Content Repurposing: How to Turn One Asset into 20 with Limited Resources

By repurposing your content, you are literally giving it new life and as a result, maximizing its effect to the fullest extent.

Benefits of content repurposing

Let me spell it out for you here. Content repurposing:

1. Expands your reach: Repackaging your content to be distributed on various channels gets you more eyeballs on your content. The very first goal of content marketing, or any marketing, really, is brand awareness. This gets you closer to that goal.
2. Saves time and resources: When you repurpose existing content, you’re working with a known entity. You have a pretty good idea of how this content works for your audience so you’re not starting completely from scratch.
3. Boosts SEO and traffic: We’ve seen this firsthand with our own content. We repurpose blog posts into infographics and then embed that imagery directly in the original blog. This gets us better rankings in organic search, more impressions, better CTR, more organic backlinks and ultimately more traffic to the page.
4. Establishes expertise and topical authority: The more content you create on a given topic, the more likely you are to be read and linked to from other sources in your industry. Content repurposing is really about repetition around a single messaging point on a topic. This goes hand in hand with building and showcasing your topical authority on that topic, and it gives you a leg up on ranking for relevant topics you target in search.

Where to start

I’m sure by now you’re sold on the seemingly limitless positive effects of content repurposing. But you may be wondering “Where the heck do I start”?

Well,  this strategy starts with your content. Even if you only have a single blog post published, you can begin. Or, if you haven’t created any content yet and you’re just starting out, you can still carry these principles and ideas with you as you get started.

But for the purpose of this explanation let’s assume you’ve got some content created.

So the idea is to start there. Audit the content you have. See what stands out, what has struck a chord with your audience, or what didn’t and could use a boost. This brings us to the next step.

How to choose which content to repurpose

If you have limitless resources, I’d say go ahead and repurpose every single asset you have! But often, we’re dealing with time constraints, and we have to prioritize. So we need to know how to find the best content opportunities for repurposing.

It all starts with data. The goal is to understand how the content has performed with your audience because content repurposing can help in two ways:

1. Really go all in on a topic that has already engaged your audience. Here you’re starting with something you already know works and you’re maximizing your results.
2. Give a struggling topic a kick. I’m sure you’ve got a blog post you were hoping performed better than it has (everyone does). But perhaps the blog wasn’t the right channel, or perhaps the topic was too complex for just written text. Here you can experiment with different formats and channels to see if the message sticks better somewhere else.

Note: When I talk about performance, I’m talking about the primary purpose of a blog post, which is, ultimately, to get users onto your site and get them engaging with your brand. Some example performance metrics to review here are:

• Clicks generated (pulled from Search Console).
• Sessions generated (pulled from Google Analytics).

When deciding which content to repurpose, start there. An article that has generated a large proportion of traffic to your site gives you a clue into the content your audience finds most valuable from you. Chances are, if repurposed into different formats and shared across multiple channels, you’ll see a good amount of engagement on other platforms as well.

On the other hand, say you’re trying hard to be known as a leader in SEO content writing, for example, but the blog post you wrote on the topic isn’t getting the attention it deserves.

These are two equally good reasons to repurpose content. 

So, now that you’ve selected some foundational content to work with, it’s time for the fun part! The part promised from the beginning of this article — how to actually do the thing with a real example.

How to turn one asset into 20 with a real-life example

OK, let’s use the article I mentioned above as our example.

As its title suggests, it’s a complete guide to writing for search. This is a big topic and a lot to unpack and potentially repurpose at 2,500 words. 

This article was initially written to comprehensively cover the topic and rank for the search term “SEO content writing.” it’s a novel of a piece, and while some ambitious marketers will definitely read all the way through to the end, not everyone will, and that’s OK. 

Because, as we now know, by repurposing this content in different ways, we’re more effectively able to meet our audience where they are, with the information they need, and in the format they prefer.

So here’s how we’d go about doing that:

For the more visual learners:

1. A visually compelling infographic that can be downloaded and shared across multiple channels.
2. An eBook that combines beautiful imagery with concisely written text to get your message across in an engaging way.
3. A slide-based presentation that breaks down key takeaways from the blog post, and can be uploaded to various sharing platforms (such as SlideShare) and embedded back into the blog itself. You can also use ChatGPT to create PowerPoint presentations that summarize the main points from the blog, ensuring that each slide highlights a key concept or actionable insight.

For the audio-visual lovers:

4. A long-form video tutorial that covers the complete SEO writing process from start to finish.
5. A podcast episode or series that discusses the strategies and tactics of SEO writing.
6. A series of short-form animated videos that break down the topic into bite-sized chunks.
7. A webinar that gathers industry to discuss the topic in greater depth.

For the social media savvy:

8. A long-form social post that goes nearly as in-depth as the original blog itself (think LinkedIn Pulse).
9. A social post series that breaks down the topic into smaller, easier-to-understand sections.
10. A social carousel with visual graphics and quote cards covering the most important takeaways from the blog post.
11. A Twitter chat or Q&A discussion about the topic to encourage your audience to engage with your brand while they learn.

For the email-attached marketers:

12. An email course that spans multiple days or weeks and helps subscribers learn about the topic at a slower pace.
13. An email drip campaign that provides additional relevant content to those who have read and engaged with the original blog post.
14. A featured CTA in an email newsletter to your subscribers to draw more attention to the blog post.

For the data deep-divers:

15. Run a survey related to your original blog topic and report on the findings in a new post and internally link between the two resources.
16. Repackage the blog into a white paper that includes stats from the survey.

For the interactive-obsessed:

17. Create a comprehensive course, or training program, on the topic — and offer a certification for completion.
18. Create an interactive quiz that lets marketers assess their knowledge on the topic.

For the industry experts:

19. Create a guest blog that covers a topic related to the original piece, and links back to the original blog.
20. Gather industry expert responses and ideas around the topic, and cite them in your blog, encouraging them to reshare their mention to their audiences.

I could (probably!) go on, but you get the point. 

Not only are we packaging the original information into a wide array of formats to appeal to a variety of audiences, but we are also greatly increasing the number of channels where that information (and our brand) can be found. Which results in more eyeballs on our content and our brand. 

All that from a single blog post or idea — that’s content repurposing in a nutshell.