What Is Content Repurposing? How to Recycle Old Content Without Burning Time and Budget?

If you’re reading this entry, you certainly know what content marketing is. Perhaps you plan, create, and distribute content that is supposed to improve your brand recognition, SEO results, and leads. You’re an experienced specialist who knows how much time and money (when dealing with more complex content) is required to create something truly appealing that can attract the attention of your target group.

Is it possible to somehow optimize the process to save time and your marketing budget? Of course! Content repurposing can help you with this task. How to do it?

However, it’s not about taking a discarded and worn-out toy out of the trash and placing it on the shop shelf again.

Every type of content requires some effort, however, in the case of recycled texts, it’s significantly smaller than when creating something from scratch. Content repurposing can give your posts completely new value and renew the audience’s interest in topics forgotten long ago.

Recycled content usually has two forms – revamping, i.e. updating existing materials and republishing them (e.g. “refreshing” data and statistics in an e-book from a few years ago), or repurposing, i.e. converting selected content into new formats (e.g. a blog post presented as a concise infographic).

How to Do It Well?

Gary Vaynerchuk and The Content Pyramid (an inverted pyramid model) can be your source of inspiration when talking about content repurposing.

Following this strategy means starting with creating a really generous portion of content in the form of a pillar, e.g. a vlog, a Q&A, a podcast, or a tutorial. Then, you divide it into smaller pieces of micro-content and publish them in appropriate forms on various available channels, social media platforms, or in newsletters.

This amount of theory should be enough to start with. Let’s see how to recycle old content in real life. Below you can see 12 methods that will facilitate and optimize your everyday work.

1. Updating Existing Entries or E-books

If your company website already abounds in articles displayed high on important phrases or you want to improve its visibility in the organic search results, why should you create something new?

Take advantage of your current content, complement it with extra headers, update provided statistics, improve header structure and make the texts as user-friendly as possible. Remember to ensure that they’re tailored to Google algorithms, check if inserted external or internal links work properly, and voila! You have brand new content ready to be shared with the world!

To learn more about updating content, go to our previous entry: To update or not to update? What to do with old content on your website?

We also regularly update our texts which is beneficial for both new or regular readers of the Delante blog and search engine algorithms.

2. Combining a Few Articles into a Greater Content Pillar

You don’t need to tell the same story from scratch in each entry. Create one content pillar,  a comprehensive guide on a given topic, which will include internal links to previously published entries. Your SEO process will certainly benefit from that. Google appreciates such competent compendiums. So what can such a pillar look like in real life?

A pillar is a unique piece of content with links to previously published blog posts provided naturally in specific paragraphs. It elaborates on a given topic.

3. Devising Infographics Based on the Entry Content

An average online reader remains focused for 7-9 seconds. And you provide them with a few pages long entries. Everything is important, you don’t want to delete anything. So what to do? A summary of the article or selected statistics can be presented in the form of an infographic.

Do you need an example? Check out the infographics on the GroMar blog. Potential recipients are 30% more likely to focus on infographics, not on blocks of text. If the information presented in the infographics catches their attention, they’re more likely to go through your text or even share it with others. It’ll also increase the average web session length and reduce your bounce rate which supports SEO.

4. Creating Short Vlogs – Micro-Content – Redirecting to the Entry

Although marketers still forget about it, YouTube is the second-largest search engine in the world and a great place for redirecting users to your website. How to use it in content repurposing? Record short vlogs with clickbait and SEO-friendly titles that will redirect traffic from YouTube to your specific blog posts or products you talk about in the video.

As far as Polish and international micro-content and short vlogs are considered, you can get inspired by the Brand24 YouTube channel.

5. Creating a Slideshare Presentation Instead of Extensive E-Books

More than 100 pages of an e-book, graphics, charts, tables… You’ve devoted hundreds of hours to create ideal content but it still doesn’t bring any benefits. Well, maybe it’s a good idea to simplify it so that prepared data is more approachable?

Create a Slideshare presentation summarizing the main principles of your premium content and encouraging people to check it out. It can be a trailer of your e-book. There’s a reason why Netflix promotes short, one-minute trailers, rather than uploading an entire episode of a new series right away. Perhaps at first, your content seems to be unbearable but Slideshare can help you make it more user-friendly.

6. Discussing a Blog Post Entry in the Form of a Podcast

Podcasts are constantly gaining in popularity. Maybe it’s time for your company? Why should you develop new content from scratch if it’s possible to create a shortened form and record it as a podcast? It’s another redirect channel and another news to publish on your social media – “we started a podcast” 🙂

7. Transcribing Podcasts into Blog Posts

Another strategy for content repurposing involves transcribing blog posts into podcasts. You can create detailed articles, summaries, or literal transcriptions to draw more users who prefer written content. It’s also great for SEO – you get to include new keywords, thus extending your website’s reach and visibility.

8. Reshaping Webinars to Video Clips

You’ve held a great webinar, which attracted many people, and recorded it? Extract the key moments and make a short video out of them. Post them on social media. This way, you’ll encourage more users to sign up for your new webinars and establish your role as a specialist in your field.

9. Converting Presentation Slides to Social Media Posts

You’ve turned your e-book into a Slideshare? You can repurpose this content further! Take out the most important slides and prepare social media posts with graphics based on each of them. Anything that contains crucial data or interesting findings will make an excellent entry.

10. Breaking Down E-books into a Blog Series

We all know how short the average attention span currently is – not everybody is capable of reading a long e-book. But, that’s not a problem when you introduce this simple content repurposing strategy – creating a blog series based on an e-book. This way, the users are served with the content in small portions, making it much more digestible. Plus, you fill your website with additional text, which will also help you rank up in SERPs.

11. Redistributing Content with the Use of New Channels

You can publish the same content on different channels that haven’t been used by your company before. Scrolling LinkedIn? Why don’t you post your evergreen content that is always appreciated? Trying to expand your Pinterest profile? Select all your infographics and give them new e-life. Working on your newsletter? Create a welcome email for new recipients with links to key articles on your blog. They have probably never seen them before and this way you provide them with a valuable source of content.

12. Focusing on User-Generated Content

Complement published texts with comments from satisfied customers or employees. Check out if someone posted interesting comments that make your content more valuable. It’s always an extra reason to remind your subscribers about given blog entries.

Today, we’ve discussed only a few examples of how to recycle your old content. Repurposing is a creative and noteworthy task of a content manager so don’t forget about it in your daily job. But why should you actually do it? What are the greatest advantages of content repurposing?

• It allows you to save both time and marketing budget – using the content that already exists does not cost you much, thus letting you maximize the ROI of your content marketing strategy.
• It’s a perfect source of inspiration if you don’t have any ideas for new topics – it’s always possible to recycle old texts.
• It helps to achieve better positions in Google thanks to supporting SEO, updating content, optimizing texts for relevant keywords, and tailoring them to new requirements of Google algorithms.
• It’s a more versatile response to the needs of your target group – some people like to read, while others prefer to listen or watch videos.
• A comprehensive approach to content marketing that consistently combines different channels and forms of content will be definitely appreciated by both readers and search engine robots.
• It helps you expose users to your core messages repeatedly, thus enhancing brand recall and building your authority.

You are aware of the methods of repurposing blog, video, and audio content, and you understand the benefits that come from it, but do you know how to do it to really squeeze the maximum out of this strategy and drive your users smoothly through the content marketing funnel? We’ve got a few tips for you on how to do it effectively!

Update Old Information

We’ve mentioned that updating old information is among the ways through which you can repurpose content in our guide on the methods, but now we’re going to say it: you absolutely should do it. With time, your content simply loses some of its SEO power, and the only way to avoid it is by regular updates.

Additionally, by returning to your posts and visuals on a regular basis, you’ll be able to make sure that they are still relevant. What’s currently right, might be old news in a year or two, with new information approaching. Content marketing itself is a great example of that, moving from “Content is King” to “Intent is King”. If a user has a decent knowledge in the field and sees outdated information, they likely won’t stay on your website.

Finally, updated content means newer dates displayed in SERPs – this may positively affect your CTR, attracting more users to actually enter your pages and view your content.

Tailor the Content to the Platform

Imagine you’re searching for something on the internet. You see a relevant Instagram post, you click it, and bam – instead of a graphic or a photo you’re exposed to a block of text in the description. Or, you see a blog post, so you enter the site to read it, and instead, you get a short introduction and a video clip. Frustrating, isn’t it?

That’s exactly what happens if you don’t repurpose or create your content with the platform in mind. The users will get annoyed and give up on your materials, sending signals to the search engines that you don’t offer valuable content. Thus, always consider what people expect from the particular platform and choose an appropriate content repurposing method.

Cite Original Content

You’ve found this awesome article on repurposing content, you check our website and you see a video on the same topic, you watch it…and it’s exactly the same – you’ve only wasted your time. This is an ideal example of how the users feel when you repurpose content without citing the source, and why you don’t want to do that.

When a situation like that happens, the user will be discouraged from exploring your topic clusters, expecting them to be repetitive. Plus, they will spend less time on the original content, sending signals to the search engines that it isn’t valuable. Thus, the conclusion here is: always cite the original content.

Engage with Your Audience

Content repurposing isn’t only meant to give your texts, videos, podcasts, or slideshows a new life, it can also be a tool for gathering feedback. By turning you’ll slideshows into social media posts, you encourage your followers to discuss them; by turning your webinars into video clips, you can ask the users what they would want to see in the next webinars; by turning e-books into blog series you may learn which form is preferred.

You want to squeeze the absolute maximum out of your content, so don’t repurpose without an aim. Think about how you can use this strategy to engage with your audience, gather feedback, learn, and offer something new.

Don’t force yourself to create new content. In many cases, recycling and polishing old texts is a much more economical and substantive solution. Incorporate content repurposing into your strategy and see how much value you can give to your recipients in a refreshed, refined, and more comprehensive version. You won’t regret it!

Looking for help with your content? Check out our content marketing service and reap the benefits of our extensive experience!