You know that feeling when it happens. Your palms start to sweat a little and your heart rate increases just a touch because the content calendar says it’s time to publish something, but you have no idea what it should be. The tentative topic in the content calendar is no longer relevant, and you are searching for an idea, any idea.
The pressure is on, and your mind is spinning. No ideas are coming to you.
So what do you do? One thing is for sure - don’t fret. Take a deep breath and wipe your clammy palms on your pant legs because there is no need to panic…or rack your brain to come up with a topic. The truth is, you have something already created in your arsenal that you can use, and you are simply going to repurpose it.
Repurposed content is taking older content of yours and making it new again. There are many ways you can do that:
Blog post → Email newsletter
Podcast → Blog post
Case study → Infographic
White paper → Twitter thread
Blog post → Blog post
Repurposed content is a great way to reinforce a point you already made but in another format. It’s often much easier to create than an entirely new piece of content.
So let’s look at each one individually.
You have a couple of options here. The first one is probably the easiest and what a lot of people do: cut and paste your blog post into your email newsletter, make any necessary updates to the content if need be, and click “send.”
Not a lot of time or effort is needed for this option, and it’s not necessarily the most effective way to repurpose content.
This brings me to the second option, which is boiling down the blog post into a few key points to highlight in your newsletter, with a link to the initial blog post at the end.
Either way, you can use the blog post's initial content differently.
Often, show notes from a podcast don’t get the love they deserve. Instead, they act as the Cliffs’ Notes to a podcast and may or may not get read.
And the podcast itself? Usually, they are chock-full of great information that you can capture and present differently.
In other words, a podcast and its show notes are pure gold when it comes to content. Take the information you glean from a podcast and present it in a blog post. It is a great way to repurpose content and get in front of additional eyeballs.
First off, I can’t stress enough how powerful case studies are, and if you have a solid case study, you will want to use the content within it as much as possible.
Why?
Because they tell the story of how you helped a happy customer from that customer’s point of view. In other words, they are objective and relatable.
A great way to use content from a case study is to repurpose the main information into an Infographic. It doesn’t have to be long or complex, either - just the key points laid out in some graphical way will do the trick. And of course, don’t forget to include a link back to the original case study.
Some people love Twitter; others hate it. Still, others have no opinion about communicating in 140 or 280 characters. Me? I’m a fan and think it’s a powerful platform if used correctly.
A Twitter thread is a series of tweets that are connected and build upon each other. It allows you to provide additional context or extend a point by connecting multiple Tweets.
And while they require some work and thought., they tend to get more impressions and more engagement than single Tweets.
So, you can use a Tweet thread as an opportunity to repurpose the content of anything, really, including a white paper.
Get the key points that you want to make together and disseminate each into a separate Tweet. Then at the end, include a link to the white paper.
Sure, you can repurpose one blog post into another one but if you do, change up the format to keep it fresh.
The format of the original post will dictate the format of the repurposed one, but some ideas include:
You can repurpose your initial post on your own blog, and you can also repurpose it on other platforms like Medium, Substack, and LinkedIn Publisher for additional mileage.
The idea is to squeeze as much juice out of every piece of content you produce. So the next time you’re sitting there wondering what in the world to write, look back at what you’ve already published and determine in what format you are going to publish it again.
If you need some help figuring any of this out, please feel free to reach out; I'd love to help!