How to Turn Your Existing Content Into Additional Content

If you’ve ever been responsible for preparing a big holiday meal, you know the work often begins days in advance and includes countless hours of cooking, cleaning and shuffling around hot pans. You also know that after investing so much time, money and energy into creating your feast, there’s no way you’d let a single morsel go to waste. Luckily, sometimes dishes are even better as leftovers than they were the first go-around (Thanksgiving sandwiches, anyone?).

But, where do you start?

Step 1: Identify Your Highest Value Content Marketing Pieces

First, start by determining which content assets provide the most value and engagement. Not every piece of content is worth repurposing — some may be too outdated or didn’t resonate well with your audience. But starting with the most valuable assets will help you compound your success. After all, if an asset did well the first time, there’s a good chance your audience wants more.

Here are a few things that will help you find for your content gold:

• Engagement metrics
  Look for blog posts that had a low bounce rate and high time-on-page compared to others, as well as those with a significant number of comments, likes and shares across social media.
• SEO ranking and search volume
  Identify content that ranks high for key terms and phrases popular among your audience. Additionally, consider content that targets those keywords and phrases but doesn’t rank as well as it should. In either case, repurposing those assets will give you another opportunity to climb higher in search results.
• Current organizational objectives
  Consider your company’s top objectives and goals for the year, and identify content that supports those efforts. For example, if you’re looking to earn a larger share of the market within a specific niche, look for existing content that targets decision-makers within that vertical or content that could be repurposed to focus on those specific buyers.

Step 2: Define Your Content Asset’s Repurposing Potential

For content repurposing to be successful, you have to start with high-value content. But you also need to make sure the content you choose has potential in other formats. Is it weighty enough that it can be broken up into smaller bits? Or is it simple enough that it could be combined with related content into a larger piece?

For example, suppose your business is an enterprise IT security company, and you’ve written a long-form guide covering the top 10 cybersecurity threats of 2021. You might consider pulling out a few of the most severe or common threats and rewriting those sections as blog posts.

Alternatively, suppose your company manufactures solar panels, and you’ve written a series of blog posts on the benefits of investing in solar energy. You might consider compiling all of these blog posts into a gated downloadable buyer’s guide.

Step 3: Multiply Your Content

One of the best benefits of repurposing content is it allows you to rapidly expand your content arsenal without requiring the same amount of resources necessary to create a brand new resource. So, as you begin this process, it’s crucial you don’t overcomplicate the process or make things harder on yourself (otherwise, it defeats the purpose).

1. First, send the audio to a transcription service like Rev.com.
2. Next, take the transcription and edit the copy for clarity, length, style and search engine optimization purposes. Now you have a new blog post on a topic you already know will resonate with your audience.
3. Then, distill the blog post to its most critical points (in the case of a how-to, boil it down to just the step-by-step process). And with help from a designer or a tool like Canva, create a simple, downloadable checklist.
4. Finally, pull a few of the most insightful quotes from the transcript and, again, using a tool like Canva, create a few enticing graphics for Instagram.

Boom. One piece of content becomes (at least) four.

Bonus Step: Make Repurposing a Practice

Consistently publishing high-quality content is essential to driving new traffic and moving existing prospects down the funnel. But creating valuable content also requires a lot of labor, so it’s critical you mine those assets for every last nugget of gold before you demand more of your team’s precious creativity.

By regularly repurposing content, you can continue benefiting from that initial investment of time and energy without running your content creators ragged. Additionally, it will help you consider opportunities for repurposing before you even begin a new project — potentially boosting the value of each new piece of content and making sure you’re not leaving anything on the table.