5 Ways to Repurpose Content

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Jean-Marie Bonthous, Seamless Social
 

 

If you are involved in inbound marketing, you know how essential it is to have a steady flow of fresh content that reaches your prospects in the many places where they are on the web, and in the various formats in which they like to consume information.
 

Unless you are independently wealthy and can afford the luxury of writing original free content all day for each platform out there, your best alternative is to repurpose existing content. Repurposing does not mean diminishing value. On the contrary, good content finds new life when reshaped, and transformed for new media.
 

Repurpose white papers and ebooks
White papers or ebooks are often 25 page long. Some contain a wealth of resources which are seen only by the people who download them. You can get a lot more mileage out of them. You can transform them into multiple blog posts, and also record an audio version as a podcast. You can also videotape yourself speaking these (you will find on the web web several descriptions of how to build you own, no-cost teleprompter), or have someone else do it, and create a vlog. Post the video on YouTube, with a good description, a call to action as an overlay and a call to action inviting people to visit your site. This will help you build traffic.
 

Leverage podcasts
Have them transcribed, and make blog posts and transcripts out of them. You can also put a few slides over them, and transform them into a slide show which you can then post on YouTube, and upload to multiple video channels via TubeMogul. You can use TubeMogul’s OneLoad video distribution to seed your content on multiple sites and the company’s InPlay video analytics to measure and compare the performance of their owned, paid and earned video media.
Each time you publish such a video, you can issue a social media release announcing your new material. Use platforms like Pitchengine and link to other rich content that you have generated. You can publish it to search engines, social networks, your website and more.
 

Give your slide decks a new life
Most 30 slides decks can easily be turned into 10 blog posts or into a few new web pages. And some of the visuals in the slide decks can be used, maybe with some modifications, in these blog posts.
 

Breathe new life into your training materials
Trainings usually try to generate a lot of learning in a very short time. Even a half-day training covers a lot of ground. And in addition to the content that you had created for this training, you are left with a wealth of comments, observations stories and questions from the audience. Make a note of these. Blending the original training content, You can take the training content and break it down into a blog series. My experience is that for each hour of training, you can create at least one valuable, 500 words blog post. And because of the continuity of the series of blog about a specific training topic, you compel your readers to come back again and again to get the benefits of the full training that they would otherwise have had to pay for.
 

Make sure you have a publishing schedule
Do an inventory of the material that you have lying around that could be repurposed. It is a lot more than you think. Printer brochures, flyers, training materials, podcasts, videoblogs, white papers, and even blog posts that can be updated or combined to address new circumstances in the marketplace.
Make an inventory of all the materials that can be repurposed, and create a publishing schedule with an effective roadmap.
 

What has your experience been with repurposing content? I would love to hear your comments.
 

Photo courtesy of Martyboy, via Flickr Creative Commons
 

Jean-Marie Bonthous, PhD, is Principal of Seamless Social. He consults and speaks about social media strategy, social CRM, influence marketing, social media analytics, and how to build a social business. He has been a trusted advisor to Fortune 500 companies for 30 years and has led many successful, high-impact consulting projects, including change management during IT-enabled business transformation initiatives with $100 million budgets, balanced scorecard-driven strategy formulation and implementation initiatives, and many strategic marketing and branding projects. He is author of two books on business intelligence and has taught business intelligence and culture change at the Stern School of Business at New York University.