by Dean Valerio AS an online business, producing consistent, useful and engaging content is at the forefront of your content marketi...
by Dean Valerio
AS an online business, producing consistent, useful and engaging content is at the forefront of your content marketing strategy.
It’s a way to maximize your visibility as a brand and it’s used to attract leads and retain them.
But a problem often ensues for many marketers and staff writers when it comes to content. Having to constantly create original and valuable content on a weekly, biweekly, or even monthly basis can be a challenge.
In fact, for most bloggers, the biggest problem is creating stellar content on a regular basis. It might be because you lack the time to create it yourself or you lack the funds to hire out your content creation to a professional writer.
There’s More to Content Marketing Than Your Blog
Let’s be honest here.
As a small business owner with a website, when you think of content you probably automatically think of a blog.
It’s no wonder most do since a blog can be a wonderful marketing tool for your business.
For example, HubSpot learned that a blog can bring 55% more website visitors per month – and B2C companies can generate up to 88% more leads – simply by blogging.
But, if the last time you published a blog post was three months ago, it’s unlikely it’s generating much traffic (unless you’re an SEO rock star that is), let alone actual business for you.
See, the real problem lies in producing shareable, valuable and engaging content for your visitors.
Instead of thinking about coming up with your next blog post, why not start thinking about producing other forms of content that may be better suited for your target audience?
Repurposing Old Content
One fantastic way to accomplish this is to repurpose your content. It’s a smart way to use old content in a new way – content that you know was well written and full of good strategies.
The idea of repurposing your content means reusing and reformatting your older content – blog posts, white papers, newsletters, etc. – and making it suitable for other mediums.
By using a new format for older content, you can reach a new audience and new traffic.
Let’s look at 5 excellent ways to repurpose your content.
1. SlideShare
A great way to make use of white papers and presentations is to upload them to SlideShare. LinkedIn SlideShare is a platform that enables businesses and bloggers to upload slide presentations and share them on the web. In fact, business executives may use it five times more than other social networks like Facebook or Twitter.
Simply drag and drop your PowerPoint presentations or PDF’s and turn them into sleek and professional looking pieces of content.
Since visual content is easier to share, repurposing content in this way can prove to generate additional traffic to your site.
Anna Hoffman of Traffic Generation Café, went from 0 to 243,000 views in only 30 days from her SlideShare presentations.
Her SlideShares also had several first-page rankings in Google and SlideShare was her second largest referral traffic source.
To use SlideShare as a traffic generator, follow these tips:
- When outlining your SlideShare, optimize it with keywords. In particular, use keywords in the title, description, tags, and in your slides.
- Use images to convey each point in your presentation
- Include a call-to-action at the end of your SlideShare (can embed a link)
Once published, you can embed your SlideShare in your blog post and on your LinkedIn profile.
Make sure to share it across all social media channels to reach a new audience.
2. Webinars
Webinars are a popular way to repurpose your content, drive more traffic to your site and above all, generate more leads and sales for your business.
You might have noticed postings on social media to join a webinar. They usually look a little something like this:
https://twitter.com/search?q=free+webinar
Webinars are live workshops where people usually have to sign up to your list to get access to the training session – making them an excellent list builder and lead generation tool.
When used to generate traffic they are free to attend, can be collaborative – a joint webinar – and research indicates that marketers rate webinars as one of the top effective marketing strategies.
By sharing your webinar sign up page all over social media you reach more people – and generate more traffic – as most bloggers hosting the webinar encourage sign ups to share the fact that you signed up to the webinar.
You can repurpose old blog posts and turn them into a webinar. For example, if you’re doing a spotlight series you can create a Keynote presentation and turn it into a webinar to either raise brand awareness to new people, or to pitch your latest digital product.
Running a typical hour-long webinar with a live Q&A at the end isn’t an entirely hands-off experience, but when the webinar is based on your already existing content, most of the hard work is already done for you.
To start doing webinars you can use a free option like Google Hangouts on Air, or choose from many paid options available such as GoToWebinar, WebinarJam or Crowdcast. For increased quality and professionalism you might consider investing in a microphone and/or a high quality web cam for your webinars.
On the marketing side of creating a webinar, you’ll want to send out a few reminder emails since many people sign up on a whim, or simply forget they signed up.
Most bloggers record their webinars and send the replay to those who have signed up to the workshop. Since not everyone can make your live training session, it’s a good idea to provide a replay. The replay video also makes a fantastic lead magnet and the video becomes valuable repurposed content.
3. LinkedIn Pulse
LinkedIn opened up their publishing platform Pulse in early 2014 to existing members which created an opportunity to market your business.
Many businesses use the Pulse as a place to repurpose their content and bring new traffic back to their site.
It’s easy to set up. On your LinkedIn homepage, just click on Write an article.
You’re then taken to the publishing platform where you can repurpose an old blog post, newsletter, white paper, press release, or any other type of content into a shareable article.
Before you publish your post you are allowed three tags to make it easier for people to find your post.
You can then share it on Facebook or Twitter right away.
What’s great about using the Pulse to repurpose your content is that LinkedIn refers around 64% of traffic to business sites. This is a strong indication that you might fare better by moving your blog to LinkedIn.
For example, Great Jakes, a website builder for law firms, used LikedIn to repurpose an old blog post of theirs.
Within 24 hours, they received 5,400 pageviews and around 25 comments. This had a great traffic turnout than the original content on their blog, which had 648 pageviews and only four comments.
4. Infographics
A popular way to repurpose your content is to create an infographic. Infographics are a visual way to show your content or other sources of content, stats and figures.
It usually conveys facts in a visual representation, making it easier for people to digest and share.
These types of repurposed content graphics are popular over on Pinterest, so much so that two new forms of the infographic emerged: the instructographic, which shows a visual representation of a step-by-step instruction and the gifographic, which is an animated infographic.
It’s simple to repurpose your blog posts or other pieces of content into an infographic.
Find your most popular pieces of content, highlight the main points, hire a designer to compose them into a graphic – try Fiverr or Upwork – and then share it on social media.
If you’re budget conscious you can create your own infographic using a free infographic tool like Venngage or Piktochart.
While infographics aren’t as popular for generating tons of traffic back to your site as a few years ago, they can still help you generate more traffic overall.
For example, Neil Patel mentioned that Kissmetric’s infographics have generated over 2 million visitors and over 60,000 shares and likes.
5. Free Email Course
A popular lead magnet for many bloggers and business is to offer a free email course or video course.
Many marketers and bloggers are moving away from the traditional eBook or PDF report, and instead are incentivizing their email list with a mini course. For visitors, a course seems more valuable than a white paper or guide.
What’s great about an email course is that you can use old content like previous blog posts, and reformat them into an email course.
You can easily do this by figuring out what the biggest problem your audience has is, and then using the blog posts that tackle those issues – turning them into an email course.
For example, over on It’s Organized, Jackie has a 5-day free email course on Photoshop for Bloggers.
She knows her audience probably struggles with creating shareworthy graphics on Photoshop.
And her blog is filled with content that she can repurpose into this course.
Grow Your Audience and Your Site
Repurposing content is an easy way to keep your blog afloat when you’re too busy to create content – or when hiring a writer to create new content isn’t financially feasible.
By using existing content from your site like popular blog posts, press releases, eBooks and other guides, you can turn them into powerful pieces of marketing content like a SlideShare – or use them to form the core of webinar.
This can help you reach more people and bring more traffic back to your site. Similarly, repurposing your content by publishing it on another platform like LinkedIn’s Pulse or Medium can broaden your core target audience and get your brand on the map.
Finally, by repurposing old content into infographics or an email course, you make it easier for people to consume your content when it’s presented in a different medium.
Over to you – have you repurposed your content before?
Maybe you need a little help getting started?
Check out this great repurposing tool called Designerr. It grabs content and helps you transform it into a customizable eBook. Upgrade your content to reach a new audience and generate more traffic today!
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