It’s easy to feel overwhelmed as a content marketer.
After all, you’re competing with the internet, where thousands of new blog posts are being published by the minute.
Literally.
About 4.4M blog posts are published per day, which works out to about 3000 posts every 60 seconds.
And somewhere in that never ending flurry of content, you have to make sure your post gets noticed.
No small feat, I know.
But, I’m about to make your life a lot easier!
Some content marketers like the quantity approach. They like to publish hundreds of new blog posts every month, chasing all sorts of keywords in the neverending pursuit of new traffic.
I don’t agree with that. It’s a waste of time. It’s also a lot of hard work.
Amazing content is what grows your audience.
That’s why effective content marketing is all about working smart and getting the most for your efforts.
One really good blog post can be the backbone of an entire content marketing strategy.
How, you ask? Two ways: You repurpose and update your existing content.
Repurposing content is a time-saving way to build tons of “new” content and grow your audience significantly.
Equally as important (and low effort) is updating older content. Updating blog posts on a regular basis, along with all your spin-off content, is a great way to build on what you already have (rather than starting from scratch everyday).
There are many SEO benefits that come with doing both, too.
Sounds good, right?
Can effective content marketing really be that simple?
Yes, yes, and yes.
Content marketing is not about quantity, joint pain, and sleep loss.
It’s about ranking first on Google because you created something so good that readers (old and new) love it for eternity.
Repurposing great content amplifies the reach of your content, and helps to drive traffic from numerous sources and across platforms. Your content can be interactive and interesting even if it’s not completely fresh. Meanwhile, updating older content tells Google that one blog post is always going to stay relevant. That keeps it ranking number one and driving new waves of traffic every week.
What exactly are the benefits of repurposing and updating my content?
There are plenty of reasons why you should repurpose and update existing content. I won’t get into all of them but here the ones that motivate me to do it:
- Save time and money
- Establish your evergreen content
- Significantly boost your SEO rankings
- Build topic authority
- Reach new audiences
- Reinforce your messages
- Keeps your content on brand
Save time and money
You’ve already done the research and got all the points down in writing. Now you’re just recycling. You’re not starting from scratch, you’re not doing research, you’re not creating multiple drafts. Less time spent on a new blog post means more time making money elsewhere.
Establish evergreen content
A really good blog post will tackle a timeless topic, like design trends or how to give a keynote presentation. While new trends, new research, new tools, and new hacks may come around, you’ve already got the base content. You just need to update it so it stays current.
Boost your SEO rankings
Over time, with so much content on the same topic getting a ton of engagement and pointing back to your original blog post, Google will realize you’re an authority on the topic. So it’ll lift all your content up, knowing how relevant it is.
Develop topic authority
As you keep talking about the same thing, you’ll keep learning new things, and eventually become a bit of an expert. This helps to establish you as a thought leader in that space and your company as an authority. Google recognizes your site, while readers recognize your brand.
And no, you don’t need to be an ‘expert’ on something before you start writing about something.
Reach new audiences
By repackaging your content into new forms of content, it can be shared on different platforms and on different channels. Not everyone discovers content in the same way, and this lets you access a wider range of audiences that may not have come across your blog post, email campaign, video, webinar, or presentation, etc.
Reinforce your message
A blog post might be great, but an infographic or video might really help the ideas sink in. Pushing the same message in different forms helps get your message across and educate your audience effectively.
Develop your brand
Over time, across different channels, your audience sees that you’ve created awesome content around a single topic. This enriches your brand, bringing together your current brand identity and topic expertise. It lets you demonstrate a consistent personality and voice, and authority as a source for information.
Read more: Future of content marketing
How to repurpose your blog post into new, awesome content
Alright, let’s get into the nitty-gritty of this post – how to repurpose your blog post into new kinds of content!
With a clear-minded approach, and minimal effort, here are the best ways to repurpose your blog post into 7 different, engaging pieces of content:
- How to repurpose blog posts into infographics
- How to repurpose blog posts as guest posts
- How to repurpose blog posts in presentations/webinars
- How to repurpose blog posts into online courses
- How to repurpose blog posts into videos
- How to repurpose blog posts into social media posts
- How to repurpose blog posts into ebooks and whitepapers
To break down your blog post into different forms of content, you’ll need to follow specific sets of steps. Let’s explore what the each process looks like!
How to repurpose blog posts into infographics
Infographics are highly visual pieces of content, especially long-form infographics. They are low on text, and high on images, icons and color. That’s why you can’t just copy and paste your blog post into an infographic design.
They are also one of the most-shared types content online today.
You’ll need two things to repurpose your blog post into an infographic:
- An infographic outline based on your blog post.
- A professional infographic template to design your infographic.
The infographic outline lets you repackage your blog post in a way that makes sense visually, is engaging and is easy to read. It should have notes and content to reference to guide the design.
An infographic template makes the design process 100 times easier by providing design inspiration and structure for anyone to work with.
Here are a few basic steps to follow to create an effective infographic outline:
- Keep your blog post’s title and subheaders (these are the infographic’s individual sections)
- Identify key takeaways for each section (these are your individual points)
- Be concise, avoid lengthy paragraphs (stick to 2-3 sentences in each section)
- Use as many stats and points of data as possible
- Include links to other design examples or inspiration to help inform the design process
Here’s an infographic outline example that you can follow to create your own:
How to repurpose blog posts into guest posts
Think about guest posting on topics related to your blog post, when you’ve got your blog post outline ready.
I know, it seems like you’re jumping ahead. But this helps you plan out how you can write some relevant guest posts that can point back to your original post.
It’s worth the effort since these guest posts will:
- Build your topic authority
- Secure backlinks to your post and help it rank
- Increase the amount of traffic your post gets
The easiest way to plan out the guest posts you’ll write is to focus on individual sections in your original blog post. Choose specific sections that you can expand on.
For example, if I chose to do that with this post, I’d likely write one post for each way to repurpose a blog post. In my guest posts, I’d provide more detailed steps, examples, and point to any relevant content that helps validate what I’m sharing.
Then comes the slightly harder part: pitching your guest posts.
Hey, don’t sweat it! Pitching guest posts is a bit of a grind if you’re new to it. But with the right process and some patience, it’s a breeze.
First, you need to get yourself a list of publications that would actually be interested in your guest post, and get familiar with them. Every site has different guidelines, different ways to contact the editor, and different publishing schedules. That means you need to visit these sites, understand what they’re asking for, and pitch them accordingly.
There’s no shortcut for that.
Don’t resort to spamming editors’ inboxes, either. You’ll only annoy the people you want to have as friends one day. Here’s insightful advice from 80+ editors on how to pitch effectively that you should check out before pitching.
How to repurpose blog posts into presentations or webinars
At some point you might give a talk on your blog post at a conference or in a webinar. Even if you’re a spectacular public speaker, you need an engaging presentation slide deck at your disposal.
When considering your presentation design, let’s talk about what to avoid first.
According to David Paradi’s annual presentation survey, here’s what annoyed audiences the most about the presentations they sat through.
- Speakers reading from slides
- Slides with numerous, lengthy sentences
- Really small text that’s hard to read
What these comments all have in common is that they center on text. If your speaking points are literally what’s on the slides, if there are way too many sentences on each slide, or the text is minuscule, you’re going to bomb.
The best way to approach presentation design is to have each slide focus on a single point, idea or emotion. Then follow up those slides with great visuals, examples, screenshots, memes and more.
This is easiest if your blog post already has tons of visuals which you can just repurpose.
How to repurpose blog posts into online courses
People want to learn. They want to get better at what they do.
If you have detailed ‘How-to’ type posts that help solve real problems for professionals, then create an online course or a learning hub. It doesn’t have to be an official set of courses with lectures and assignments, either (although that works, too).
For example, Brian Dean’s Backlinko blog (pictured above) has tons of helpful blog posts on anything SEO. His SEO Hub just brings all of his content together in a way that makes it easier to navigate. It’s organized by intent, helping people find everything they need on specific aspects of SEO and content marketing.
That said, your newly curated content should also provide more context, offer a number of helpful instructions, relevant examples and case studies. You want to build on the foundation of content you already created.
If you’re using your learning hub or course as a way to capture new leads, reward the people who sign up. Be ready to give your course-takers something no one else has access to. It could be a process checklist, a cheat sheet, a template, or any other kind of digital product that’s simple but valuable.
Related: Best online course builders
How to repurpose blog posts into videos
The content team at Venngage takes their best blog content and turns them into videos. Our post about different types of infographics exists as a simple video on YouTube. This helps us reach new audiences by building our presence on a new platform.
Creating instructional or explanatory videos is a great way to access and engage new audiences. It’s also a great way to show up in search results!
FYI: You can actually optimize YouTube videos for SEO. Just check out this video optimization guide here.
Also, here are some tips to help you repurpose a blog post into a video:
- Use your post’s table of contents or headers as the guide for the video’s structure
- Use on-screen graphics and examples to clearly communicate your messages
- Make sure that everything you say is important! Include breaks and changes in pace to keep your audience tuned in
- Make jokes, change the inflection of your voice, and talk with your hands for a more engaging video
How to repurpose blog posts into social posts
Creating social posts out of your blog post content is probably the easiest win from this entire list. You can create custom posts that share insightful tips, revelations or statistics to share and reference your original post.
You can also just share different visuals from the post itself. The best part about it is that you can schedule your posts in advance using any social scheduling tool.
I’d suggest first creating the infographic from your blog post, and then sharing sections of your infographic as individual social posts. It can be the title card, quotes, captions, statistics, charts, and anything else that’s attention grabbing.
Remember, the more visually appealing the design of your social media content, the better chance people will pause to look at it as they scroll through their feed.
It’s a great way to encourage visits to your blog post, and also build more interest as your consistently share valuable insights from your post.
Pro Tip: As you create marketing collateral across channels, be sure to keep color choices simple. You want to maintain consistency. More importantly, you want to complement your brand colors every step of the way. Check out this post on color theory to help you establish style and color palettes that work for you.
How to repurpose blog posts into whitepapers & ebooks
Whitepapers and ebooks are great content marketing assets because they’re excellent lead magnets. You can use them to segment highly engaged audiences, collect emails (aka build your email list), build lead-nurturing campaigns and more.
Since you’ve got the basic content already down, you can spend more time setting up your distribution and nurturing campaigns around your whitepaper or ebook.
Just like in a course, you need to offer more than the original piece of content to really provide value. It boils down to three things:
- Highly engaging visuals
- Real-life examples, case studies
- Instructions and actionable tips
Build on your existing blog content by incorporating those three components and you’ll have an excellent lead-magnet to share with your audience.
When you’re designing your whitepaper or ebook, think of the pages like presentation slides. While they can have more text, they should be very clear, easy to read and easy to understand. The visuals you’ve paired the sections of text with should enhance the impact of your message.
How to update existing blog content
Just like repurposing content, updating content should be a fundamental part of your content marketing strategy. Updating content properly leads to an increase in organic traffic, more backlinks, and improved rankings. It also lifts up under-performing content, ensuring your blog is performing at its best.
Updating blog content is another low effort, easy win.
My favourite kind.
If you choose to update your blog post with new information, new sections, new links – then Google will reconsider the value of your post. It also gives you a reason to re-promote the post to your audience, since the post offers even more value than it did before.
What blog content should I update?
Deciding which blog posts get updated really depends. Ask yourself, how many blog posts are there? Have all the blog posts been SEO-optimized yet? Have any blog posts dropped in rankings recently, lost organic traffic or seen lower CTRs lately?
Personally, I found Jonas Sickler’s post on thin content very helpful. It’s a guide on how to audit your site (very simply). It lets you identify all the pages you need to either update or possibly remove, and then prioritize them.
It’s also a great content marketing practice to revisit content that’s always performed poorly and investigate why. Is it the formatting, the lack of focus on keywords, lack of visuals, the length or something else? Compare them to high-performers and ask yourself what changes you could make to improve their quality.
How do I update my blog content effectively?
Updating content is a great opportunity to make sure your content is up-to-date and relevant. It’s also an opportunity to make sure the post adheres to SEO best practices.
You want your blog content to always provide the best user experience and satisfy Google’s ranking factors.
Here are a few things you can do to update your content and get Google’s attention:
- Link to new sources
- Add new examples and references
- Update broken links
- Apply SEO best practices
- Double-down on organic keyword rankings
Link to new sources
To begin with, any sources you referenced in your blog post might have already been published a year or two ago. So check if there are new posts on the same topic that you can link to instead.
Linking to new sources is helpful to your audience since you’re providing the most up-to-date information. Google also notices that newer, more relevant pages have been linked to and signify a change in the post.
Add new examples and references
If you’ve included visual examples or references to what other companies and influencers have done, consider updating them.
Over time, the examples you shared may be outdated or common knowledge for your readers. Updating any examples you’ve used provides value to readers new and old. It’s also another signifier to Google that your content has changed.
You can also include more tips and examples, to further enrich the post.
Update broken links
Unfortunately, other sites often remove blog posts or restructure their site and breaking links in the process. If your page has a number of broken links on it, Google ranks it lower, since it looks like a poor user experience. You can use browser extensions like Check My Links to quickly scan your page and identify any broken links.
Apply SEO best practices
All your blog posts should be SEO-optimized. This requires following a specific blog format that reassures Google you’re providing a great user experience.
Here are some easy, impactful ways to optimize your blog post for SEO:
- Use the primary keyword consistently throughout the post
- Use headings and subheadings often and consistently to break up your post
- Use a variety of visuals
- Apply descriptive alt-text to your images
Double-down on organic keyword rankings
Even though your blog post focused on one specific keyword, you might be ranking fairly high for other keywords unintentionally.
Doubling-down on these keywords can increase the organic traffic to your page.
You can check that with tools like Ahrefs.
You can register for a trial period to try it out for free, although I’d recommend purchasing it. There are a ton of valuable SEO insights Ahrefs provides that you can plan your content strategy around.
In Ahrefs, you can paste the blog post URL into the search bar. This lets you view organic keyword rankings. You’ll see a list of terms which you currently rank for and the position you’re holding on them.
Order them by position and see what you’re ranking for under 20. You should gauge the relevance of the individual terms. If the search volume and position justifies the effort, incorporate that term into the post. Dedicate a section to it in your blog post update.
Diversify and conquer
Blog posts are the cornerstone of any content marketing strategy. They’re essential for SEO, give your brand a voice, establish your brand’s authority, and connect your offerings with the right audiences.
But blog posts alone should not be your entire content marketing strategy. That’s an ‘eggs in one basket’ scenario.
Get yourself a few more baskets to improve your online visibility and acquisition. Blog content serves as a foundation to create great content across different channels and in different formats. So use the content you already have!
Repurpose your blog posts into cool, new content that your audiences will love. Your competitors will, even if you don’t.
Bookmark this guide if you find it helpful, and share your thoughts with me! I’d love to hear what’s been working for you, what you think I’ve missed, or some of the challenges you’ve faced with repurposing or updating content.