Do you have older content pieces that really worked well for you? Do you have those blog posts, articles and case studies that took the internet by storm? I know I do. 7 Lessons I’ve Learned About Business from Quentin Tarantino, 3 Business Lessons from Vince Vaughn’s Character from True Detective, How I Made a Career in Marketing by Telling Stories are just some of those texts that generated a lot of quality traffic to our website and helped us present our company to the world as a brand that’s able to come up with some fresh insights.
Creating quality content pieces is extremely hard. It doesn’t really matter how good you’re at your job or how well you can write, it’s always difficult to produce something interesting and original that has the potential to resonate well with your audience. Why? – Well, because almost everything about anything has already been written and shared online. Coming up with some original content is nearly impossible these days. Since 2011, the number of companies that invest in content marketing has at least tripled. There’s a lot more competition in almost every niche. Everyone is battling head-to-head for the attention of their desired crowd.
Thanks to this, user expectations have exponentially increased in these last couple of years. All of these forces combined have created a world in which people feel like it’s normal to demand unique and high-quality content to be delivered to their doorsteps on daily and weekly basis. This puts a lot of pressure on brands. They have to work around the clock and create extraordinary posts that will turn heads and blow minds almost every time if they want to make it in this highly competitive game.
Unfortunately, before you create that one perfect post that will get your audience’s attention, you’re gonna produce a lot of terrible ones that they’ll just ignore. But once you do it, once you finally create that one piece of content that will get you a lot of traffic to your website and turn a whole new group of leads into actual customers, you’re probably gonna spend a lot of your time analyzing it over and over again in order to duplicate its success with your future endeavours.
Unfortunately, that won’t come as easy to you as you hope.
Being a service that constantly talks to its clients, we at AltusHost came to an understanding that it’s quite hard for most of our clients to create a steady stream of high-quality blog posts, articles and ebooks for their business. Although they know that producing and distributing high-quality content is of great importance, most online entrepreneurs, especially those who are flying solo, find themselves in situations where content creation becomes extremely difficult for them.
Creating unique, high-quality, trustworthy, useful, and interesting content pieces that are able to achieve an impressive quantity of amplification by solving problems or giving answers to questions in a comprehensive, accurate and resourceful manner is nothing easier than digging for gold in a huge desert. The chances are, you’ll have to dig through a lot of dirt and still go home with nothing in your pockets.
Great and successful content pieces are dependent on all sorts of different factors. Timing, writing style, personas, design, targeted audience – these are just some of the things that come into play here. Having this in mind, we can easily agree upon that creating great content is not something that could be automated. That’s why, if we get lucky enough and produce something that people actually respond to, we need to do our best to get as much out of it as possible.
This is where the concept of repurposing content comes to shine. This decision can strategically make the difference between always struggling to produce enough fresh content to get yourself noticed and having that same piece of information spread all over the web.
Why Should I Repurpose My Content? What’s The Point?
When talking about repurposing content, I don’t mean using your existing content and just cutting it up into different blog posts. No. That won’t do you much good. To make content repurposing work for you, you actually have to find a way on how to recycle your best work so that it applies to all sorts of different new formats.
Say you start with a presentation and you transform it into an animation or an infographic. The point here is to get the best possible value out of every single word you already wrote.
Let’s say, for the sake of the story, that you have an 1800 words long blog post that you spent ages creating. You spent a lot of time searching the web, gathering great and unique information that you can use in your story. Before you even wrote it, you knew it was going to be good.
Days, week and months pass and here you are now – You’ve already published your post, shared it and republished it on all your channels. You milked it dry, right? This piece of content is done, you got from it all that you possibly could? – Wrong.
If you repurpose that post as a presentation, animation, video, podcast, and infographic you suddenly end up with a much broader possible audience and the investment you made earlier will only get you more and more users.
You can also repurpose that content to fit different platforms.
Let’s say you did a webinar or a training – you can use the transcript to make a blog post with the video or webinar. All you need to do is cut the blog post into several pieces and share that over a x day period on Twitter and Linkedin. Take the presentation used in the webinar and post it on slideshare.
Repurposing content is a great way to get high mileage the time you put into creating content. Apart from that, this sort of tactic helps you to:
Build Up SEO and Generate ROI by Investing Very Little Time Into Its Design
Believe it or not, but repurposing your content has proven to be extremely good for SEO. It gives you that much-needed boost in rankings. Creating various “new” pieces of content around the same topic can and will help you create fresh opportunities to target desired keywords and steal some traffic from your direct competitors.
Apart from that, if you take your repurposed content outside your own website and post it somewhere else, it can earn new quality links back with a bonus of controlling the anchor text in the link. Great, right?
Reach New Audience Members From Different Medias
If you really think about it, it doesn’t really matter how many times you shared a certain blog post everywhere online, your original piece of content still has a lot to give.
How come? – Well, because it can still only be found in one particular format. If you put in a little effort into transforming your “golden goose” into different mediums, you’ll open yourself up to a whole new world of potential consumers and buyers.
This kind of content repurposing can also help reinforce your message. It’s a well-known fact that people need to hear or see your information a couple of times before they really allow it sink into their heads.
Apart from that, distributing your work in a wide variety of places on a single topic can help raise your profile in the industry and position yourself in the eyes of your consumers and competitors as an expert in a particular niche. Raising your authority is of crucial importance for your business and your career, so you should really do your best to be omnipresent wherever you need to be.
Create “New”, Fast and Cheap
Timing is everything on the Internet. It plays a crucial factor in the success of your content marketing campaign. If you spend ages creating this one particular piece of content, the chances are, someone is probably going to beat you to the punch.
You never want to find yourself in a situation where you publish a subject that has been written about over and over again on the internet, especially if you don’t have any fresh insights to add this pile of opinions and examples that already orbits in this digital cyberspace. Why? – Well, because it will be a lot harder for you to rank for those specific keywords that you included in your post.
Repurposing your content can help you win in this sort of situations. It will save you time in the content creation process and give you a real chance to be one of the first brands in your field to write about a certain hot topic, and thus, get cited in other people’s work.
Thank you for reading this post. I hope you enjoyed it. If you have anything to add on this particular subject, feel free to write your thoughts in the comments section below.
That’s all for now,
See you soon again,
Goran @ AltusHost B.V.
The author is highly qualified and writes blog posts weekly.
