Creating content can feel like running on a treadmill. You crank out one blog post. Then another. And then another. You publish, publish, publish, but at the end of the day, are you getting everything you really could out of it? Your blog page – is that really as far as it goes?

At least that’s what it’s like to create content without a plan for using it. There’s a lot of information and effort that goes into each piece. If you’re just hitting “post,” a lot of potential is being left in the dust. 

But what if you could get the message out in different ways. Take that content and build other resources out of it. Get a conversation going on LinkedIn. Turn the post into a viral video. Craft a stunning infographic. Wouldn’t that be better? 

Every business needs a solid strategy for reusing content. Maybe you’re taking time out of your busy day to write blog posts, email campaigns, social media messaging or maybe you’re paying someone else to provide those services for you. 

Either way, you’re investing in it. Don’t you want to make sure you get the most out of your investment? 

First thing’s first: How do you know what to repurpose?

Not all content is created equal. Even the best content developers have some pieces that merely get the job done and some pieces that resonate with their readers. 

So before you get ahead of yourself, look at your content starting point. For this article, let’s assume that you’re looking at your blog posts. But it could be a presentation, visual content, slide decks, or anything that provides a detailed look at a topic. Yet the benefit of blogs is that you can use readily available metrics to evaluate what your most valuable content is. 

You audit be auditing

Auditing is something you should be doing for your whole website. It’s an important piece of the ongoing content maintenance. For our conversational purposes, though, we’re going to look at auditing your blog. 

The goal of auditing your blog is to see what you’ve written and how much interaction each piece has received. (Yes, you probably have your favorite articles, but this isn’t about you: it’s about your audience and what they find useful.) 

Getting started

Tools like Google Analytics or SEMRush can help you audit your blog content. Use your preferred crawling tool to pull all the page names, URLs, and metrics for your blog. 

For each page, you should try to gather as much of the following data points as possible:

• Traffic from search engines (last 90 days)
• Date of publication
• Bounce rate
• Relevant keywords
• Number of internal and external links
• Word count

What are you going to do with all that data?

Data’s useless unless it’s actually used. Export your data to a spreadsheet so you can look at it all at the same time. At this point, you have a lot of options for reviewing your content. 

But we’re interested in what your highest performing content is. Metrics like traffic from search engines and bounce rates can be good indicators of popularity. 

No one says you have to repurpose your number one, absolute very most popular blog post. If “Ten Things You Need to Know About Tax Law in Florida” is your most popular article, but you’re really passionate about your third most popular, “What Clients Can Learn from the Florida Man Meme,” by all means, write about number three if gets you going. 

The goal by audits isn’t to credit inflexible rules but rather to give you insight. Use accordingly!

Get started right now: Ways you can reuse your content today

Update your content

You’re going on a date with an ex-flame. Exciting! You want to show off how well things are going. So what do you do? You may get a haircut. Put on that just-a-little-bit-nicer-than-usual outfit. You know, you polish things up just a bit. 

The same goes for your content when you’re sending it out into the world. If it’s been sitting on your blog unattended for a while, make sure that you’re doing a review of it. As your reviewing it, ask yourself the following questions:

• Are there any typos that you missed the first time?
• Is the information still relevant and accurate?
• Do you have accompanying graphics? Are they high quality?
• Do the links still work?
• Does the content have a meta description?

Going through this checklist goes beyond best practices. It’s a healthy measure to take for your SEO, especially since Google loves to see pages getting regular updates. 

Gets your links lined up

Internal linking is a powerful, powerful thing when it comes to getting mileage out of your content. From a user perspective, it makes it easier for readers to find related topics. That’s always a win! But they also serve your SEO well by supporting your website’s architecture. 

How does it do this? Search engines need a crawlable link structure to find all your web pages and list them. If you don’t link pages, it makes their job that much harder. 

Emails

Any good content reuse plan should include email marketing. A study of 1,000 small businesses found that email marketing was ranked as the second most effective tactic for developing brand awareness. Filling emails with valuable content can be challenging, but if you’re not using that platform to distribute your blogs, you’re missing a key opportunity. 

Where to start

A rule of thumb should be to include recent blog content in every outgoing email. Your text for the email can be a short snippet to interest your readers but consider building it out in a longer format. Add either the whole introduction or even the whole blog post if you want to add value to your readers. 

Yes, you won’t get the bump in website traffic if they’re reading the whole blog in your newsletter, but you’ll build trust by giving them something that everyone wants: convenience.

Make your content social ready

Just like with email marketing, you should be pushing out your content on your social feeds. Facebook and Twitter are obvious platforms, but we highly encourage you to focus on LinkedIn as a channel for content reuse. 

Why? LinkedIn has fantastic lead conversion rates – 3 times higher than other major ad platforms. (This includes Google Ads). Yet only 15% of marketers are creating content for LinkedIn. That means that there’s a big, wide-open field to stand out in. 

One note: This is especially true for lawyers. According to the American Bar Association’s 2019 survey on websites and marketing, LinkedIn is the leading platform among lawyers with 79% of firms having an active account. The same goes for individual lawyers. LinkedIn is the leading platform among individual lawyers, just as it is for law firms. Overall, 73% of all respondents said they maintained a LinkedIn presence.

Where to start

Regardless of the channels that you’re pushing content onto, you should contextualize the blog post for each audience. Your audience for Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, et al are going to be different. 

This is where having a solid brand strategy articulated is important. When you know who you are and who your audience is across different platforms, you’ll speak more authentically.

Build it out: More work but more reward

Pushing out updated blog content is great. It’s effective and it gets more life out of content that you’ve already produced. A win-win, for sure. 

But if you stop there, you’re missing out on a lot of opportunities. 

When you create a piece of content, there’s never just one idea in that content. There are always other secondary or tertiary points that crop up. 

For example, let’s say that you wrote a blog post about the basics of business taxes in Seattle. You touched on lowering your tax liability, what can and can’t be used as a write-off, and what estimated taxes are all about. Using the information you’ve already brought into your blog, you could build out the following topics:

• Tax payment reductions tip for small businesses
• Thinking about making a big purchase? Check your taxes first
• What to do if you missed an estimated tax payment for your business

These alone would be great additional blog posts, but you don’t have to go that far. You could take this content further by repurposing these sections into new content formats. Take a look below for some ideas. 

Turn it into a video

One of the most effective ways to repurpose content is to take your blog post and convert it into a 30-second-or-less standalone video. For example, if you wrote a blog called “Child Custody in Oregon,” then you would pick three to five bullet points of what people need to know. If your content is considerably more in-depth, you can segment it into short videos and release them over the course of a week. 

There are numerous platform options for video content. YouTube is the obvious one, but you can release video across Facebook and Instagram – both in your feed and in Stories – and you can send it out via your newsletter. No matter how you distribute it, videos have a great ROI. 

While you might feel awkward recording yourself, once you get some practice, it’s much easier. (Think of it as public speaking, only you get to edit it before anyone hears it.)

Infographics

If you break down any information and display it in a visually engaging graphic, you (almost) always have my attention. 

Infographics have had a big increase in use among B2B marketers in the last several years and it’s not hard to see why. (Pun mostly not intended.) People just do better with information when it has images associated with it. When given instructions, readers with illustrations did 323% better than those without.

It’s not hard to extrapolate the value of that: anytime you make something easier to understand for your audience, you’re building trust. 

eBooks and white papers

If you’re really inspired by the ideas in your blog post, don’t limit yourself. A blog can sometimes be an excellent jumping-off point for a more in-depth exploration of a topic. Use your blog as an introduction for readers who can learn more by downloading an eBook or a white paper.

Before jumping into the work of writing an eBook or white paper, though, remember, these formats don’t appeal to all audiences. If your practice area mainly consists of personal injury cases, it may be hard to entice your clients to download a 10-page white paper. However, if you’re writing about development in intellectual property litigation, corporate clients would be very receptive.  

Webinars

Given the difficulty of in-person networking and speaking opportunities right now, it’s not prudent to turn your content into speaking topics – unless you record it at home and turn it into a webinar. 

Keep in mind, webinars may have a different audience than your blog post. If your blog focuses on the client portion of your audience rather than referral sources or your colleagues, make sure to recalibrate the content. 

Content pro tip: Just as you can turn blog content into webinars, webinars make excellent sources of blog content. In fact, because webinars tend to be meatier than a blog, you can often get two or three blogs worth of content out of them. 

Add FAQs to your site

If you have a piece of blog content that’s popular, ask yourself this: is it popular because the information on it isn’t well represented on your website? 

FAQs are powerhouses for websites that need to highlight popular answers and offer answers in an easy-to-use format. No hunting through text, no parsing paragraphs, just information hitting your question keywords. 

To implement your blog content as an FAQ, examine it for relevant keywords. Tools like SEMRush can help you articulate this information effectively. A few things to keep in mind when building out FAQs, though: 

• Keep questions thoughtfully curated 
• Remember to keep information up-to-date 
• Make it easy to find 
• Keep answers to a manageable length

Now you’ve got some ideas on repurposing your content, you need a plan of action. Content creation thrives when you have a strong editorial calendar. How do you get started on that? Drop us a line – we’d love to brainstorm with you.