Reuse, Reduce & RECYCLE

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How to repurpose content in ways that will boost your reputation as a friendly expert.

Content marketing has become an essential part of the marketing mix. Unfortunately, competition is fierce, and the life span of content seems to become shorter and shorter. I got to share my thoughts on how to repurpose content at WordCamp Europe. WordCamp Europe is the world’s largest official WordPress event. I was thankful that I got to experience sharing my expertise at such a huge event.

View my talk on YouTube:

What is content repurposing and how does it help position you and your team as friendly experts?

Content repurposing is presenting content you already have in a different way.

Since people do business with people they know, like and trust, the whole purpose of creating content is to help your visitors, leads and clients to do just that. Know, like and trust you and your team. A little more with every interaction.

Content repurposing helps with that, because:

Your visitors, leads and clients need to hear what’s important within your field of expertise more than once.
People who don’t know, like and trust you yet, may not be visiting your site. You need to meet them where they are. On social media channels, for instance, or on websites that they do visit regularly.
Repurposing content helps you cater to people with varying levels of knowledge about your field of expertise.
Repurposing content helps you cater to people with different learning styles by offering your content in a variety of media.
One part of repurposing content is to make sure that content published in the past does not contain outdated advice today.
And lastly, sharing your expertise freely, in all sort of ways and all sorts of places, help your reputation as a friendly expert grow faster and higher than you may ever imagine.

How to repurpose content systematically?

During my presentation, I shared 4 overarching strategies to repurpose content.

A Seasonal Cleanup

If your audience follows up on outdated advice, your visitors may not obtain the results they were hoping for. Your reputation may suffer from that. At the same time, if you’re optimising for search engines, you don’t want to just delete outdated content, either. You would lose valuable links and search engine positions.

I recommend you to audit your content regularly instead, and make sure it’s still valuable and up to date. Now, if you have a lot of content, auditing once a year may be overwhelming. I suggest to create an overview of your content first, and then group it into your fields of expertise. Next, you’ll spread the workload out over the year. So, every 2-3 months, you’ll work on auditing and updating one topic.

Content splintering

You’ll use content splintering for content that has proven to be valuable for your audience, but is too lenghty or too advanced for the segment of people who are new to your field of expertise. Or who don’t know, like and trust you yet.

So, to provide value to this group, you’ll chop your longer form content up in smaller, focused pieces. And end of those pieces with a call to action that invites your visitor to take a next step.

Content Stacking

Content Stacking works exactly the other way around. You’ll now stack several pieces of short-form content into one piece of long-form content. And that longer piece of content is aimed at the segment of people who are ready to spend more time with you. And dive deeper into the matter with you.

If you’re stacking content, you may need to add an introduction. Or add some copy to transition from one piece to another. And you could add more value by sharing additional examples of how to apply what you have been explaining..

Media Swap

A media swap is converting your content into other types of media. After all, some people prefer to read, and others like to watch or listen. And sometimes someone’s schedule dictates their preferred version. By swapping media, you cater to all those preferences.