Regular, quality content is still important for SEO, whether your customers are looking on Google, ChatGPT, or any other AI chatbot. It can help build trust amongst customers, place you as an expert in your niche, and keep your website fresh and relevant.
But creating content is also a time-consuming task and busy business owners may lack the time or headspace to continually come up with new pieces.
Fortunately, there is a way to make your content go further, saving you time and effort, and freeing you up to do other things.
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What is Repurposed Content?
Repurposed content is any form of your own content that has been lengthened, shortened, or reformatted so that it can be used on a different platform or in a different way. A blog becomes a podcast, a podcast becomes a video, a video is clipped into an Instagram reel. It saves the creator time and gives an audience the chance to experience content in their preferred format.
Let’s take a look at some of the ways you can repurpose existing and future content to create a much larger library to draw on.
Ways to Repurpose Content
Divide and Expand Existing Blogs
Detailed and in-depth blogs about topics you’re knowledgeable in are a great way to obtain traffic, build your reputation, and be recommended in AI chats and summaries.
Sometimes, though, a topic is so in-depth and interesting that covering it all in a single post is too much. It’s unlikely that most audiences are going to read a blog that is thousands of words long.
So maybe you’ve written a blog, but have only scratched the topic’s surface? In that case, go through the post and see where you could expand. For each sub-topic, you can create a brand new blog that covers it in more depth. Those new blogs can, in turn, be repurposed in the ways I discuss further on.
Not only does this provide you with more pieces of content, it allows users to easily dip into a topic or deep dive into a niche as they prefer. Remember to include a master page that links to all the sub-topic pages so that those that want to can easily find and read the whole thing.
Create a Video
Some people love a guide that they can read, while others prefer to watch a video. So creating a video of your written content, or repurposing a video as a blog, is a great opportunity to reach different demographics. You can get on camera yourself, hire actors, go for an animated option, or even generate something with AI. Getting on camera yourself is often the cheapest and quickest option; you don’t even need a proper camera, just a decent phone and some basic equipment.
You can then post the video on your website, YouTube, Vimeo, social media, or even use it on external sites and in adverts.
Record a Podcast
It seems as though everyone nowadays has their own podcast, and with good reason. Unlike video and written content, podcasts allow users to easily listen to your information when they’re in the car, out on a walk, or doing chores around the house. There are a number of free podcast hosting sites including Acast and Buzzsprout.
Consider inviting guests so you can get a different and more in-depth viewpoint on a topic, and get listeners involved by encouraging them to write in, leave reviews, and share your podcast. Their questions and comments could be a source of additional content you haven’t yet covered.
Create Social Posts
Social media is (usually) the place for short-form content. This means that short quotes, quick tips and brief videos do well. Can you extract useful but brief tips from your longer-form content? Can clips from a longer video be clipped into an Instagram Reel or YouTube Short?
You can use a free programme such as Canva to create a quote graphic or make a basic video clip. Subscribing to the paid plan will give you even more editing options. Then share it across your social sites.
For maximum SEO impact, don’t forget to include a link to the longer content if it makes sense to do so.
Write a Transcript
If videos are your go-to format, then repurposing them into a blog is possible by writing a transcript. As well as creating additional content for your site, a transcript has other benefits including improved accessibility (for example, for users with auditory impairments).
Inclusion of a transcript also means that search engines can more easily pick out keywords and therefore more easily serve your content in search.
Some video programmes or sites like YouTube will automatically generate a video transcript (though will often need heavy editing). Or you could use AI or a programme such as UniScribe to create one.
Create a ‘Top 10’ of Your Best Content
If you already have an established range of content, top 10s (or top 5s, 7s, 20s, 100s…) can bring together some of your best pieces. Create a list for social, a blog with summaries of your top content picks, or a countdown video of your best items.
These remind existing followers of your best work, highlight some possible starting points for new visitors, direct users to further similar content they may be interested in, and can underline importance to search systems.
Video Clips
Video is a popular way to consume content, but users don’t always have the time (or the attention) to watch a 20-minute YouTube video. For those people, create shorter clips of longer videos to grab their attention. This is particularly useful for sharing on short-form social media sites including Instagram and TikTok.
Build a Course
Have you created enough content – or nearly enough – to build a valuable course around a topic? You may find that you’re putting so much useful information out there that users would appreciate a pay-to-play version. Remember to add paid benefits by including elements of your course that can’t be gotten for free. This could be additional content, downloads, or even 1:1 or group sessions with you.
You can build courses on dedicated sites such as Thinkific, or add to your existing sites using extensions such as Memberpress for WordPress.
Publish a Book
Like a course, if you have enough content to fill a book, then why not do just that? It’s relatively easy to self-publish now on marketplaces such as Amazon, and creating an e-book is fairly straightforward with free programmes such as Calibre e-book management.
Write a Guest Post
While you don’t want to exactly repeat your content on other sites, you can summarise some of your longer content for a guest post.
Guest posts have lots of SEO benefits including backlinks (an external link to your website), the opportunity to reach a new audience, and cementing yourself as an expert in a certain field.
Obtaining guest post slots can be quite difficult, but if you build up a couple of successful relationships, they can be well worth the effort. Look for other sites that cover your topic, or adjacent topics, and that have an engaged audience similar to yours. Ideally, they should include a link back to your site, but even a mention without a link can be beneficial to your SEO.
Send Out a Press Release
This won’t work for every piece of content, but if you’re writing about something newsworthy, then a press release is an excellent way both to repurpose content and build your business reputation. If you’ve undertaken some interesting research, have something new to say about a trending topic, or have a particularly newsworthy story about your own business, send it as a press release to local and national news outlets, or to magazines in the right kind of niche.
Press releases aren’t just for printed media either. You can send them to radio and TV stations too.
Answer Questions on Quora
Quora is a website where people go to ask questions that can be answered by experts or enthusiastic amateurs. Search for a topic relevant to your business and see if you can find some unanswered (or unsatisfactorily answered) questions that you’ve already written about. You can then summarise some of your current content in the form of an answer, and provide details of your website and expertise.
Write a Reddit Post
On Reddit, users discuss and learn more about topics that interest them. As a result, if you have something fresh to say about a subject, making it into a Reddit post can help you reach an engaged audience and establish your expertise. Again, remember not to copy everything word-for-word. An informative yet summarised post will prevent Google flagging your site for duplicate content.
Reddit is split into different topics and communities called subreddits, and you should read the rules of each subreddit before you post (many, for example, don’t allow links). Even if links aren’t allowed in the main post, there is value in posting for the opportunity to engage with other users and highlight your expertise.
Design an Infographic
Infographics are very shareable, both across social media and on websites. If your content can be summarised into a single infographic, then this is a great way to distribute it more widely. Use a tool like Canva to easily create a design (there are many free templates available, or paid ones if you have a subscription).
Ideally, websites that use your infographic will also credit you with a link to your website. Just in case they don’t though, remember to brand or watermark your graphic so viewers know where it comes from.
Create a Lead Magnet
A lead magnet is something that a user can download or view after entering their email address or other contact details. Users can download free and interesting content from your site to save it on their computers or phones and easily refer to it again and again. Each time they do, they think about your business.
These lead magnets can also be used as incentives for building a mailing list. By asking users to provide an email address before they can download a document, you obtain a new subscriber. And guess where else you can use repurposed content..?
Newsletters
A newsletter can be a good place to summarise existing content. Let an already-engaged audience know when you’ve published something new, summarise the content within the newsletter itself, then include a link to the original content to encourage them to click through to your website.
A newsletter doesn’t have to be long, but should instead encourage more traffic to your website by enticing subscribers to read more about a topic. By following this strategy, engagement improves and the additional site traffic sends positive signals to search systems like Google, therefore boosting your SEO.
Train An On-Site AI Bot
If you have a lot of content on your site it can be difficult for users to find what they want unless you have a robust search system. A search bar is traditional, but more savvy business owners are starting to utilise on-site AI chatbots.
These chatbots can be trained on all your website content so that the right information can be quickly surfaced in response to a user query, even amongst hundreds of pieces. This speedy response can ease the customer experience and move users towards making a purchase more quickly.
Summary
You can save yourself a lot of time by repurposing content into different formats and across a number of platforms and media. Choose the options that will work best for your business: don’t try and do absolutely everything. You’ll reach a wider audience with less effort and less time spent creating content.