Crafting and publishing content takes a lot of time. That’s why promotion is essential. But sometimes, promotion campaigns don’t work that well. It makes you feel as if you have lost money, time, and a great opportunity to reach new customers. But don’t worry, there are ways to repurpose already published content. Repurposing your already existing content is the best free website traffic generator.
You spend a lot of time producing great content for your website. It’s only natural that you want to get it in front of as many eyes as possible. The internet is a crowded place. Everyone has a blog and the number of posts going live every day has passed 4.4 million on WordPress.com. That doesn’t include other platforms like Blogger, Tumblr, and Squarespace. To make matters worse, 50% of content gets 8 shares or less and 75% of content gets 39 shares or less.
It’s no longer enough to publish a great piece of content and share it on social media. You’ve got to distribute it far and wide. With repurposing, you can take one piece of content then slice and dice it into different forms so people can find and consume it however they prefer. You’ll increase your reach and many of those people will land back on your website. It’s a win-win for everyone. A great way to enhance this strategy is by integrating services like Socialgreg, which can significantly boost your content’s visibility and sharing potential.
Let’s look at some of the best avenues to repurpose published content for maximum exposure and traffic.
Repurpose Published Content As Presentations
Presentations are amazing. You can condense large amounts of information into the most important points. You’re free to highlight interesting statistics and use compelling imagery to get your point across.
In a recent study, it was found that visual presentations were more engaging than oral presentations. To repurpose your published content into a compelling presentation, identify the main points. Your normal subheadings work well for this. In addition to the subheadings, pull out any statistics or interesting facts with shock value. If you don’t have any, include quotable text.
The best presentations have little text, striking imagery, and focus on the main points. Be sure to drop links back to the original article for people who want to dive deep into the topic. You can use a lot of tools to create your presentation. Also, you can use icons in your presentation using image to icon converter.
A few of them are:
- PowerPoint (a nice free choice, some of the options are limited).
- Canva (a freemium design tool that has a lot of beautiful presentation templates).
- Prezi (a premium tool that allows you to make interactive presentations).
Once you have your presentation, upload it to Slideshare, promote it, and let their algorithm do the rest. You’ll be getting traffic for a long time to come.
Drift used this content repurposing strategy to generate 28,000 visitors in a month and land on the first page for a competitive keyword – product marketing.
After their initial success, they continued to repurpose their published content into slideshares. As of this writing, they’ve amassed millions of views on their SlideShare account.
Create An Email Course
Email marketing consistently generates a higher ROI than almost any other medium. An email course is a great way to repurpose published content. You may have to expand on your original post, but the process is similar to what you’d do with a presentation.
Take the subheadings or bullet points and expand each one into a lesson in your email course. The ideal length for an email course is about 5-7 days. Create an end goal for your email course. It’s not only to drive traffic and email subscribers to your mailing list. It’s also a unique opportunity to pitch a relevant product to a responsive group of people.
Think about an email course like this, your email subscribers are more likely to click a link and read your newest blog post. You don’t have to hope Facebook’s or Twitter’s Algorithm surfaces your post for your followers.
A fringe benefit of email courses is positioning you as an authority.
Here’s a quick rundown of how to repurpose your published content into email courses:
- Choose a blog post. This should be a post that’s already done well and is providing consistent traffic. Check your analytics software to narrow down the perfect post or series of posts.
- Outline the course. This is a bit more than copying the content in the subheadings of your original post. This time around, you want to add actionable takeaways to each lesson. Think about how long it’ll take someone to perform the action you spell out before sending the next lesson. Dedicate one or two emails to selling your main product/service
- Expand the blog post. Each email should have 750 – 1,000 words. It’s enough to give a solid lesson but short enough to be digested in less than ten minutes. Most people open emails on their phones.
- Load everything up and go through it yourself. Go through your email course at least once to make sure everything is functioning properly.
Brennan Dunn used an email course to generate six figures on the backend. He’d spend $2.50 on Facebook ads and make over $50 when they turned into paying customers.
You can use almost any email marketing tool to set up an email course.
Here are suggestions on a few that work well:
- Drip
- ActiveCampaign
- Get Response
To add an email course to your website, it’s as simple as creating a landing page or a popup that asks people to sign up. Keep the following points in mind:
- The course should have an interesting name
- Let people know what they’ll learn in the course (the end result)
- Be clear about how long the course is (the number of days)
Creating the course itself is only the first part.
When used properly, it can be a great way to introduce your audience to your startup and the value you provide. Monitor the open rates, click-through rates, and completion rates of your course. Test out different subject lines and content in order to improve it over time.
In addition to generating traffic, it should be a consistent stream of new users for your startup.
Buffer uses an email course to introduce people to social media marketing philosophy, and, by extension, their product. Unbounce also uses an email course. This one is focused on optimizing your lead gen pages. At the end of the course, they give the subscribers free Unbounce templates which gives them a compelling reason to try out the service.
Repurpose Published Content As An Infographic
It’s great to repurpose published content as an infographic because they break down otherwise dense information into an easily digestible format. Our brains excel at processing visual stimuli. If you see an image and words that convey the same information, the brain processes the image 60,000x faster than the text. This is an added advantage because our attention spans are shrinking on the web.
It’s ideal when you’ve got a lot of information that would otherwise be difficult to comprehend (like an academic study). Like with the other ways to repurpose published content, you want to stick with posts that have already done well in the past.
Here’s how to get it done:
- Identify the main points. As long as your post is well formatted, this should be simple. Keep the points in your infographic short. This isn’t a replacement for the original blog post but you want to convey the main information in a new way.
- Decide the layout. Even if you’re not the one designing the infographic, you should settle on a general layout. Get a pen and paper to work out a simple flow. Forward that to the designer so it’ll be easier to make the infographic.
- Choose the fonts and color. You want to make sure your infographic reflects your brand. At the same time, it shouldn’t be the exact same colors. Choose complementary colors and fonts that are unique.
- Add your sources to the infographic. This infographic is going far and wide. It’s important to cite your sources because you can’t hyperlink the image file.
When your infographic is ready, reach out to relevant websites to see if they’ll publish it. Also, you should submit it to infographic directories. Be sure to vet the directories because not all of them are created equally. Here are a few tools to create infographics:
- Easel.ly
- Piktochart
- Infogr.am
- Venngage
Infographics tend to do well on social media but there are a few specific places you can submit high-quality infographics to get a surge in traffic.
Build An Interactive Quiz
An interactive quiz probably isn’t what comes to mind when you think about repurposing content. That’s what makes it so special. In a study of a hundred million pieces of content, eight out of the top ten were quizzes. A quiz taps into a powerful part of our psyche, the drive to understand more about ourselves. You can use this to your advantage to get more traffic and email subscribers.
Take a popular piece of content and think about how you can develop a quiz around it. For example, you could’ve written on the best workouts for biceps. Your quiz can ask the taker what the best workout for their biceps is based on their lifestyle.
Another example could be an article on how to promote your blog. A quiz could be “What are the best promotion channels for your blog?” The quiz creation process is straightforward. Use your subheadings as the basis for the questions and incorporate language similar to your audience to make the answers.
Here are the steps:
- Choose a topic. Use your popular content.
- Choose a title. The title should be relevant to your topic and inspire your audience to action.
- Create the outcomes. The outcomes are the results your audience gets from taking the quiz. They should be detailed enough to make them feel like it reflects their unique situation but general enough so they don’t get alienated.
- Write the questions. Start with an easy and exciting question so they warm up to the quiz. Don’t try to be clever because the quiz taker won’t choose the best answer if they’re confused.
- Make your answers. Create answers that reflect the language your audience would naturally use when they talk. It’ll improve your completion rates.
- Create a great quiz start image.
After your quiz is ready, embed it in the post that inspired it and also create a dedicated page for it. Promote it on Facebook (they work REALLY well there) and your other social channels.
Once you see your quiz is working well, boost it with Facebook ads to create a lead-generating goldmine for your startup. In addition to that, your quiz will reveal a lot about who your audience is so you can continue to create great content and increase your traffic.
Repurpose Published Content As Video
In a recent study, it was estimated that over 82% of web traffic will come from video by 2022. That’s a lot of traffic. Video also increases the conversion rates on landing pages.
This form of repurposing is a bit more difficult. You have multiple options; you can edit the footage together, create a PowerPoint presentation with a voice overlay, or shoot a talking head video. If you’re like us and don’t like to get on video too often then you can go the PowerPoint route. The only difference between this one and presentations is that this one has audio; all other things remain the same. There’s a neat tool called Draftsend you can use.
- Create the video by reading the content of each slide aloud. When it’s ready, upload it to YouTube. Here are a few things to keep in mind.
- Name the video file before you upload to YouTube
- Choose an SEO optimized title
- Select relevant tags for the video
- Create a description that’s 3-4 paragraphs longs
- Refer back to the section on presentations to understand how to fill out the content of the video
That’s about it. The last thing you need to do is make sure your video is actually good. Note that the best-repurposed published video content is short and sweet. It gives a high-level overview of the topic and gives the viewer a reason to get the full version.
Here are a few tools to create videos:
- Prezi
- Animoto
- Camtasia Studio
- Biteable
- Powtoon
Record A Podcast
A podcast may be the easiest way to repurpose published content. You don’t need fancy equipment or editing software. You can get away with a cheap mic and an editing program like Audacity.
The great part about a podcast is you’re exposing your brand to a group of people who’d never discover you otherwise. That is, not everyone likes to consume written work or only go to very specific websites to find it. They’re more willing to try a podcast because they can listen to it while doing something else. Even people who would normally read will choose to listen to a podcast when the option is presented.
Here are a few steps to create compelling podcasts from your blog posts:
- Filter through your content to see which ones will work best. Not all of your old content will work well as a podcast. Look for evergreen content and niche specific content that you can tell stories around. Great podcasts are the ones who can incorporate stories and lessons.
- Write a script. The way you go through a podcast is different from a blog post. You’ll need to write a script to guide you.If you’re going deep on storytelling then you’ll want to write the script out verbatim. If not, you can just use talking points to guide you.
- Record and edit your podcast. You don’t need fancy recording tools to make this work. Just make sure your audio is clear. Editing is where the magic happens. Remove most of your sentence fillers like “um.”
- Promote it. There are tons of places that aggregate podcasts. The most prominent one is the Apple Podcast player. In addition to that, there’s Soundcloud, Stitcher, Podcast, TuneIn, Podcast Subreddit, Castro, and Bello Collective.
Use a platform like Soundcloud or Libsyn to host your audio files. You can use your own website hosting but it’ll slow your main site to a crawl when a few people are listening to the files. Once you’ve uploaded the file, add it to iTunes and other podcast aggregators. It’ll be discovered by more and more people over time.
Use Internal Data For Proprietary Research
As a startup, you have a lot of proprietary data. You do track how your users use your platform so you can optimize it right? Of course, you do.
You should have a lot of data just sitting around on your servers. Why not share it with the world? We have a lot of data on how people convert and what works best for people in different niches. We could easily turn that data into interesting research that no one else on the web has.
With a few pretty graphs and a topic that touches your niche, it’d be sure to be shared far and wide.
Buzzsumo found that image-heavy posts received double the amount of social shares.
Spotify used internal data to determine the most patriotic states in the nation and the most popular songs.
To determine what data will do well as repurposed content, use Buzzsumo to find the most popular content in your space. Think about what’s working in your space and how you can use your data (or even public domain data) to create compelling content.
- Search Buzzsumo for popular content. Ideally, this will be content that’s supported by some kind of research and is relevant to your space.
- Look at your own data. Can you make something with proprietary data?. Can you slice and dice your statistics to tell a compelling story?
- Use your data to create a narrative. Just throwing out statistics won’t get the job done. You’ll need to draw conclusions and guide readers through what you’ve discovered.
- Create compelling graphics. It’s one thing to write 33% of people walking for 15 minutes. It’s another thing to make a graph that compares different segments of information.
- Combine everything into an article or infographic and publish.
Repurpose Multiple Blog Posts Into An eBook
Over time, you’ll create a large library of content for your audience. They will be focused on multiple topics relevant to your business and likely get a decent amount of traffic.
You have two options at this point, leave them as-is and hope for the best or turn them into a different format and spread it across the internet. The eBook is a staple of the online marketing world and many startups have used it to gain initial traction. In fact, Unbounce used an eBook to get their first email subscribers which eventually turned into paying customers.
Look through your website to find topic clusters where you’ve written at least five blog posts. If you’re following best practices then that should equate to thousands of words of high-quality content.
Here’s a quick outline of how to write the eBook:
- Highlight different blog posts and subheadings (if there’s enough content) as chapters for your eBook. You should be able to expand each blog post into at least two chapters.
- If the content was created a while ago, be sure to update it so it’s current for new subscribers. Your best bet is to choose an evergreen topic that only requires more detail.
- Flesh out the content and edit out the parts only relevant to your blog. A blog post can almost never do a topic justice. Add in the things you’d like to talk about but couldn’t because of space. There is no character limit for blog posts.
- Order the content in a logical way. Even though you may have written a specific post a year ago, that doesn’t mean it should be the first chapter in your eBook. Create an outline if that helps order the content in a logical way.
- Write a new introduction and a conclusion.
- Add calls to action throughout the eBook.
Bonus: set up a few automated emails to highlight specific portions of the eBook. Most people download eBooks and don’t read much (or any) of the book. When you send emails, it increases the likelihood that people will open and read what you’ve created.
Baremetrics took this route by adding their most popular blog posts to an eBook and making it available for purchase at select retailers. They generate revenue from the book, but more importantly, they use it to introduce customers to their startup.
Conclusion
When starting to repurpose published content, choose your best-performing content and only one or two other formats.
Start small and test the reaction to your new format. If it does well, continue until you’re comfortable with that method of repurposing then move on to the next one. If it doesn’t do well, try again with a different format. There’s no way to tell which format your audience prefers ahead of time.
Repurposing content is a powerful way to extend the shelf life of your hard work. It takes a bit of effort to get right. Once you understand it, you can develop a system to speed up the process.
