Creating content is like having a meal with leftovers afterward. It would be a shame to let all that material go to waste by only using it once. With a little creative ingenuity, you can take what you’ve made, switch things around a little bit, combine a few different things, add a couple of new ingredients and turn it into a delicious new content casserole. And if you do it right, no one will ever realize it’s leftovers.
There’s a plethora of different content types out there that can be used for repurposing. You can start off simply. Take a group of five or six blog posts on the same topic, combine them and turn them into a white paper or e-book. Or you can do the reverse and take a white paper or e-book and break it down into five or six blog posts. Try to do this with older content that hasn’t been viewed in awhile, rather than more recent stuff that people are more likely to have seen already. Another thing you can do is to take a blog post that’s heavy on facts and stats and add some graphic design elements to turn it into an infographic.
You can also take a particularly successful blog post and turn it into a video. Demonstrate what you have to say instead of just telling. It will help drive home the point and attract a slew of new viewers. And of course, you can reverse this one as well and transcribe a video to use as a blog post. As a bonus, this also makes the full content of the video searchable, rather than only tags of the main points.
And then there are webinars. Webinars are full of useful content that can be repurposed multiple times, yielding not just a casserole, but a soup as well, with enough left over to make sandwiches afterward. Or, to clarify, in content marketing terms:
A webinar starts off as an event. People gather online to see a live video of an expert or group of experts expounding on their area of expertise, often with the help of visual aids such as pictures, charts and other slides. Since it’s done in real time, many webinars are interactive, allowing viewers to submit questions via instant message or Twitter hashtag, which the lecturers can then address during the event.
Then, when the event is over, the video of the webinar can be posted online for those who missed it. It’s no longer interactive, but it’s still great video content that can now be viewed as often as needed and used as a helpful reference.
But webinars tend to be very long—usually an hour, if not more. So for viewers who don’t have that kind of time, clips of it, three or four minutes covering a single point, can be taken, edited and posted to YouTube (and your website) as a video series. In addition, you can take a transcript of the webinar and, with a little tweaking, turn it into a white paper or a series of blog posts. You can even take the slides from the webinar and post them on their own on Slideshare or a similar site.
You have to eat every day. And your website needs new content almost as often. You can come up with something brand new to feed your audience every day if you want. But sometimes it’s just easier to raid the fridge and throw a few leftovers together. With a little finessing, a single page of content can feed your audience for days.
