Revive Your Old Content Through Repurposing

If you've maintained a blog for any length of time then you know keeping your blog up-to-date with quality content is a very important task. But other tasks that we must perform is to maintain our social media footprints as well. This can eat a chunk of time away from your day. One way to get around this is to take what you have already produced and repurpose it. This saves you time by not having to think up new ideas and it gives you the ability to expand its reach.

Posting on social media platforms is important but it should be well thought out. Repurposing your existing content already answers the question "what to post onto social media". While it's true that you may need to reshape the content for the various platforms that exist, the content subject matter is in place.​ So what kinds different medium are available for repurposing? The following are some that are available:

Slideshows

Take the main points of your content and put them in a PowerPoint or Keynote presentation. Then you can upload them to Slideshare.com. Bear in mind that Slideshare is one of many of these types of sites. You can also send your slides to Scribd, Docstoc, ISSUU, Slideboom, Slidefinder, etc. The more places you share, the better.​

Videos

Once you have a slideshow created from PowerPoint, it is very easy to turn that into a video. This can then be placed on sites like YouTube and other video sharing sites. Other video sharing sites: vimeo.com, metacafe.com, dailymotion.com, etc.​

​One note of caution: videos that are converted from slideshows don't typically engage visitors as much as other types like talking head videos. If you want to kick it up a notch, consider outsourcing a talking head video on Fiverr.com or elance.com.

​Audio

This medium works much better if you submit to places like Audible.com and iTunes.com. Having a standalone audio recording on your blog or website doesn't usually attract too many people. You need to have a decent audio player or allow the user to download it from your website. It also gives you very little benefit in the way of providing links to other resources as you cannot link within an audio file. But still if you can create a decent audio, it is yet another way to repurpose content.

​Graphics & Images

​If you participate in any social media platforms, it's almost a necessity to include some kind of graphic. Just check out the news feed of Facebook or the front section of Pinterest. You'll see memes, infographics, etc. You will need to adjust many of your graphics for the different types of platforms as certain dimensions (width and height) of your graphics work best with some and not so great with others. Pinterest graphics tend to do better when they are long and narrow whereas Facebook tends to do well with short and wide.

​When working with graphics, it pays to be proficient in tools like Photoshop, although Gimp.org offers a free alternative. Also, never steal anyone's graphics as that will get you into legal trouble. Make sure you have the right to use the graphic. Simply grabbing any old graphic off of Google and throwing it up on social sites is not generally a good idea. Please note: this is not legal advice as I am not a lawyer.

​Memes

A meme is a graphic with a saying on it. You'll see them a lot on sites like Pinterest and to a lesser degree, Facebook. Examples of some memes can be found here:

Source: MemeGenerator.net

The same warning about copyrights for graphics exist for memes. Make sure you have rights to use the images that you download.

Ebooks

Ebooks come in all sizes and flavors. If your blog content is long enough to make into an Ebook, you could turn around and sell that on places like Clickbank. Many people will actually take several blog posts and turn into into a book that can be sold on Kindle or Barnes & Noble. If you decide to do this, make sure that you add more to the derived book than just the content of the posts. I have seen several authors get slammed with negative reviews for simply putting up a book that contains nothing but their posts.​

Guest Posting

The idea here is to find someone who is growing in the ranks of influence online and reach out to them with a guest post query. You may be wondering why I didn't suggest looking for highest influential bloggers and the answer is simple: you'll never get to them. They are so busy and thousands of others are trying to query them for a guest posting spot. You have a much better chance at getting the attention of a blogger whose rank is rising.

When you find someone and make your pitch, what works best is to already have something written but not the same item that you are repurposing from. They don't want copied content. That can get them into hot water with Google. You are going to expand upon your original article/post/video, etc. Make it an entirely new piece to be submitted to your influential blogging partner.

Also keep in mind that Google has recently cracked down on blogging and it is unclear if they are against the practice altogether. Matt Cutts of Google had made the announcement that if ​you are using guest posting with the intent of gaining back links this could be used against you. He later updated the statement to say that guest blogging isn't dead. But true to form for Matt and Google, the entire article was ambiguous and left everyone scrambling about guest posting.

Forums

Forums are a great way to connect with people and find out what kind of information they are looking for. The key word here is "connect". If you just show up to a forum and start writing "buy my product, buy my product" you will quickly get banned. Instead build a rapport with the group. Answer questions that you are capable of answering. Over time, you will be considered an expert with the group.

Once you attain that elevated status of expert, you can start to repurpose your content to reflect the discussions that are on the forums. You still don't want to plug the forum with promotional messages but one trick that I like to use is to direct people who are looking for answers to the newly created and repurposed content. If someone asks a question about a certain topic, you can simply tell them that you have already found a solution and make the solution available to them on your website. It's a genuine way to get more traffic to this repurposed content and others in the forum will be interested as well.

Plus it can often appear in search engine queries for a particular keyword.

Wikis

If you unfamiliar with the term Wiki, it is a community generated encyclopedia of sorts. Some wikis, like Wikipedia.org, are moderated whereas many of the smaller ones let people post whatever they want (and they usually regret the vast amount of SPAM that they get). Wikis are popular with some people and others don't give them the time of day. The key is to find wikis that will accept entries. You want to make sure that you don't be one of the SPAMMERS. If you contribute great content to the wiki, you will become a respected member by the moderators or the owners of the wiki.​

As you can see, there are several ways to repurpose your content so that it can get more traction. The more channels you have in place the greater the chance for it to be shared. As you grow in the sub communities people will want to follow you just to get updates to your content.