Repurposing Content: Let Me Count the Ways

Although you might not know it, I’m recycling right now. Yep, guilty as charged: I’m taking one section of a blog post written by my boss several months ago and repurposing it here. And I’ll do it again and again and again. In fact, I’m going to take the same basic concept and package it differently for an industry publication as soon as I finish this blog post.

You see, I’m proud of my content recycling habit. It’s one way to make sure my company’s key messages are reinforced and that my marketing budget is maximized. It also keeps me honest, ensuring every piece of content I’m creating has a certain amount of shelf life and that I’m not hopping all over the place with different messages.

Let me make one thing clear: Repurposing content does not mean a quick cut and paste job and voila, you’ve got a great new piece. It means taking a piece of existing content and:

• Expanding on the entire topic to make a longer piece
• Taking a longer piece and “atomizing” it into a series of smaller individual pieces
• Determining how to use the content (article, eBook, blog post, press release, white paper, case study, Q&A, Top 10 list, podcast, webinar) across different channels (website, blog, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, SlideShare, Google+, YouTube, partner or customer sites, and more).

Repurposing in Action

Let’s use this specific blog post as an example. To repurpose my content, I could:

• Expand it into a longer white paper by removing the first person tone and including industry research
• Use an abstract from the white paper as a speaking abstract and submit it as a proposed panel session at an upcoming industry event
• Create a list of the Top 10 recommendations for repurposing content and offer it for publication on a website that writes about content marketing
• Use it as the basis for a press release announcing the “Top 10 Ways to Repurpose Your Company’s Content” and distribute across the newswires
• Turn that Top 10 list into a SlideShare presentation
• Post about the SlideShare on LinkedIn and Twitter
• Embed that SlideShare back into a new blog post
• And other ways that I’ll come up with as I go along

One things to keep in mind—I won’t be doing all of this work at once; I’ll just get bogged down and overwhelmed. I might choose one new way to recycle my content every week, depending on other happenings within the company that deserve attention. The key is to stay at it until the ROI starts to drop and you’re seeing fewer likes and retweets, fewer leads and lower website traffic. Then it’s time to move on to the next big idea (which you’ve been working on in the background) and start the cycle over again.

What’s your best example of repurposing content? How many ways have you found to reuse a single piece of content?

[photo courtesy business2community.com]