The gist: to prove you can easily create weeks worth of content from one blog post, I’m walking you through my favorite blog repurposing ideas.
Content repurposing isn’t a trick, it’s an illusion! 😉
A good content marketer, aka content magician, knows that repurposing content like blog posts isn’t a trick. It isn’t cheating. It isn’t lazy.
It’s just really, really awesome.
So let’s talk about a few ways that you can repurpose blog posts and make some of that magic work for you.
Now, you may know that I am a huge fan of repurposing content. (Mainly because I’ve made a bunch of videos about how I’m a huge fan of repurposing content.
So today I’m showing you five ways blog repurposing ideas to extend the life and traffic of your next piece of content.
(Psst – I also have a free worksheet to help you get started.)
Why recent blog posts are perfect to repurpose
Let’s say you have a recent-ish blog post on your hands.
It’s somewhat new, but has been out in the world long enough that you know your audience likes the idea or information.
Right there is a perfect subject for content repurposing.
Here’s why:
Blog posts leave you with a ton of content to work with, so they’re great repurposing candidates in general.
Plus, content that’s a minute or two old is also prime for repurposing, because it lets you to resurface and improve the messaging around the original idea.
Enough time has passed that you can tell whether the topic was a good one.
If it was, and was popular at the time, enough time has passed to resurface it. If it was a good topic, but didn’t take off, enough time has passed to objectively look back for the problem, and fix it.
And finally, if you’ve realized the topic missed the mark, now you can go back and tweak it.
So here are five ways that you can take one blog post and spin it into new content.
My 5 Favorite Blog Repurposing Ideas
1. Break it up into smaller pieces on other platforms
First step, you can break up the text of the blog posts into text social media posts.
Create mini blog posts as native social media content, meaning content that’s created and housed right there on the platform instead of linking out to your blog post.
We all know that native content is really being favored by a lot of the social networks right now, but struggle to find the time to create content for one more platform.
And this gives you a bunch of it without writing anything new.
But here’s the thing:
On most social media channels, the best performing posts are way shorter than what tends to perform well on blogs.
So you don’t want to take the whole blog post and just copy and paste. Instead, take smaller snippets of the blog posts, like the introduction, one of the subsections, a key takeaway, or even just an example or quote.
Then optimize it to the platform you’re posting to.
And with that method, you can easily turn one blog post into 10 or 12 social media posts. You’ll have got a ton of content for Facebook groups, Facebook pages, the LinkedIn feed, Instagram, Twitter threads, wherever you need to be active.
Talk about a time saver.
This was how I originally filled the content calendar for Work Brighter’s Instagram page when I started it. That part of the brand was brand new, but there were years of blog posts I could pull topics and excerpts from.
2. Turn your blog post into a video script
Your second great option is to turn it into video.
As Mugatu would say, video is so hot right now.
But the thought of creating videos in addition to all the written content you already have rightfully gives most marketers a headache.
Turning written content into video can make it way easier to get noticed by audiences that are spending less time with text.
You build a strong connection with your audience super fast and get yourself some VIP treatment from online algorithms.
You think I’m just on YouTube because I like the sound of my own voice? (I mean, I do. But that’s not what I make business decisions based on.)
And it does NOT need to be fancy or high tech or super professional.
If you’re only comfortable with talking or people watching you for 10 seconds at a time, do an Instagram stories series of lightning fast key takeaways from the blog posts.
A slightly more polished version could be to do go on Facebook Live and talk people through the posts.
And for those of you with your full out fancy pants, you can produce YouTube videos. (Yep, I’ve got fancy pants!)
3. Take the topic on a PR tour
My third idea for you is to take that blog post “on tour.”
By this I mean take it to other people’s audiences through things like guest posts or interviews on the same idea.
When you’re repurposing content for a completely new audience, you don’t have to remix and change up as much as you normally would.
For example, I have a post on Work Brighter about how business owners can use Zapier.
To help me promote it and Work Brighter as an automation authority, I’ve written a bunch of guest posts with the same ideas, but just getting slightly more specific.
So it’s stuff like how VAs can use Zapier, how writers can use Zapier, how solopreneurs can use Zapier and other variations. You can go over the same main points but with a few different details catered to different specific audiences.
And since it’s similar to something you’ve already written, it’s really, really easy to knock out two or three, even four, guest posts based on that original topic.
4. Send a one-off email
Now onto idea number four and it’s time to talk email. The fourth way you can repurpose a blog post is to send a one-off email to your email list about it.
And since, similar to social posts, blog posts are also usually way longer than the best emails, this is another chance to break up your topic and create a bunch of spin-off pieces of content from one blog post.
The most popular way to do this is to send out an email using the blog post’s intro as the email copy. Since this is frequently something like a story or a general introduction to the topic, it makes for a good email. Then at the bottom you can then just link out to read the rest of the post.
5. Create an email series
And today’s fifth tip is another to help you with your email marketing: creating an automated email sequence.
There are tons of ways to do this and it gets really fun, so I think I’ll have to save the nitty gritty for a whole other video and post:
But for now, let’s talk about creating one email sequence from one repurposed blog post.
Let’s say that your blog post was around 1,200 words, and had an introduction and plus three different subsections.
You can so easily turn that into a four part email series. Chop it up, add some more introductions, examples, maybe a little segues, and you have a series containing 4 emails, each a snappy few hundred words.
You could send them out four days in a row when people just sign up for your list as a welcome sequence. Or if you’re not already consistently emailing your subscribers every week, you could spread this out a little more and have it go out to all of your subscribers automatically once a week to keep them engaged for an entire month.
An entire month of email content from one blog post!
Repurposing works for anything
Repurposing can be used for anything you do you. Any part of your marketing, or even the rest of your business.
These five ideas are just a start, and in them you’ve got blog posts, emails, social media, video, and PR.
BOOM! You’ve got it all.
When you start building remixing into your content strategy from the start, one blog post can easily become weeks or even months worth of content.
Need help doing that?
I’ve got you covered. Download my free content repurposing planner. It walks you step-by-step through selecting, analyzing, and repurposing any piece of content that you need.
