Content marketing is an extremely effective tool to build trust and authority within your niche. By repurposing your content to social media and other platforms, you can stop the content overload.
(Updated October 2021)
Google and the other search engines use quality online content as one of their top ranking metrics.
Prospects and customers are looking for it too. Studies show the vast majority (81%) of your site’s visitors aren’t ready to buy yet. They’re researching their options.
The more helpful information your site has to lead them through the buying process, the more they’ll see you as helpful and knowledgeable. That’s where content marketing comes in.
How to Keep Up with Creating Original Content?
Articles, blog posts, social media posts, email newsletters, videos, podcasts, white papers and ebooks are all super effective content marketing tools.
But how do we possibly find the time to keep up with creating original content? Especially when we’re trying to run a business? The answer: repurposing content!
Make the most of the time, budget and effort you’ve already put into a few key content marketing projects. Then spread pieces of them around to your other marketing channels.
Here’s how it works:
Have a Plan
Like everything else in your business, having a written plan in place for your content creation gives you the foundation.
It can be a fancy spreadsheet. It can be a simple outline or organizational tree. It can be digital or on paper. It should be updated each month, quarter or year.
The biggest plus of a plan is nixing the “What do I write about?” syndrome each time.
It’s not written in stone—it can easily be changed if something better or more timely comes up in the meantime. But you have a starting place.
Create the Big Project First
Does your business have an ebook, white paper or monthly newsletter? Then you’ve got all kinds of topic ideas for blog posts, articles and social media updates already.
There are several ways to use the big projects once they’re published:
- A 5,000-word white paper has material for several relevant blog posts, articles or email newsletters. Divide up the topics according to chapter or section.
- Pull quotes out from blog posts to share on your social media pages.
- Brainstorm more topic ideas that stem from the original content, and write articles and social posts on them.
- Create a downloadable PDF with the main points of a video or podcast. Use it as a lead generation tool.
Create a Big Project from Smaller Projects
You can turn it around, too: Do you have several blog posts or articles about the same topic? Pull them together into an ebook and publish it.
If you have a substantial blog, you probably have several ebooks waiting to be “written” by collecting posts around the same topic.
You can even sell them as products.
Spread the Content Around
Do you have a regular email newsletter? Once it’s been sent out to your list, post it under the newsletter archive section on your website or as a blog post.
Or do it the other way around: write the blog post then send it to your email newsletter subscribers.
Grab a handful of insightful or helpful sentences that can be used on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter. Write or list them all at once and you’ve got your social media posts for a week or two.
Take that same e-newsletter and boil down the content for an infographic.
With some creativity and planning, one content project can be re-purposed into all your other venues for the month.
What looked like content overload in the beginning is now a useful and doable strategy of content repurposing.