We all know the importance of regular blogging for your business. But then coming up with new and valuable topics to post about every single day can be really difficult and time-consuming.
Rather, 60% of the marketers say that creating engaging content is among the biggest challenges in 2016.
One way to simplify the process of consistent blog content creation is to repurpose the old posts to new formats. The Pareto principle states that 80% of the effects come from the 20% of the cases, where 20% of your posts bring in 80% of your organic traffic.
That is to say that you don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Rather than writing spanking new, content every day, you can make use of the hundreds of old posts by renovating, combining and repurposing them. Although the specific repurposing techniques would still require some effort on your part, they wouldn’t be really time-consuming as the ideation, research and drafting of articles based on the new topics.
Many digital market expert India believes that besides saving time, by updating and republishing the old content on your website, you can increase your organic traffic further. You will have a greater chance of older blog posts ranking better than the brand new posts.
So scan the data worth several years from your analytics to find your top-performing posts and get to work on them! Decked are a few ways to repurpose your old blog content:
Update or expand old posts
Technology moves really fast, with the websites, products and services disappearing as fast as the new ones emerge to replace them. Reexamining your perennial posts every year or two not only keeps them in the vanguard, but also increase the organic traffic.
Let’s suppose you run a digital marketing blog. You’d know how quickly information, algorithms and techniques change, which means that the recommendations that you shared would also change.
Some ways to update your old posts are:
• Add images/graphs/videos
• Include current stats and facts
• Fix the outdated information
• Refresh examples
• Add a content upgrade
• Add Call to Action
• Link to the other posts or blogs
In addition to hyperlinking to the other blog posts, you can also add a ‘Read More Here’ phrase right under the paragraph where you discussed the related topic. A few more things to keep in mind are:
• Add a line at the top of the post to announce the update. Use can use ‘2nd Edition’, ‘Updated’, ‘Now with More’ or ‘Updated to Include More’.
• If using a WordPress post, you can simply change the publish date to today’s date and update it once all your changes are made.
• Use the same old URL instead of creating a new one.
P.S: These tips ensure that you don’t lose your ranking for the post.
Record a video version
Videos have turned out as the most popular online medium for consuming content in no time.
According to Google, YouTube explains that annual mobile video consumption has increased by more than 100%. 100 million hours of videos are watched on social media daily and it is expected that 79% of the internet traffic will come from videos by the year 2018.
Recording video versions of your olden articles are a fun way to capitalize the wealth of the content. There are a number of ways to do this:
• Create screen capture videos that show you carrying out different tasks and procedures described in the past blog and articles.
• Record yourself an ad-lib on the topics covered in the blog posts. If you are comfortable with it, even a conversational video on the past topics can come across as more natural for the viewers.
• Consider exploring the live-streaming world. However, it can be a little terrifying until you get used to it.
• You can also create animated videos using text, photos, music, video clips and sound effects. It proves to be a great choice for the camera-shy people in your team.
Whatever approach you decide, publish your new video blog post to your own website and then upload it to YouTube (and/or on other video sharing sites) to see the expanded reach of your ‘New and Improved’ content.
Create podcast episodes
If you run a podcast, look to your old content to provide inspiration for the future audio episodes. Podcasting is a tremendously popular medium, and it is getting bigger and bigger. And with the fast growing use of smartphones, the podcast audience is only going to get bigger.
You can either record reading the articles word-for-word yourself, or can use the past blogs as an inspiration for your podcast episodes to avoid turning off the listeners with a stiff delivery style.
Turn posts into email newsletters
If you think that people don’t really read emails, then you are definitely lagging on something. What your potential customers aren’t really interested in are the promotional emails from you. But they would never negate something of value, if that entertains them, teaches them something new or helps them in one or the other way.
You can post your blogs ‘as it is’ into individual newsletter issues, or use the pared down version, or simple prompts to redirect the readers back to the original posts. If they haven’t seen it earlier, its new to them!
If you have a selection of the past blog posts based around the same theme, then you can consider releasing the newsletter as a series of posts.
Let’s suppose, if you have 5 different articles discussing link building techniques, then you can put them all altogether and advertise your newsletter as an e-course for ‘5 weeks to Link Building Success’.
Binding posts together in this way make the readers more likely to come back week after week, as compared to ‘one off’ messages.
Create Snapchat Stories
The best way to figure out the working of a new platform is by familiarizing the existing content to it. Since you already know the type of response a particular blog has generated, you can see whether you are able to replicate a similar response through an emerging platform.
Snapchat has become one of the leading social networks out there in no time, but it is still early enough for the marketers to see significant ROI because only 1% of the advertisers are using Snapchat for marketing.
You can also repurpose any strategies that you teach or discuss in your blog posts into bite-sized Snapchat stories.
Compile them into an eBook
To make an eBook out of the old blog posts, look for a series of at least 10 blogs based around a similar theme, bring them together in a way that makes sense, and write any additional test required to make it a more solid read.
You can offer your eBook as an incentive to encourage the new readers to join your email marketing list. This will prove to be extremely cost effective. Rather than having your fans reading 10 different blog posts, you can make available to your readers in a convenient, downloadable PDF with an elaborated cover and a bit of extra content that attracts people.
The eBook can also be used as a content upgrade or a lead magnet for the other posts, which is an excellent way to convert your readers into subscribers.
Run a best of promotion
One final alternate to consider for repurposing your old blog content is to pile up several past posts into one ‘best of’ article.
Suppose, you had a series of articles that didn’t perform as you hoped they would, then sharing them again in a new format may bring about your desired level of recognition.
But irrespective of what type of repurposing you decide to use, there is one thing to bear in mind: Bloggers fear that repurposing the old content will bore the current readers or will run the risk of seeming monotonous, this hardly happens.
A very few visitors would have read every piece of content on your website. This makes your repurposing more of a welcoming introduction to the past articles they have missed, and not an unwanted promotion of the already seen content.
Convert it to an infographic
Infographics are the new slide decks! In fact, they are liked 4 times more than the traditional presentations on portals, and have shared 3 times more than any other content on social media. In addition to this, 65% of the marketing executives believe that infographics and the similar visual content communicate their brand story better than just text. They appeal more to our visual brains and don’t require too much of our short attention spans.
Almost everything can be converted to an infographic, but it does work better with the statistic and heavy duty content pieces. Remember that this format is visual, so ask yourself if the information can be conveyed with numbers, images or other statistics. If not, you should probably just write a blog post or create a video tutorial.
Tips for creating an infographic:
• Research to be sure that all your facts are correct and ensure that you cite all of them
• Create a draft of the text of the infographic, breaking down the different sections with strong headers. Also, always proofread what you write
• Take time to think about what look you want for the information and how it represents your brand. You can take the help of a designer or can Do-It-Yourself!
Beyond these cases, be conscious of the fact that people like to abstract content in different formats. What might seem like a long, overpowering text post could come across as much more handy in video format, depending on the unique preferences of your readers’.
In this situation, you are not being repetitive – you are actually introducing your message to reach a greater number of customers.
Consider the above described techniques as a way to strengthen your message and minimize the amount of effort needed to run a successful business blog.
