After you’ve put so much effort in creating a valuable blog post, you need to ensure you make the most of it. Repurposing your content helps to extend shelf-life, and maximize reach and performance. Content variations and spinoffs will provide you with more content pieces for sharing, and by sharing, seeding and syndicating your content, your topic will be more likely to catch the attention of potential readers, and drive more traffic to your blog.
Here are five simple strategies for repurposing your blog posts:
1. Create a Multimedia Portfolio
There are several other media formats you can use to create a bundle of spinoffs from your blog content, such as post images, memes, infographics or short video clips summarizing your content or specific arguments of your topic:
- Turn your key facts and images into a slideshow
- Screencast your slideshow into a short video clip
- Add voice to your post and turn your blog post into a podcast.
- Turn long posts into a white paper or eBook
- Create an infographic or write a checklist for your post.
Every single piece of spinoff content can be cross-promoted on social media or within specific communities. Make sure you experiment with a mix of content types and lengths to maximize reach.
2. Refresh Old Content
Don’t let your evergreen content go stale. When you’ve created content that’s performed well initially, looks to update and republish at later stages to generate more response. Refreshing your content from time-to-time extends shelf life – re-read your old posts thoughtfully, and remove irrelevant information, replacing it with fresh data.
For example:
- Add current statistics and data from current research or studies
- Refer to current news or events on your topic
- Make sure the screenshots (and other media files) that you used are still relevant and up-to-date. For example, if the interface of the tools you show in the post looks differently now, it could be confusing for the reader.
- Add a stellar infographic or video or a checklist/white paper for downloading
- Check all links within the text and make sure they’re still active
- Re-publish your refreshed content with a current date
Use Google Analytics and find articles that performed well at the time, but are now slowing down in traffic.
3. Use Visuals
Visual content is more likely to get shares, likes, and comments than basic text messages. People remember visual information 65% longer than text information, and as such, visual content can generate additional reach and bring more traffic from search engines and social media to your website.
- Illustrate your posts with graphics, photos or infographics
- Always share your social media posts with an image or as an image post
Image posts can have a big influence on the reach and interaction with your posts. Use tools like Canva to create super fast and easy visuals and infographics. For stock photos try Pixabay, Pexels or Unsplash, as well as Freepik.com for stunning vector graphics. You can upload any photo or graphic from stock photo collections or any other graphics to embed them in your Canva design.
4. Write Follow-ups and Series
Take a successful piece of content from your blog and create a series focussing on the major aspects. The best types of serial posts are the ones that give something an in-depth look, with each post dedicated to a specific aspect of the topic:
- Pick an evergreen topic or pick an article for which you received a lot of engagement – you’ll probably find some interesting aspects or questions in your readers’ discussions you can follow up
- Create an outline for each post, dedicating each post to a specific aspect of your topic, and decide on a schedule for your series
- If you’re creating a how-to series, you should plan for successive posts that will take the reader through several stages of the tutorial
- Tell your readers, when the next issue of your service will be published to make sure your readers will come back for more information
- Link back to your original post, and interlink all posts of the series to previous and future posts of the series. This will enable readers who are just discovering your posts to read through everything you’ve written in the series
- Add something like “In case you missed…” and a “Related posts” sections right below the article to put the links to previous and future posts there.
5. Share and Syndicate Your Content
Start by sharing your blog post on your social media channels – social platforms are hugely powerful sources to get more outreach for your content and to drive traffic to your blog.
However, each social network offers different options for promoting your content – to effectively cross-promote your blog post, don’t just cross-post the same message on every social network. Tailor the message for your posts to fit each social media platform and audience:
- Share your post on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn
- Schedule your post multiple times on Twitter, but follow the new Twitter rules and customize each Tweet
- Share your blog post images on Pinterest, Instagram, and Flickr, using your focus image with your introduction, hashtags and a link to your post
- If you use multiple images, share them all, but share them on different days and at different times
- Consider sharing your blog post in special interest communities such as Reddit
- Share a link to your blog post to social bookmark networks such as Diigo, Digg, StumbleUpon
- Schedule your posts at the best times for each network and across several days, weeks and month to extend the lifespan of your posts
- Re-share and re-schedule your evergreen posts from time to time to revive them