Our Blog

How to Repurpose Old Content (and Why You Should)

By Snap Agency March 2, 2017

Creating content is necessary for online success, but continuously creating content is also a pain. If you create your own content, you’re spending time. If you pay someone else to create your content, you’re spending money. Fortunately, there’s an easy way to make your content go the extra mile.

Repurposing content is when you take an existing piece of content and use it again in a different way. With minimal time and effort, your reformatted content can reach a whole new audience and continue to drive sales.

What Content Should Be Repurposed?

It’s tempting to think you only want to focus on the popular content, but don’t forget your old content which never really found an audience. Sometimes a topic just needs to find the right moment in time.

Ways to Repurpose Your Content

There’s no magic formula here for turning lead into gold. You’ll want to keep an eye on your competition and see what’s working for them. For instance, maybe they’re having lots of success with blogs while you’re concentrating on videos.

The beauty of repurposing content is that it’s usually a quick and easy process, so you can experiment without feeling like you’re wasting time. Here are some popular ways to repurpose writing that you’ll want to consider:

Turn a Blog Post into a Video

How-to guides, listicles and other instructional content is always a popular type of blog post. Plus, they can also be easily turned into video tutorials.

A video tutorial can be as simple as standing in front of a whiteboard and explaining the topic in a fun, engaging manner. You can also use animation and graphics. Videos are also a great way to explain any physical process like a yoga move or a car maintenance issue.

Combine Smaller Blog Posts into One Longer E-book

The idea of sitting down and writing an entire e-book probably seems overwhelming. But if you’ve been blogging long enough, you likely have enough content for an e-book already completed!

Turn one or two blogs posts into a chapter. Put several chapters together and you have a full-length book. You’ll want to do some minor re-writing to create a cohesive narrative, but you’ve already completed the research and bulk of the content.

E-books are a billion-dollar industry, but you’re offering yours for free! You’ll likely find plenty of people willing to give you their email address in exchange for a free e-book. Then you can begin the conversion process.

Create a Webinar

Google Hangouts lets you easily set up a free webinar. Unlike a video, a webinar is live and interactive. You can use existing blog posts as the building blocks for your presentation. Long-form blog posts are an especially useful resource when building a webinar.

Later, you can turn your webinar into multiple short videos. Simply break your webinar down into smaller segments. You can then post the segments on your website or social media pages.

Create an E-Newsletter from Social Media Comment Responses

You’ll want to build an email list of potential customers. Giving away gifts like an e-book is a great way to do this. Once you have the list, you’ll want to create and send out an e-newsletter on a regular basis.

Unsure what to put in that e-newsletter? Use your responses to social media comments as your guide. You should already be responding to the bulk of comments you receive on social media. See if those comments have any common themes, questions or concerns, then address those issues in your e-newsletter.

Turn Blogs into Podcasts

Blogs can be an excellent script for a podcast. You’ll likely want to change the words up a bit as spoken language is less formal than written. But the information you researched for your blog is just as valid in a podcast.

You don’t need any special equipment to record a podcast. A simple microphone headset will do just fine. Some common platforms to post your podcasts include:

Update Existing Content

When a piece of written content is published, that’s the final product. But digital content is different. A piece of content published online can easily be edited and updated later.

Information changes. A how-to guide written a few years ago might not be relevant today. When you add new info to an old guide, be sure to retitle the guide as “New for 2017,” “Updated for Today” or similar.

Save Time and Money through Repurposed Writing

You want to present quality information in as many different formats as possible. Once you’ve researched a topic and created an outline for the information, use that info to create blogs, videos, podcasts and more. At the same time, don’t think of your content as static. You can update old content at any time and in any format.

Developing content is an ongoing process. Repurposing your content is a fast, easy way to reach a new audience.

Do you repurpose your content? Share any helpful tips in the comments below.