Small Business Tips – 8 ways to repurpose blog content

We talk about it a lot, but in today’s digital world, content has become the foundation of marketing. With small business owners focusing on their business, they do and not necessarily have lots of time to spend on marketing, it makes sense to try to make the most out of what content you create. One way to help be more time efficient is to repurpose blog content.

In their definitive guide Buffer gave a great analogy of how this works. I am showing my age a little here, but a great example of what we are trying to achieve is demonstrated by the US TV show “Fraser“. This was a TV spin off story from the very successful sit com “Cheers“. They took one of the main characters and gave him his own show, expanding on his story. We are trying to mirror something similar here by repurposing blog content.

Benefits to repurposing old blog content

Before we look at how we repurpose the content, there are a number of different reasons why you would consider doing this:

1. SEO: It supports your SEO strategy, by continually demonstrating your website is being updated with fresh content.
2. Reach a new audience: If you edit and change some original content, you can either bring it more up to date or use it via a different media as demonstrated below. Both results in connecting with a new and fresh audience.
3. Reinforce your message: If you can share similar information but in different formats and at different time, it will further demonstrate your knowledge in a particular area.
4. Saves time. Once you have researched and written a blog article it is time efficient to reuse in other ways.

The first thing to do is to identify which blog articles were most successful and your audience engaged with the most. Once you have identified possible content, look to see how you could evolve it and reuse it. It probably makes sense to start with evergreen content which is not time or date specific, unless that is the intention to update an article to a particular point in time.

How could you repurpose old blog content?

There are many ways that you could repurpose old blog content, we outline some ideas below to get you started:

1. Micro blogs. Once you have identified a blog that got lots of engagement, see how you could take one point and expand on it. For example, if I write about marketing strategy I would probably talk about visualising your target audience as part of the copy. An extension might be to go into more depth about why and how to do this. Much like the Fraser analogy, think about how you could take a different perspective. The revers could also be true, take a group of blogs and see how you could write a summary of them, bringing them all together in a cluster.
2. Build an infographic. If you have researched information for a blog you could then make it visual and build an infographic. By turning the information into something eg: social media infographic, it will give you the opportunity to engage with a different audience.
3. Update a blog. Sometimes we write blogs which are time sensitive eg: data or usage of social media networks. If this is the case, there maybe an opportunity to update at a different point in time. eg:” Social media usage in October 2012″ vs “Social media usage in January 2021”. This would be an interesting experiment to look at the differences and see how things have evolved. In this example you could also potentially write a third blog comparing the two outcomes.
4. Re-post and share old articles. Once you have written a blog, the biggest challenge is then sharing with your audience and encouraging engagement. If you have a good blog it is always worth revisiting. An example of this for us is our “Marketing Strategy for business – your definitive small business guide“. Not only does this get good engagement but it is also packed full of useful information, we share this quite often even though it was written some time ago.
5. Create an e-book and re-use information in a different format. We have done something similar for our newsletter sign up, combing a number of blogs to provide together to provide our “Small business marketing tips”.
6. Use the content in your email marketing. This is something that hopefully you are doing as a matter of course, but to use your blog as the basis for your email content will really help to be time efficient. In addition, it will also help to re-enforce the message with more chance of achieving cut through in a cluttered digital market place.
7. Write a guest post on a similar topic. Not only will this help with your back links but also raise your profile. Don’t forget that the content needs to be different as the search engines do not like the same content in two places.
8. Host a webinar/ FB live. A great way to share content, once you have invested time in researching and writing a blog would be to also to share via video, webinar or FB live. It is a great way to engage and connect with a different audience.

It makes sense to reuse and repurpose blog content in a number of different ways across your marketing channels, not only to help you become more time efficient but also achieve cut through. Good luck in getting started and of course if you would like some help in planning your content, please get in touch.

Sources:

• Buffer – The Ultimate guide to repurposing content
• Neil Patel – Bring Old Blog posts back to live – 5 strategies that work