9 Techniques to Repurpose Blog Content to Reach New Audience

0
223

Share on LinkedIn

Content creation isn’t easy neither inexpensive. And it is unfair not to use your content (after spending a lot of resources on its creation) to its full potential. If you publish new articles on your blog only, you’re not using it to its capacity.

Underutilization of the content is a common practice that often goes unnoticed.

If you’re not reproducing your existing content into other forms, you’re leaving money on the table. Eugene Cheng, for instance, garnered more than 2 million views on SlideShare and acquired 400 email subscribers from a single SlideShare presentation.

slideshare case study

The best part: He did this with a blog post that was already published and live on this blog.

This is what’s called content repurposing which is defined as reproducing or recycling your existing content to reach a new audience by changing its format. When the content is reproduced into another format, its purpose is changed and is now used to achieve a different objective. All you have to do is reuse existing content somewhere else.

For instance, converting a blog post into SlideShare presentation, converting a blog post into a video and then publishing it on YouTube, or converting email series into an eBook.

Why repurpose content?

To reach a different target group and to reach a new audience.

Your target audience has different preferences. Not all of them like reading blog posts, some of them will prefer watching videos, others might prefer listening to a podcast on SoundCloud. The content on your blog is read by a specific portion of your target audience. But when you take this content and publish it on other platforms, you reach a new audience that is more likely to find your content on a network they visit more often and in a format they love interacting to.

That’s what repurposing does to your content.

Businesses blog religiously. As much as 53% of marketers reported that creating content for the blog is their top priority. If you have a blog and you publish new content regularly, you can convert your blog posts into different content formats and distribute them to reach a new audience.
Below is a list of proven blog content repurposing techniques that you can use to reach a new audience at little or no cost at all.

1. Videos

The best thing you can do with a blog post is to convert it into a video. People love interacting with videos. Statistics show that 54% of consumers want to see more video content from the brands they follow.

video content statistics

You can easily convert any blog post into a video using online tools. Lumen5, for instance, lets you make a video from any blog post quickly. It uses text and existing images in your blog post to create a video that you can download or publish on social networking sites.

Alternately, you can use Windows Movie Maker. It’s flexible and fairly easy-to-use but it doesn’t convert text to video automatically rather you’ll have to do it manually.

Once you have converted a blog post into a video, publish it on your social accounts, on your blog, and online streaming websites. That’s how it will reach a new audience.

2. Podcast

As much as 51% of the US population has listened to a podcast. If you’re not creating podcasts, you’re not reaching at least 50% of your target audience (theoretically). And doing so will increase the chances of reaching a new audience that specifically listens to podcasts.

podcast listening stats

Play is the best tool that will automatically convert any blog post into a podcast. It has more than 30 voice types and supports several languages. It works on complete autopilot. Select a blog post and voila!

Better yet, if you use WordPress, grab Play’s plugin.

3. Social Content

It is expected that the global social media monthly active users worldwide will cross 3 billion. You can’t ignore social media. If creating fresh content for social media is getting tough, repurposing your blog posts won’t just save time but will help you connect with a wider audience.

You can create several small social media posts from a single blog post. It all comes down to how you use it. A tool like Pablo can save you a lot of time. Select any text on your blog post and convert it into an amazing social media post with a few clicks.

This means you can create a social media post from every sentence that you wrote.

Amazing, right?

4. Infographic

Infographics are far more effective than text when it comes to readership. An infographic is 30x more likely to be read than a blog post.

infographic effectiveness statistic

Infographic needs a lot of data and statistics and this is where things get tough. You can use data from multiple blog posts on a single topic and create your own infographic without spending a penny on research.

You can create infographic easily with Canva. Use an existing template, tweak it, add data, and you’re done. You don’t have to be a designer to create an infographic with Canva. You should have data and statistics for infographic, and that’s what you can get from existing blog posts.

When your infographic is ready, publish it on your blog or maybe you can publish it on an authority blog as a guest post. Once it is published, you can convert it into small images which can be shared on social media.

5. Slides

Content repurpose seems incomplete without SlideShare. It is one of the top 100 most visited websites in the world which is used by more than 80 million professionals. Besides, you can publish slides to several other platforms like Scribd, Slides, and Speaker Deck.

You need to extract slides carefully from your blog post. Use Open Office or Google Slides to create slides. It’s essential to have your PPTs designed well to stand out from the crowd.

Most of the slides on SlideShare and elsewhere aren’t professionally designed and use similar templates. Unique, professional, and consistent design theme is what your brand needs on SlideShare. Hire a freelance designer or use Design Pickle for designing PPTs.

Upload slides to SlideShare and other platforms, and sit back. SlideShare will drive heaps of traffic to your website and your presentation will attract a new audience.

6. EBook

This is something quite obvious. You can convert your blog posts into an eBook which can be used as a lead magnet on (and off) your website. Beacon is an awesome tool that lets you convert any blog post into an eBook, workbook, checklist, resource guide, or any kind of PDF.

Alternately, you can try Anthologize. It is a WordPress plugin that lets you convert content into an eBook with a few clicks.

You can use an eBook in several ways. You can upload it on SlideShare, use it as a lead magnet, upload it on eBook databases, or send it to your list. You can reach a massive audience with a simple PDF.

7. Online Course

Did I mention you can sell your eBook too? Well, you can. Nick Stephenson generated $130K+ in the first week with his online course. This is what you can do with an online course.

After you have created an eBook from existing content, you can sell it online via your own website or other platforms like Udemy and Teachable. The idea isn’t necessarily to make money rather getting exposure and reach a new audience.

Udemy, for instance, has a global rank of 342 and is used by well over 30 million students. Uploading your course on Udemy will help you connect with its audience and that’s the whole point of content repurposing.

8. Webinar

Webinars are exceptionally great at driving conversions and connecting with a new audience. Statistics show that 76% of B2B buyers have attended at least one webinar in the last 12 months which helped them with their purchase decision.
You can conduct webinars successfully without worrying about content creation as long as you published a good number of blog posts. Use blog posts to create a webinar.

For instance, you can convert how-to blog posts into individual how-to webinars. This can be done easily. Here is an example of how Neil Patel does it.

neil patel webinar image

Better yet, if you have already created slides, you can use them in the webinar. However, you should craft your webinar carefully. It should deliver exceptional value to the attendees.

9. Email Series

Not sure what to send your subscribers? Are you out of new content ideas of for your email series? You can always use blog posts.

However, you don’t have to use a blog post as is in the email rather tweak it to make it appealing. It is necessary because it is highly likely that your subscriber had read the blog post on your blog. Sending exact content via email might ruin engagement.

Here is what you should instead.

Create an email course using blog posts. If you have created several blog posts on a given topic, convert them into a single document, and use them as an email course.

You won’t be reaching a new audience with an email course like this since you’re interacting with your own subscribers. What you should do is let subscribers share emails with their friends in exchange for an incentive. That’s how you’ll connect with a new audience.

Bonus

Changing content format isn’t always necessary to reach a new audience, you can re-publish your blog posts on other platforms is one of the best techniques to repurpose content. Publishing complete blog post or some part of it on another blog or blogging platform with a backlink to the original piece won’t just help you engage with new audience but it also gives you a natural backlink.

Here is a list of leading platforms where you can republish your blog posts without changing the format or making any tweaks:

1. Medium
2. LinkedIn Pulse
3. Quora
4. Reddit
5. Growth Hackers

Conclusion

Content repurpose still works and it will continue to work. You can like Benjamin Hardy who acquired over 20K new subscribers from Medium in as low as 6 months. You can do better than Hardy, who knows.

Give content repurpose a try and see how what it does for your business. What content repurpose technique will you use to reach a new audience?

Sabih Javed
Sabih Javed is a seasoned digital marketing freelance writer who writes on everything 'digital marketing'. He has written content for several marketing blogs, B2B companies, and SaaS businesses His work has appeared on sites like TheNextWeb, Jeff Bullas, Yahoo News, Smart Data Collective, E27, Business2Community, and more.

ADD YOUR COMMENT

Please use comments to add value to the discussion. Maximum one link to an educational blog post or article. We will NOT PUBLISH brief comments like "good post," comments that mainly promote links, or comments with links to companies, products, or services.

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here