It is usual for you to see mentions of how important content creation is. There are tonnes of valuable content pieces online on how to create content. If you wish to make a mark or have a notable voice online you need to create relevant and engaging content. No wonder it is constantly emphasised that your business must have an active digital footprint. There are so many things to discuss on content creation. Today is a good day to look at repurposing content – an often ignored fundamental. Let us delve into the importance of and how to repurpose content.
What Is To Repurpose Content?
We can delineate that by looking at the two words. Content is the sum total of the freshness, readability, relevancy, and usefulness of the information and the manner in which it is communicated or presented. To repurpose is to alter to make more suited for a different purpose. This sounds straightforward enough but there are many faces to what repurposing content is. For instance, here are five possible ways of repurposing content:
- Making blog posts out of videos
- Making short video clips out of long videos
- Making infographics out of blog posts
- Making social media posts out of blog posts
- Making emails out of blog posts
These are just overarching examples but they do paint the picture for you. It is apparent that there are countless other ways through which you can repurpose content. At times it can simply entail rewriting a blog post you did in the past pursuing a different angle. The approaches to repurposing content are infinite.
Why Is Repurposing Content Important?
Many content creators tend to not repurpose some of their content. It is understandable that you may be big on always coming up with original stuff. However, you may be missing out on opportunities to come up with easier and even more engaging content. Repurposing content is useful and important in many ways. The most notable importance is scalability. If something is scalable it means it is able to be changed in scale (or resized) or possesses the ability to greatly increase in capacity with relative ease. When you repurpose your content it becomes scalable. Let us suppose you come up with a blog post.
If you employ the repurposing approach, that blog post can become many things. You can turn it into a video, a podcast, a social media post, quotes, infographics, short video clips, and so on. This means the scale of who it ultimately reaches becomes exponential. All the while you will not be laden with the pressure to research and all. You will already have the source material you need. That is the core importance of repurposing content – it becomes scalable. This translates into many other upsides. For example, you will not run out of relevant and engaging content ideas. There is time-saving and cost-cutting as well – you will do more with less.
3 Best Practices In Repurposing Content
Not All Content Should Be Repurposed – Choose Carefully
When choosing content to repurpose, you must be strategic. You must choose content that is considered evergreen. You often hear me talking about the importance of data analytics. All social media platforms provide data analytics insights on your posts. The same applies to when you have a website. Google Analytics provides insights regarding traffic and other metrics on your website. By looking at those insights you can easily tell which of your content did well and continues to do well. That is the content you should consider for repurposing. This is because it will most likely do well again.
Format Being Repurposed To Matters
When you repurpose content there obviously will be a change of format. For example, let us suppose you did a video. Then you want to repurpose it into a blog post. You cannot just transcribe it and consider that enough. Typically, that will not work effectively. You will have to consider the approaches that apply to coming up with a blog post. For instance, SEO considerations for a blog post are not necessarily similar to that of a video. This means you will have to restructure and reword some parts.
Even if it were a blog post to a video, the same principle would apply. Bottom line is, when repurposing content you must pay attention to the tenets of the new format or context in question. Think of how tasteful it is to eat a raw piece of sugar cane. Yet when you want to sweeten your tea or coffee, the raw sugar cane in its raw form will not work. It would have to be adapted to the new context it has to be used. As in, it would have to be processed into sugar. That is the concept.
Parts Of The Whole – Opens Up Infinite Possibilities
This here is a potent approach you can and must use in repurposing content. You may think that repurposing content should always be premised on turning the whole into a different whole. That works of course but it limits you. Think of breaking down the whole into different components. Let us suppose you have done a blog post. That blog post may have 6 subheadings. Those subtopics can become 6 different video ideas. You could even adapt each subtopic into a full blog post as well. This is an example to show you the infinite possibilities breaking down the whole bring.
Now you know what repurposing content is all about. You now know why it is important. You now also know the best practices in repurposing content. The next thing for you is to put to work what you have learnt. Repurposing content is quite practical and relatively easy to roll out. Start putting it into practice today.
