Marketing your business could be a full time job if you let it (and maybe you dream of employing a full time marketing manager to do it for you). For most of us entrepreneurs, marketing is something we need to do together with everything else we need to do in our business – serve clients, follow up leads, sort out your website, keep accounts up to date, etc. We just don’t have the time to market as much as we maybe want to.
So we have to choose how to spend our time. And it makes sense to use that time as efficiently as possible. Which is where repurposing your blog (or other similar) content comes into play.
It is much more time efficient to take a single piece of content and use it to spawn lots more pieces, than to try to create that number of pieces from scratch.
There are other benefits too. We wrote another blog post all about the benefits Why you should repurpose your blog posts
So how do you do this?
Take a big piece of content
The first step is you need that big piece of content. I’m a big fan of blogging for many reasons. But it doesn’t need to be a blog post. The exact same principles apply to any other kind of big pieces of content, like a speech, podcast episode, LinkedIn article or youtube video.
It just needs to be a piece that explains why and/or how to do something that is relevant to your work. It needs to have tips. This blog post is a good example.
Once you have that post you can then start to repurpose it.
We’re not generally copying it word for word across multiple platforms. It helps to tailor it slightly.
Repurpose it whole
The next step is to look at how you can repurpose the whole of it. Almost all my solo podcast episodes start as a blog post. I then take that blog post and use it as an outline for my podcast. If you listen to an episode with the blog post along side you’ll see the similarities. At times the words are exactly the same. But the podcast is more chatty and the language sometimes reflects the fact that you’re listening to me. So I use the blog post as a base for the podcast.
You could do the same with video for youtube. You could use the blog post as an outline for a youtube video. You could film yourself recording the podcast if you wanted to do both. Alternatively you could tweak it again for video, taking into account that people can see you so you can add in visuals.
In a similar way you could use the blog post as an outline for an Instagram or Facebook live.
Some people do it the other way round. They record a podcast, video or live and use the transcription as the basis of their blog post.
You could also use the blog post as the basis for a LinkedIn article (which is longer form), post it on a blogging platform like Medium (just make sure to tag it as duplicate content so it doesn’t hurt the SEO of your original blog post) and/or add it to your Google My Business account.
Basically the same piece of content can, with a small amount of tweaking, be used as:
- A blog post
- A podcast episode
- A youtube video
- A LinkedIn article
- An article on a blogging platform like Medium
- A post on Google My Business
- A speech or presentation and
- Even a Facebook or Instagram live
It doesn’t really matter which one you start with – that’s just a matter of personal preference. You might not want to do all of these, but you could, and even if you do just a couple there’s a real benefit in terms of reach, authority, etc, for very little additional work.
Chop it Up
Thirdly is to look at chopping it up and using small clips for social media.
If you recorded a video you can use video clips and share them on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter etc. These are just clips from the original video – no need to rerecord at this stage.
Similarly, clips can be taken from the audio if you have recorded either a podcast or video. These can be used as “audiograms” on the different social media platforms.
You can pull quotes from the blog, video or audio and use these on a standalone basis on social media. A tool like Canva is great for presenting these kind of quotes. You might need to expand in the caption but you’re a long way there.
What Else?
With a bit more effort you can take the content and repurpose it into an Instagram reel or even a TikTok. So if you’re on Instagram you’ll probably see me do a reel “5 reasons to repurpose your blog posts” and maybe an “all the ways you can repurpose a blog post”. You won’t find me dancing or pointing though. And you won’t find me on TikTok. My teens find me embarrassing enough as it is!
You can also do a carousel post which you can use on Instagram and other social media platforms. These get good reach and engagement so are worth doing. Again these would be the “5 reasons to repurpose your blog posts” and “all the ways you can repurpose a blog post”. Yes exactly the same points as on the reel (and of course the original post).
Then you could make some graphics for Pinterest which link back to the blog post. It is super easy to put together several “pin posts” in Canva and then add them to different boards in Pinterest, linking to the blog post (you do need a blog post or other link you can send people to).
Finally what about your email list? You could use the post as the basis for an email to your list. Perhaps with a slightly different intro and then linking to the blog post and/or other long form content in the email. That’s what I do!
Conclusion
Ultimately, repurposing content from your blog posts or other long form content into social media posts is an extremely efficient use of time – something which us small business owners rarely have enough of. It enables you to take one big piece of content and use it to show your authority, build the “know, like and trust” factor and drive traffic to your website to buy. Why wouldn’t you do that?
A single piece of content can be used with just a few tweaks, as
- A blog post
- A podcast episode
- A youtube video
- A LinkedIn article
- An article on a blogging platform like Medium
- A post on Google My Business
- A speech or presentation and
- Even a Facebook or Instagram live
You can then chop it up and use clips, they can be quotes, video clips or audio clips on social media. A good VA could do that for you.
You can also then take the material and make reels or TikTok videos, carousel posts, pins for Pinterest and an email for your list out of the same content.
That’s a lot from one single piece of content.
You don’t even need to write a new blog post. Just use one that’s been sitting on your website unloved for a little while and give it a new lease of life by repurposing it!