Create a Sustainable Content Strategy: 7 Ways to Repurpose Blog Posts
Creating high-quality content that people genuinely care about takes a lot of time and effort. Between ideation, research, writing, editing, and publishing, even a monthly blog post can quickly feel like an unsustainable marketing initiative. Add to it the need to provide a multimedia experience for your audience, and suddenly your content strategy can look impossible to execute.
Blogs, vlogs, eBooks, case studies, photos, reels, stories, live videos—it never ends. But, like refurbishing dated furniture or upcycling vintage clothes, you can breathe new life into old content.
To help you develop a sustainable content strategy, Ethos Copywriting discusses how to repurpose your blog posts. This approach will help you maximize your return on investment (ROI), compete with more robust marketing teams, and increase search ranking. To get your creative juicing flowing, we’ll also outline seven ideas for repurposing your content to ensure you’re consistently engaging with your audience.
What Does it Mean to Repurpose Old Content?
Also known as content recycling, repurposing old content means reusing existing content to generate new content. Whether you’re using an old blog post to outline a video script or its key points to craft sharable tweets, you can leverage what you’ve already created in many ways.
How to Repurpose Your Old Content
While repurposing old content can undoubtedly speed up the content creation process, it still takes a good amount of time. For that reason, you don’t necessarily want to repurpose every blog post on your site. Instead, use Google Analytics or your content management system’s dashboard metrics to determine where the most potential is.
High visitor traffic is a primary signal that people find value in your content. It also indicates that the same subject will perform well in a different medium, such as an infographic or video. However, you should consider other key performance indicators (KPIs) as well.
For instance, let’s say you notice a particular page is crushing it on traffic. But, its bounce rate (the percent of visits to a page that only resulted in a single pageview) is high, and time-on-page (the average time a visitor spends on the page) is low. This combination of KPIs indicated that there is an opportunity to adapt the content to make it more actionable and valuable for your audience.
Ultimately, you want to leverage your site’s analytics to steer your content strategy. Also, consider the 80/20 rule: 80 percent of your traffic will likely come from 20 percent of your content. Keeping this rule in mind will help direct your attention to the most high-value blog posts worth repurposing.
Why You Should Repurpose Content
For many people, the most profound benefit of repurposing content is time savings. From inception to completion, a high-value blog post generally takes five to ten hours. And, before you say, “Hey, ChatGPT does it in a matter of seconds,” know that that content doesn’t rank particularly well without human intervention. Reason being, it doesn’t follow Google’s E-E-A-T criteria:
Expertise
Experience
Authoritativeness
Trustworthiness
ChatGPT is an excellent tool for outlining posts, ensuring you have a comprehensive overview of a topic, and idea generation. But when it comes to producing people-first content, those who put fingers to keys will typically outperform their fully AI-reliant counterparts.
So, for those putting in the effort to produce high-value, high-quality blog posts, repurposing them can be the key to a successful and sustainable content strategy. But the benefits extend beyond just time-savings. Repurposing content can help you:
Amplify brand awareness
Diversify content
Improve search ranking
Increase reach
Maximize ROI
Optimize underperforming/leverage outperforming blog posts
There are seemingly endless ways to repurpose content. But you need to determine what methods best align with your goals, resources, and brand.
Lastly, before diving into seven ways you can repose content, remember to consider this approach an iterative process. If repurposing a blog post into a YouTube video takes too much time, consider an infographic. If transforming a blog post’s main points into an Instagram carousel yields the results you want, lean into it. Just make sure you’re using data as a guiding light.
Update Content in Outperforming Blog Posts
Let’s start with the simplest way to repurpose a blog post: update its content. First, use your site’s metrics to determine the best performers. Second, find any antiquated insights and outdated data. You may even have time-specific posts like “2022’s Comprehensive Guide to Spring Cleaning Guide” or “5 Tips to Help Your Business Survive the COVID-19 Pandemic.”
If you have statistics from sources ten years or older, we’d recommend scrapping those entirely. With the pace at which industries evolve, even five years is iffy. Whenever possible, Ethos recommends using data that doesn’t date back more than three years.
We also recommend documenting the changes you made. Indicating an update can be as simple as stating the original publishing date and the new one. Doing so can help build trust with your readers as well. On one of our high-performing blog posts titled, "How Many Drinks Should I Have At A Business Meeting or Happy Hour?" we added editor's notes so readers are confident in how up-to-date the research is.
Depending on the topic, it may be worth comparing your old facts and figures with the new ones to highlight major changes in your field.
2. Add Content to Blog Posts
Adding content is a great way to boost traffic on underperforming and outperforming blog posts. If you’re striving to make high-impact changes, start with your best performers and work your way back.
Beyond looking at traffic signals, consider the easability of updating the content. For instance, listicles are basically teed up for additional content. If you currently have a post such as "7 Cocktails You Need to Make this Summer" or "8 Tips to Win Your Next Construction Client," add new cocktails or add some additional tips.
Pro-tip: Be strategic about the URL for new listicles. We recommend not including the number in the slug. For instance, in a post titled "7 Real Estate Questions You've Wanted to Ask," we'd make the URL slug /real-estate-questions-you've-wanted-to-ask. Doing so allows you to add content later while still including critical keywords.
Older blog posts are often never freshened up with new content. Not only is this a missed opportunity for diving deeper into a topic, but it also means those blog posts are severely lacking in internal links to your latest work. For that reason, as you add content, find opportunities to connect old blog posts with the new.
If you're looking for a quick and effective way to add content, consider adding leadership quotes into the mix. Reach out to industry peers or an in-house specialist. It's a great way to generate new ideas and add more credibility to the content you already have.
3. Find Common Threads to Make an eBook
Unless you're shooting in the dark with your blog post topics, it's more than likely you've written about similar themes. So, say you regularly write about real estate. You can find all of the blog posts that discuss selling and weave those pieces into a comprehensive eBook on selling a home.
eBooks help position you as a thought leader and industry expert. If created as gated content (content is online content that requires people to fill out a form to access it), they're also valuable lead magnets. With a bit of rewriting, reformatting, and repurposing your blog posts, you'll have a new piece that can deliver a big impact.
4. Create “Snack-Sized” Social Posts
High-quality blog posts require a lot of research. They typically cite a variety of impactful facts and figures to prove a point and persuade the reader to take action.
All those statistics you dug up make for delectable snack-size social media posts. Turn them up a notch with a little graphic design work and a thoughtful caption, and you'll have something your audience can sink their teeth into.
5. Make an Audio Blog/Podcast Script
Not everyone has the time to sit down and read an entire blog post. But they might just have the time to listen to one. Accordingly, you should consider repurposing your blog posts as scripts for audio blogs and blog posts.
By doing so, you can reach audiences on the go, be it during their work commute or while they're cleaning their kitchen. Creating an audio blog or podcast also gives you more valuable material to feature on social media.
Pro-tip: This approach is best for people with the time and resources to record consistently. Unfortunately, many content creators lose stream after a few episodes because they already have too much on their to-do lists. If time is scarce, skip this repurposing approach until you're in a position to upload consistently.
6. Make a Video Script
Surveys estimate that 91% of consumers want to see more online video from brands. So, why not repurpose a blog post by turning it into a video script and give them what they want?
Go long-form on YouTube, or keep it short n' sweet through an Instagram story. No matter what you do, keep track of what's delivering results.
Pro-tip: Videos can be time-consuming to make, so make sure it's worth it by keeping close tabs on your KPIs. Further, when measuring your content's success, decide what matters most to you. Is it followers? Backlinks? Email subscribers? Without a goal, it's impossible to see if you hit your target.
7. Make an Infographic
High-quality blog posts are brimming with helpful tidbits. To make the most of that content you already have, reconstitute key points, facts, and figures into a sharable infographic. Not only can they perform well on social media, but you can reintegrate them into the blog post from which you got the information and provide a multimedia experience for your readers.
Grow A Sustainable Content Strategy
High-quality content is the cornerstone of digital marketing. But creating enough of it is a significant problem for many businesses and organizations. Luckily, repurposing blog posts can alleviate some of the stress.
If you’re looking for a way to completely circumvent the headaches of marketing, you can also reach out to Ethos Copywriting. We’ll help you build a sustainable content strategy, generate new content, and repurpose your current content.
Of course, if you have additional ideas for repurposing blog posts, please comment below. We love seeing how other people leverage content to build their businesses.