Repurpose old content. Don’t let it waste away.
That was a maxim first published here, in this very blog, all the way back in 2015. Today, as the changing leaves on the trees around our Cincinnati office signal the coming of Autumn, 2019, it’s still true.
Here at wFC, we’re starting an initiative to re-purpose our the blogs in our company archive. Why? Because we know that the information we presented on our blog several years ago is still relevant. It would be a shame to let all that old content gather dust when it could still be useful. We need a way to signal to Google that our content can still help people, even if we wrote it a while ago.
Enter: repurposing!
First of all, you shouldn’t duplicate and repost your old content. That is a big SEO no-no in Google’s eyes. What we are talking about here is taking old content that is useful and presenting it in a new way using different mediums. Not only is this less time consuming than constantly trying to come up with great new content, but it allows you to reach different audiences in the process.
How to Choose Which Content to Use
You should start off by using your most popular content. This can be measured many ways. The first way is by using the content that drove a ton of traffic to your website or got really good feedback from your audience. You can also measure this by using the content that got the most engagement. This could include comments on the post, shares, or “likes” and “+1’s.” By measuring which content is the most popular you are more likely to get another positive response when you re-purpose it.
Ways to Repurpose Old Content
- Create infographics out of blog posts – You may have seen these visual information graphs floating around the web in the past few years. And for good reason. Infographics are a great way to share content to an audience on one canvas that is both appealing to the eye and informational. Some of your blog posts may have tons of great statistics or facts that some people may be too intimidated to read. By placing this info in an infographic form it makes that content more approachable to your audience. There are a number of free resources to create infographics that don’t require you to be a graphic design guru.
- Use old blog posts as an email blast – Regardless of what you may think, email still has the highest adoption rate of any communication medium online. Did you know that there are over 4.3 billion email accounts in the world, and of those, 91% say they check their email daily? By repurposing content into an email you are absolutely certain that the person receives the content as opposed to social media or blog posts. This is because they own that email, and have control of what they want to see and don’t want to see. By using your blog posts in emails you are delivering your content to a new audience. You can start gathering emails by getting a Constant Contact account and placing a sign up form on your website, blog and social media accounts.
- Use statistics from posts for social media – The great thing about blogging is that there is a ton of information that you can repurpose for social media. Scan your posts and use intriguing stats for social media. If you are really feeling creative use a service like ShareAsImage to spice up the information and present it in a more desirable and shareable way for the consumer.
- Create a downloadable guide or e-book out of your content – After you rack up so many posts covering a multitude of topics it may get overwhelming for consumers. If this is the case, parsing through your posts and combining them into one simple PDF or downloadable e-book is a great idea. Divide each guide up by category and combine them together. This makes it easy for someone who may be interested in a certain topic to get all of the info they want without the need to search through other unrelated posts. This also makes it easy to print out and refer to if they need it for later.
- Post blogs on other blogging sites – Another great way to repurpose content is to publish it to other blogging websites. Sites like Medium.com and LinkedIn offer great blogging platforms with highly active users. They may not get the information directly from your website, but they are still consuming it regardless. The goal is for them to seek out your product or service afterwards if they liked what you had to say.
Resources to Help Repurpose Old Content
Here are just a few of the great resources online to help you repurpose your content.
Infographics
- Easel.ly (www.easel.ly)
- Piktochart (www.piktochart.com)
- Canva (www.canva.com)
Email Lists
- Constant Contact (www.constantcontact.com)
- MailChimp (www.mailchimp.com)
- Emma (www.myemma.com)
Social Media Creative
- PicMonkey (www.picmonkey.com)
- Canva (www.canva.com)
- Fotor (www.fotor.com)
- ShareAsImage (www.shareasimage.com)
PDF and E-Book
- PDF Converter (www.freepdfconvert.com)
Blogging Sites
- Medium (www.medium.com)
- LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com)
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