9 Ways to Repurpose Your Old Content

Starting a blog is one of the best ways to market your services or products and build a strong personal brand. However, even though it’s easy to start a blog on WordPress, creating great content is a time-consuming task. It involves coming up with a topic for your post, thorough research, writing the post, sourcing images, and then promoting it across a variety of social networks if you want to reap the maximum number  of benefits.

It’s no wonder that 60 percent of marketers say producing great content is one of their biggest challenges.

However, creating great content doesn’t have to be difficult or take up all of your time. In fact, you can use your existing content in new and creative ways to breathe new life into it and generate more traffic to your site.

Here are nine  ways to repurpose your old content that will save you time while still attracting new audiences to your website.

1. Create a video

Video is one of the most popular online mediums, so repurposing your content as a video makes a lot of sense. You can record yourself narrating the contents of one of your old posts or create a screencast that shows your readers how to do something you talked about in a previous post.  

2. Turn a blog post into a podcast

Similar to the idea above, read your old post out loud, record the audio and upload it to places like iTunes, Stitcher or Google Play. Some people prefer listening to podcasts to reading blog posts, especially if they’re on the go. Why not let them enjoy your content in their preferred format? Another benefit is that by starting your own podcast, you can reach new audience which can eventually lead to more sales down the line.

3. Use blog series as an email series

If you’ve written a few blog posts on the same topic, consider repurposing them into an email course. Set the course up in your email provider to go out as a sequence over the span of a number of days and you’ll have subscribers coming back to your site to check out your other content. You can also use that course as an opt-in bribe and take your email marketing to the next level.

4. Take Advantage of Live Streaming

Live streaming is another medium that can expose your content to new audience. The benefit of live streaming is that you can interact with your audience during your video which helps you establish a better connection with them. For shorter streams, consider using Facebook Live or Periscope and present the topic of your existing post or expand upon it to add extra information. If one of your older posts talks about your creative process, consider streaming your creative process as a longer stream on platforms like YouTube or Twitch.

5. Create a Slideshow

Use your data-heavy or list posts as presentation material. Make a slide deck out of your old posts and upload them to sites like SlideShare. SlideShare alone boasts over 70 million users so it’s a great way to get more eyeballs on your content without spending hours reinventing the wheel.

6. Make an Infographic

Infographics are hot right now and with good reason – they allow us to consume content in a visual way which makes it easier to understand. This format works well with data-driven posts but the benefit is that it makes the statistics included in your blog post look good. There are various websites that can help you make an infographic such as easel.ly, Piktochart, and Infogram.

7. Offer it as a free eBook on Kindle

Another way to repurpose your old topic is to take several of your shorter posts that are on the same topic and turn them into an eBook. You could also do the same for longer posts and offer the eBook for free on Kindle. Self-publishing is slowly becoming more and more popular and it’s easy to establish yourself as an author. It adds to your credibility and goes one step further to building your brand.

8. Syndicate Your Old Posts On Sites Like Quora

Quora may be a question and answer site but they also have a blog feature. Answering questions on Quora is an excellent way of building your credibility but when you pair that with a blog on their site, it helps build your trustworthiness. Alternatively, you can also take excerpts from your old posts and publish them on LinkedIn Pulse or give Medium a try. Both platforms allow you to use your existing accounts to log in and all you have to do is paste the content of your posts and you’re good to go.

9. Host a webinar

Lastly, consider holding a webinar on the same topic you discussed in your post. Webinars are extremely effective in presenting content and have huge potential for growing your email list as well. You can take an existing post and add more information to it or use it to walk your readers through your strategies or show real examples of the tips you shared in your post. Use a platform like Google Hangouts to host your webinar for free and don’t forget to ask your readers to sign up for it with their email address.

Final Thoughts

Running a successful blog is not an easy feat, whether you are a personal or a business blogger. One of the most difficult tasks is coming up with engaging quality content, but you can avoid this problem by repurposing what you already have.  Don’t forget that you can also update your existing posts with new information to keep them relevant.

Of course, the tips above work best when you use the most popular posts that are already bringing you a decent amount of traffic. You can easily keep track of the content that’s bringing you most visitors through a Google analytics plugin and use it a starting point to determine which posts would be best to reuse and offered in a new format. Good luck!