I hate waste, whether it’s something tangible like food or money or intangible like time or opportunity. In my family they call me the “leftover king” because I refuse to throw food away until it’s got fuzzy green stuff growing on it. I’m also the guy who squeezes every last drop out of the toothpaste tube and reuses plastic baggies.
My distaste for waste extends to marketing content, which is why I’m such a big fan of content repurposing. To me, there’s nothing more wasteful than spending valuable time and money creating good content and then not maximizing its impact.
Why Content Repurposing Makes Sense
Content repurposing is simply reusing content you’ve already created across different platforms so readers can access it in different ways. This makes sense for several reasons, including the fact that it’s easier and cheaper to tweak and revise existing content than to create new content from scratch.
Repurposing also expands your audience reach since it’s published in more than one format and location. In addition, it can boost search engine optimization (SEO) results because you’re creating multiple content pieces that are targeting similar keywords and phrases.
Note that content repurposing is different from content reposting and cross-posting. Reposting is simply republishing content you’ve published before on the same platform, while cross-posting is sharing the same content on different platforms. Repurposing adapts existing material into new types of content for different media channels.
The best content for repurposing is so-called “evergreen” content that isn’t time-sensitive. For example, a blog about new tax legislation is not evergreen because the newsworthiness wears off after a period of time. But a blog about estate planning or cash management is evergreen because these topics and strategies are timeless.
How to Repurpose Your Content
Thanks to the digital revolution, there are more ways than ever to repurpose your marketing content. Here are 6 ideas to consider:
1. Convert long-form content into blogs. Whitepapers, eBooks, research reports and case studies contain a boatload of material that can be chopped up and repackaged into shorter blog posts. For example, you could create a series of six 500-word blogs from a 3,000-word whitepaper or eBook. Or take the opposite approach and create a whitepaper or eBook out of a series of blogs.
2. Blast out your blog as an e-newsletter. I do this with the blog you’re reading right now by slightly tweaking it and then sending it as an article to my newsletter list. (Click here to sign up for my e-newsletter.) This allows me to “push” the content out while also posting it here to “pull” readers into my website and boost my SEO results.
3. Share your content on social media. Make sure you’re sharing content across all your social media channels, especially LinkedIn and X. LinkedIn’s Publishing Platform makes it easy: Just click on the “Write article” button at the top of your LinkedIn home page. Don’t forget to click the “Share” button so the article is shared across the platform with your network.
4. Create LinkedIn and X posts out of newsletter excerpts. I do this a week or so after I publish a LinkedIn article. I shorten the article to about 100 bulleted words so skimmers can read it quickly — they can click through to read the full article if they have more time and interest.
5. Create slideshows and infographics. Infographics are especially popular now. They can take reams of statistics and data and make it interesting and digestible. Just make sure the underlying data itself is relevant and of interest to your audience. Slideshare is an online tool that makes it easy to repurpose text into slideshows and infographics.
6. Repurpose a webinar or podcast into text or a video. If you’ve hosted a recent webinar or podcast, you can repurpose this into long-form content or a series of blogs. I just did this for a bank that hosted a webinar about foreign exchange by writing an article based on the material in the webinar, including quotes from the bankers who led the session.
You can also repurpose webinars and podcasts as videos and post them on YouTube, TikTok or Instagram Reels. A friend of mine who owns a record store creates videos where he talks about all things vinyl record-related — he’s currently approaching 13,000 YouTube subscribers. Check out the Deaf Man Vinyl YouTube channel.
Be Proactive with Content Repurposing
The best way to repurpose content is to make it part of your content marketing workflow. Strategize how you’ll repurpose content during the early stages of the process, instead of doing so reactively after the fact.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to go see what’s in the fridge that I can whip up for a leftover dinner tonight.