Discover The Value In Repurposing Content

What does it mean to repurpose content?

Once you have successfully written a piece of material that fits well with your target audience, you can choose to repurpose content or reuse some of the same ideas in a fresh piece that further nurtures the relationship. For example, if you have a highly successful blog post, you might elect to dive deeper into the material by producing a white paper that will give your audience something more to explore. You can also reuse content as a webinar, infographic, or video, to name a few options.

What does it mean to republish content?

Sometimes people find that a successful piece remains valuable even a year or two after they had initially published it. They might want to draw the attention of their target audience back to this material so that it can gain some fresh eyes. This is known as republishing content.

Generally, when you republish content, you want to be completely upfront with your audience that you are republishing an old piece. If you have dedicated readers, they may remember it from before and wonder why they're reading the same thing twice on your page. Including a disclaimer can also encourage newer readers to dig into the rest of your archive to see what other materials you have to offer them.

How do I repurpose content?

You can repurpose content if you know that it still has value for your readers. To identify the best topics to repurpose or republish, you should use a dashboard, like Brightedge, to uncover which pages received the strongest traffic and the best engagement numbers. The content that was the most useful for users in the past, if it is still relevant and helpful, is also likely to be popular now. Be sure to only repurpose content that is relevant. Promoting old content that doesn't interest or pertain to users any longer can make your company look out-of-date and behind in the industry.

If you run an SEO firm and you notice that your recent posts related to local SEO are attracting a considerable amount of attention, you might consider expanding on this core idea and developing additional blog posts, articles, or related materials around this topic. When you repurpose content that has already had success, you spend less time coming up with new topics and you also lessen the risk of selecting a topic that doesn’t interest readers. You increase the chances that the additional content you provide will optimally serve the interests of readers.

If there is a blog post that continues to provide value, but it has gotten lost in your archives and no longer attracts the attention it once did, you might choose to promote it as a featured blog or republish it. You can offer some basic updates to the piece if they are needed but you are largely just reintroducing the content to audiences by making it accessible.

Content can also sometimes be republished on other sites in a process known as syndication. With this marketing tactic, you publish a portion of a piece on another, reputable site to encourage people to click through to your site. This can help increase brand reach. Although content syndication can be done well and successfully, it also has to be done carefully to let Google know that the syndication was on purpose and to avoid duplicate content penalties.

Republishing and repurposing content are two successful ways you can grow your brand by introducing your followers to the wealth of information you offer. When you repurpose content, it lets people take a fresh look at an older piece of value while also encouraging people to dig through and discover the insights housed in your past entries.