and reach because the more people share it, the more fresh eyes see it. Plus, it’s a nice break from educational posts or posts directing people to a link.
5) USE YOUR LIVE ENGAGEMENT TO CREATE FREEBIES
Instead of trying to come up with an interesting idea for a freebie from scratch with an enticing headline only to risk letting your audience down, listen to what your audience wants! Take the questions you get during your Facebook lives or webinars, the comments on your blog posts, or the roadblocks people are expressing in your Facebook group or in your DMs, and use them to create a whole new resource for your people. Don’t let the opportunity go to waste!
And that wraps up our 5 favorite ways we’re repurposing content in 2021! We love to stick to strategies we know work, so chances are we’ll still be using these methods for a long time. Content creation has never been easier when you develop a flow for repurposing, so find your flow and get to mastering your content strategy!
We dive more into repurposing content in part of this podcast episode! We highly recommend checking it out if you’re curious about how others are repurposing their content in more intentional and strategic ways.
