Anyone trying to create content that performs well in SEO AND brings prospective customers to their website probably has a search history full of similar queries.
- “How Long Should a Blog Post Be?”
- “How Many Hashtags Should I Use on Instagram?”
- “How Long Should a LinkedIn Post Be?”
It’s exhausting, right? It’s hard enough to juggle creating and posting content, but then the goalposts keep moving. Should blog posts be 2,300 words? Ok, time to get writing. Oh, they can actually be shorter than 1,500 words, depending on the content. That’s clear as mud.
Just like keywords! A few years ago, people trying to market their businesses jam-packed their web pages and blogs with their well-researched keywords, trying to claw their way up the search engine results page. And then the powers that be (in this case, mainly Google) started penalizing websites for keyword stuffing, so people had to learn the rules again.
Aren’t you tired of trying to make unique content for eleventy different websites and remembering best practices for each? There is one great way to create content and post it across the channels that will give you consistency and save you precious time: a content repurposing system.
Why You Need a Content Repurposing System
My first job out of university was as the European Marketing Manager for IBM, taking content made for U.S. audiences and optimizing it for the UK. I learned some really crucial lessons during that first marketing job, which all boils down to making your content work for you.
One of the marketing department’s rallying cries at the time was, “do it once!” What does that mean? It means starting with one comprehensive, well-made piece of content, like a video or a blog post, and then creating multiple pieces from that starting point.
Repurposing your content in this way offers many benefits. First, it saves you time because you’re taking content you know is excellent and relevant to your brand and transforming it into a different format, which you can now use on different social media channels. This gives your content a longer life than posting it once and never referring back would.
I understand that you might worry it seems repetitive, but the truth is that your customers and clients are busy people who are unlikely to see every post. Furthermore, studies show that people must see a message seven times before internalising it. That means seeing your core branding messaging once simply isn’t enough. Repurposing content to different formats means you meet your client base on every step of the customer journey with consistent messaging.
One more reason content repurposing is a valuable marketing tactic – it can help augment your SEO. When your website has several pages with similar keywords, the search engines begin to see your site as valuable.
Content repurposing increases the amount of valuable information you have to offer your customers without sharply increasing the amount of time and effort invested.
Where Do I Start?
Before you go wild, look at your previously posted content and see what has performed well in the past. How can you take your most popular content, turn it into different formats, and continue to provide value to your customers? Think of a few ideas and write them down.
Suppose you start by repurposing a blog post. In that case, you can turn the information held within the post into a YouTube video, a slideshow that breaks up the content into more easily understood chunks, an infographic, or an eBook.
You could also create a podcast episode from the content of your blog post. Any of these options will take your text-based content and break them down into more palatable pieces.
Blog Post from Video
Once you have created your main piece of content, it’s time to start repurposing it into other content types. If you started with a video, you could now turn it into a blog post.
First, why would you want to turn a video into a blog post when video is so buzzy right now? Well, here’s the thing. Creating a video takes a lot of time, energy, and equipment, so you’ve probably put a fair bit of effort into crafting your video. Blog posts, on the other hand, are a fantastic way to improve your SEO. If you create a high-quality blog post that provides value to your customers or clientele, it can drive traffic to your site for a long time.
So how do you do it? Repurposing a video into a blog post requires creating a transcription of the video. Hopefully, your video script was structured logically, so you don’t have to spend too much time moving things around.
You’ll want to remember a few key things when repurposing a video into a blog post:
- You need to have clear headings and readable paragraphs. Google will ding you if it can’t easily understand what your blog post is about.
- You should embed your video into the blog post. Why? You can use video meta tags to help your video appear in Google searches. Also, if someone finds your blog post but prefers the video format, you will be able to keep them from clicking away.
- Don’t forget a meta description! This short description, which should include your primary keyword, doesn’t appear in the actual post, but it does appear in search results.
Splitting Up Blog Posts
Once you have a transcript or a blog post, you can split up your larger posts in infinite ways. You can post tidbits of your blog to social media and earn a lot more eyeballs on your blog post that way.
First, take a look at your blog or transcript and find the key takeaways or good quotes from the content within. Whether the most exciting parts are key statistics, thought leadership, or bits that boil down to the essence of the entire blog, you can use these nuggets to pique the interest of your audience on social media and drive them to your website.
Consider using several different formats for these posts. You could put a short slideshow or carousel of images on Instagram. You could also use audio or short text posts with accompanying imagery. Different people learn differently, and it’s a way of providing value to your clientele and meeting them along the customer journey.
Share Core Brand Content to Socials
One of the most important parts of repurposing your content is not to completely regurgitate it. You need to add context and differentiate your social content from the blog post from the video, not to withhold information but to prevent yourself from looking redundant and careless. The “hook” of a blog post’s headline is the question it prompts in the reader’s mind. Locate these details and compose a social media message that alludes to the solution without giving it all away. The goal of your social media post should be to increase your audience’s interest enough to start a conversation. In your blog post, you can drop hints about the significance of a particularly impressive statistic, sentence, or graphic. Leave your customer curious, and they are more likely to click through!
More Knowledge Lies Within
While this blog post provides some powerful and practical tips to increase the mileage of your content creation, it’s just the tip of the iceberg. If you want the comprehensive guide to repurposing your content that will save you time and money, and increase your conversions, I invite you to purchase my course, Repurpose Blueprint. With this mini-course, you will learn to take one piece of content and recreate it across your social media channels. You’ll help your customers decide to purchase your item or service. You’ll obliterate wasted time from trying to create different content for different sites for different days… you’ll solidify your messaging and have more time to devote to your most pressing tasks. Are you ready to save a tonne of time? Click here to learn more.
