As the financial market continues to struggle with the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, many businesses are cutting costs. They are laying off workers, cutting back production, and, in many cases, slashing their marketing budgets.
When times are lean, it makes sense to trim where you can. However, cutting off marketing efforts could be a death sentence for your business.
So, how do you market when you don’t have much of a budget?
It is time to find ways to do more with less —- like repurposing your blog posts into other, high quality content.
Why Repurpose Content?
High-quality content is critical to building your business online. But, creating great content takes time — a lot of time.
A survey by Orbit Media found the average blog post takes nearly four hours to create — up from just 2 hours and 24 minutes in 2014.
Bloggers who reported “strong results” from their content marketing efforts spent more time than average on each post.
In fact, 38% of the most effective content producers reported they invested six or more hours into creating in-depth, well-optimized content.
Many business owners and marketers simply do not have that much time to invest in creating great content over and over again.
The solution? Make the most of what you already have by repurposing your highest-traffic blog posts into other formats.
Repurposing content allows you to increase the reach of high traffic posts by creating similar content in other formats.
While some of those executives might read a post if they had no other options, creating a video of your content allows you to capture far more traffic than a written post alone.
If you want to bring in more traffic, convert more leads, and increase your online presence, the simplest way is to repurpose successful content into more content.
It’s one of the easiest ways to boost the results of your marketing without investing hours and hours of your time.
Ready to give it a go? Here is how to take a blog post you’ve already created and turn it into nine pieces of killer content.
1. Turn a Listicle Into Multiple Posts
Listicles are snappy pieces of content formatted in a list format for easy consumption. However, covering five to ten different topics in one post doesn’t give you much room to dive deep.
So, take a popular listicle and create another blog post for each list item, converting a single post into an entire topic cluster. You’ve already done a good portion of the research, so each piece should take far less time than creating a new blog post from scratch.
Start by diving into your Google Analytics data to find your most popular listicles — you know these are topics your audience cares about.
Then, create spin-off posts for items on your list by diving deeper into the topic, offering detailed insights, and adding more stats to back up your position.
Or, go the opposite way — take several in-depth blog posts and turn them into an easy to read listicle.
For example, ActiveCampaign turned some of their blog posts into listicles, one about newsletter ideas, another about welcome emails, and so on.
Combine Several Related Posts into Guide
According to Hubspot, the ideal blog post length is between 2,100 and 2,400 words. Could you share everything you know about core topics in 2,000 or even 4,000 words? Probably not.
Do you have time to create long-form content right now, during the midst of COVID-19, working from home, and maybe even juggling child care with building your business? Probably not.
Luckily, you don’t have to. Instead of starting from scratch to create an in-depth ebook, combine several posts (or portions of posts) into a deep dive on a topic relevant to your audience.
For example, TrackPOD created this complete guide to route planning.
They are covering in other blog posts on their site all the ideas mentioned in this guide. They didn’t have to start from scratch for this post.
Guides help establish you or your brand as an expert in your field, can be used for lead generation, and are a subtle way to sell your brand. They are powerful — but you don’t have to invest a ton of time. They help you even build backlinks for your brand to increase your domain authority.
Earlybird, an app for investments for kids, created a guide on gifting money to children. Then they followed this up with a series of other posts on financial gifting – ranging from gifting between specific family members to gifting on various occasions.
Record a Podcast on the Same Topic
Podcasts are extremely popular — a study by Nielsen found that the US podcast audience size is on track to double between 2019 and 2023.
You can take advantage of that growth by creating a podcast and covering topics you’ve already written about. For example, you could invite a guest and discuss how a piece of news you covered on your blog will impact your industry.
Or, share your favorite tips for overcoming a challenge your audience faces. Don’t just read your blog post, of course. Instead, use the blog as inspiration for your episode.
Podcasts allow people to listen while commuting, running, or doing other tasks where they aren’t able to read — which can help you reach a much wider audience.
2. Go Live on Social Media
Most social media platforms pay to play. That means if you want to reach a larger audience, you’ll need to invest in paid ads.
Or, you can ‘hack’ their algorithms by going live, which tends to have a much better organic reach than standard posts. A study by Biteable found that Facebook lives reach nearly twice as many people than a standard video post.
They also found that engagement is much higher for Facebook live videos over standard pre-recorded videos.
Plus, going live allows you to interact with your audience, answer their questions, and direct them to other content you’ve produced.
3. Turn it Into a Video
Digital marketing trends change rapidly, but video content has been holding strong for the last several years. In fact, more than half of all marketers say video content earns them a higher ROI than any other type of content.
Worried you’ll need a fancy video setup to make professional videos? I’ve got great news for you. All you need is a smartphone and a good pair of earbuds with a microphone (or a computer with video capabilities.)
You can use software like Zoom to record a webinar-style video and share the recording with your audience. Or, you can record straight to your device and upload to YouTube.
Which content should you convert to video? Look for topics that are difficult to cover in writing or posts where readers asked more questions than average. These factors could indicate your audience would find a video useful.
Remember, video content doesn’t have to be you talking the whole time — consider using screen share for walkthroughs or interviewing industry experts on camera.
4. Revamp Older Content
When it comes to digital marketing, the only thing that stays the same is that everything changes. A piece of content that was incredibly effective just two years ago might be outdated, stale, and not optimized to today’s SEO standards.
To keep up with the SEO standards, an SEO reporting tool helps.
Instead of spending six hours creating a brand new piece of content, why not make the most of what you already have by editing and updating older content?
Google favors updated content, but they also like content that has already earned links — so updating content is really the best of both worlds. You keep any links or social shares you’ve already earned and earn a bit more Google love by updating your content.
Here’s a crash course on how to revamp older content:
- Use Google Analytics to pull up the most popular content from the past one to two years.
- Copy and paste your content into MarketMuse, under their optimize tab to get an idea of how your content currently ranks. It also provides a content score, target word count, and suggests related topics to add in red. Use this information to optimize your content and add additional sections.
- Then, run your content through Grammarly. This is more than just a grammar tool — it will also help you catch run-on sentences that make content hard to read and the passive voice, which can dilute your message.
- Before you hit publish, look for internal links you can add to the older content. This will encourage Google to see your content as useful and improve time on page.
- Make sure you’ve added your main target keywords to a rank tracking tool of your choice, and monitor your rankings for positive impact.
This article reviewing the credit repair companies was originally published in 2020. However, it’s being updated twice a month. This ensures that the information on the page is still relevant and that it continues to rank well on Google search results.
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5. Turn It into A Guest Post
Guest posts can help you establish your brand as an authority in your field, increase your brand’s reach, and even expand your personal network — if you choose the right site to guest post on.
Posting for a website with a smaller reach than your own or with an entirely different audience won’t help your brand much. A high authority website that targets your audience, however, can be priceless.
But, you might not want to spend 6 hours writing a post that may or may not be effective. So, instead of creating a totally new piece of content, look for a new take on a topic you’ve already covered.
Can you use newer examples to prove your point? Approach the problem from a different direction or target a different subset of your audience?
Remember, your content cannot be plagiarized, but it can be inspired by the content you’ve already created. For example, you could use an SEO content tool like Clearscope to analyze a piece of content on your website.
The dashboard provides a list of relevant terms you can use to create a totally new piece by targeting different relevant terms.
6. Create a Slide Deck
When it comes to social media sites, most marketers focus on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. But there are several smaller social sites, like Slideshare, that can help drive substantial traffic.
Founded in 2006, Slideshare is owned by LinkedIn and currently earns more than 80 million visitors — most from targeted searches, according to their website.
What does this mean for you?
By translating your blog post into an easy to digest slide presentation, you have the opportunity to earn high rankings through SlideShare for key terms related to your business.
But, don’t just copy and paste your blog into a slide. Look for ways to highlight critical information while keeping the slides simple and informative.
Seth Godin shares three tips for creating engaging slides in, as you would expect, a SlideShare presentation. But this isn’t just a meta presentation — it is created from a portion of one of his ebooks that he repurposed.
ProTip: You could also turn a blog post into a full-fledged webinar and use it as a lead magnet, part of an online course, or as a paid training.
7. Build an Infographic to Highlight Key Points
Infographics are a visually engaging way to share key information with your audience. But, they aren’t just for statistics — infographics can also be used to outline a step by step process or share fast tips, like this example:
If you were looking to get quick tips to improve a presentation, would you rather read a 2,500-word article, watch a video, or scan this engaging infographic?
Most of us would choose the infographic, and there’s a good reason for that. Our brains process images much faster than written content, which means we absorb information from infographics much faster.
In addition to being popular with online readers, infographics also earn 170% more links than standard written posts — which helps your brand get seen more online.
Conclusion
The world has been turned upside down, but you have a business to run. Repurposing content is an affordable way to keep your brand top of mind and expand your reach during a time when most businesses are reeling in their marketing budgets.
Here’s one final tip to get the most out of your repurposed content —- include internal links between your new pieces of content and the posts you drew inspiration from. This will assure Google your posts are relevant — and, hopefully, keep site visitors around for just a little bit longer.
