Content marketing is a lot of work. Content repurposing is a smart way to get more “bang for your buck” from your content. If you are engaged in content marketing then you should ideally be layering on content repurposing as an accelerator.
Content marketing is a long slow burn but ultimately it is great for driving sales. I’ve previously covered how content marketing drives sales if you missed it.
But can be forgiven for starting content marketing and burning out because of how much darn work it is. Today I’ll show you how to get smart with content marketing via content repurposing.
What is content repurposing?
Content repurposing is the process of taking one piece of content and chopping and changing it into a new, fresh piece of content.
Why is this useful? Two fold.
First it gives us something NEW. Google (and other platforms) love new content. It’s their lifeblood.
Second, and more importantly, we can use the new repurposed content on a new platform.
Whenever possible we try to create once and then publish many. We want our creative upfront work to be applied over as many channels as humanly possible in order to increase exposure. Increased exposure helps grow our audience and (eventually) leads to more sales for your online business.
Content repurposing examples
Honestly describing content repurposing in the abstract is unhelpful. Content repurposing examples are the only way to really get across the utility of this tool.
Let’s say you’ve written a blog article, much like this one you are ready now.
It sits on your blog, probably on a WordPress website. It can be seen by people who come and visit your blog. That’s where the content lives – it’s “channel”.
What if we want to expand our audience though? What can we do?
Certainly we can drive more traffic to the blog through advertising and SEO. But that’s still just getting more people to read our blog. That’s not yet repurposing.
Content repurposing is instead taking a piece of content (this blog article) and making new content from it.
Repurposing a blog article
By way of example I could take this blog article and :
- record audio of myself talking through the article
- record a video of me talking through the article
- pay a designer (my talents have limits!) to make an infrographic of the information
- compile the blog article (and others) into an eBook
- make a powerpoint presentation of the main points
- etc etc.
These are all different examples of the same content, just delivered in a different formats.
Why do I want to have lots of formats?
First, my audience may simply prefer some formats to others. We can test a whole bunch of formats and see what they respond to the most. Or we can even produce in multiple formats so that individual audience members can choose how they consume my content.
Second, the multiple formats give me access to different channels.
For instance:
- audio can go to Stitcher or a podcast service like iTunes (podcasts)
- video can be uploaded to Youtube
- an infographic can go to social media sites like Facebook or Pinterest
- an eBook can go to Amazon Kindle
- a presentation can go on Slideshare
By using content repurposing suddenly my single blog article is available everywhere. This gets me to more people, builds my audience and helps me drive sales (which is, remember, the purpose of content marketing for an online business).
How to use content repurposing
This all sounds great huh? But like a lot of work. In fact – it’s just creating more work for you.
Sure you’ll get to more channels and build your audience faster but you don’t want to be doing this full time I’m sure.
Normally a guide to content repurposing would leave you at this point to get on with it. “Hey you should repurpose and use lots of formats. Lots of work? Yeah sure but tough. Off you go.”
Instead I’ll give you the key to make your content repurposing workflow waaaaay more efficient.
Content repurposing: Start with VIDEO
Need a little more? Fine!
Basically we want to start with video because video is the most information dense format.
If you write a blog article you have:
- Words
If you record a podcast you have:
- Words
- Audio
If you record a video you have:
- Words
- Audio
- Image
Video has the information of written and audio mediums built in to it. It simply has MORE information.
Vitally it is easier to strip away information than it is to add information.
A more concrete example: if you have a video you can strip away the image and you are left with audio. That audio can be converted into a podcast. Video converts to audio easily. Just remove the image and you are done!
If you went the other way then what happens? Let’s say you’ve started with a podcast (audio). Now you want a video to upload to Youtube? How do you make a video from the audio. With great difficulty! You may need to animate a video. Or put random clips over your audio. Or just a still photo? Whatever you do it’s far more time consuming that going from video to audio.
Video -> Audio. Easy
Audio -> Video. Butt ache.
Here’s a great example of this: Joe Rogan.
Joe Rogan’s podcast the Joe Rogan Experience is one of the top podcasts on earth.
Joe Rogan shoots all his podcasts as video. You can watch the whole podcast as a video (if you want). Creating the podcast (audio) from this point is simple: just strip out the image and the remaining audio is the podcast. Joe Rogan ends up with BOTH. Do the work once, get double the result.
Content repurposing for SEO
OK, what about text?
Text is SUPER important for SEO (search engine optimisation) because it’s mainly what Google “reads”. Google is getting better at working with video but the majority of Google’s crawling is text based. Hence the importance of blog articles still!
If we need text for SEO then we do the following:
Video, remove images = Audio
Transcribe Audio = Text
Ta-dah!
Again, we start with the information dense medium (video) and work down to another format.
Could we go from audio to text directly? Absolutely! But then we don’t have a video form video channels like Youtube. Ideally we need them all.
On a practical level how do we take text from audio? It’s a process called transcribing.
Rev.com is a solid choice – they combine manual (ie. human) transcription with automation to keep the costs reasonable.
Alternatively we’ve have great success with https://www.descript.com/
Descript has added a boatload of features recently (and keep doing so) meaning it’s a bit of a repurposing powerhouse. I’ll potentially come back and do a full article on Descript because of it’s power in repurposing.
Content purposing workflow
Hopefully today covered the basics of what content repurposing is and why you should be using it in your business.
For our own businesses and client businesses we run something I’ve dubbed the Content Machine which takes a basic piece of content (ideally video!) and runs it through a series of processing steps to “spit out” a multitude of formats for multiple channels.
Here’s a rough outline:
This said, if there is interest I’ll put together more articles about how to run a content machine like this either for your own company OR for clients.