How to Repurpose Blog Content: the Basics for Business Bloggers
Sarah
A business blog can provide you with myriad benefits, not the least of which are providing added value to customers and giving you a platform from which to promote your business with new content that may be optimized for greater visibility.
But managing your business blog is no walk in the park. Even if you are passionate and knowledgeable about your particular field, coming up with topics and creating informative and entertaining content can become more and more difficult over time. And the investment you make in your business blog can seem never-ending.
But the payoff could be significant in terms of increasing traffic and ultimately, sales, so it’s well worth your time and effort to create a successful blog for your business. And the prospect can be made easier when you learn how to repurpose blog content. This doesn’t mean simply re-posting useful or popular blogs, however. You must reuse content in new and creative ways if you want to engage your audience and provide them with added value.
The basics of this principle can be applied in a variety of ways, allowing you to enjoy the benefits inherent to repurposing content for your business blog.
What it Means to Repurpose Blog Content
Let’s first explore what it means to repurpose blog content. Suppose you come up with an incredible idea for a blog post that provides your readers with invaluable information. If the content is not only useful, but the presentation is compelling, it may become popular, get liked and shared, and boost your visibility in the process. And you’ll likely want to replicate this success and spread your content as far as possible, reaching new readers and expanding your online presence in the process. This can be done in a variety of ways when you repurpose your blog content.
For one thing, you could transfer your content to several formats, creating infographics or videos related to the content, just for example. But you can do more than simply restate the same information. You may also come at it from a different angle, updating or integrating new information as it becomes available.
Or you might cross-reference related disciplines in order to appeal to a larger audience. Say you’re discussing the emergence of new technologies and you find a way to angle the content towards environmental concerns, the economy, or even art and entertainment.
In this way you can reuse the same information in different ways, finding a new means of making it relevant to your audience while also reaching new audiences and simultaneously cutting the time, effort, and cost you must put into content creation.
Repurpose Blog Content: The Many Benefits
Reap the many benefits when you repurpose blog content:
- Save time and money
- Add value for readers
- Appeal to new readers
- Target all types of learners (visual, auditory, etc.)
- Provide content for multiple platforms (social media)
- Increase sharing
- Increase conversions
If you repurpose blog content in creative and thoughtful ways, keeping the wants and needs of consumers in mind, you stand to lose next to nothing in the process. The only way this could potentially backfire is if you simply re-post rather than repurpose blog content. It’s important that you don’t underestimate the faculty of readers to spot something they’ve seen before. You need to make your repurposed content fresh if you want to keep the attention of readers.
How to Decide Which Blog Content Deserves Repurposing
Repurposing blog content can be a dicey undertaking. But there are a couple of ways to decide what’s worth repurposing. The first thing to pay attention to is whether or not content is timely. Evergreen content is information that isn’t tied to a particular time or event – it retains utility despite the passage of time. This is the best type of content to repurpose for readers new and old because you can find new ways to make it valuable for those who are aware of it already.
But you also need to keep an eye on which content is the most popular. By following metrics you can easily determine which blog posts have been viewed, liked, and shared the most. In some cases this may be related to a timely news tidbit. But if the popularity of a post has more to do with the timeless appeal of the information included, it may be a good candidate for your designs when it comes to repurposing blog content.
Different Ways to Repurpose Blog Content
There are literally dozens of ways to repurpose blog content. For example, you might:
- Turn it into an infographic
- Create a YouTube video
- Deliver it in a podcast
- Delve deeper into the topic with an e-book
- Add significant portions to your regular newsletter
- Pare it down for social media
- Seek cross-promotional opportunities with adjacent blogs
You can even repurpose blog content for real-world applications like presentations for clients or business partners, or for use in seminars. If you attend industry trade shows you could utilize information presented in your blog for pamphlets, banners, or other promotional materials, especially if you have access to statistics or concise quotes.
When you repurpose blog content, you have many options to explore – the only thing that might hold you back is a lack of imagination, although knowing the mediums you’re working with can certainly help to provide a springboard. And of course, when you repurpose blog content it takes a lot less effort (in most cases) than coming up with completely new ideas for blog posts. As long as you find new ways to use the content so as to make it timely, relevant, and useful to readers, you stand to come out ahead when you repurpose blog content.
No matter what type of business you’re running, having an online presence is essential. And an on-site blog is the next step if you want to appeal to a wider audience, deliver added value for customers, and expand your visibility in the online arena. But you absolutely must operate it in an efficient manner if you want to achieve overall success. Repurposing blog content is one of the best ways to accomplish these many goals.