As digital marketers, creating great content is a huge part of what we do. For some of us, blogging is a natural matter, and such people are able to crank out blog post after blog post without so much as batting an eye. Others among us struggle to come up with ideas, or we simply don’t have the time to write a new post every day.

Content marketing is challenging because it requires us to come up with worthwhile content on a very regular schedule. This fact can come out of nowhere, hitting us like a ton of bricks a few months, or even weeks, after starting our websites. It’s all so easy and free-flowing when first start out, right? The ideas are just piled up and ready to go! But when those ideas stop flowing, what’s a content marketer to do?

Repurpose Your Content!

It’s really that simple, and doing so is not a cop-out or a sign of giving up. In fact, repurposed content should be part of your overall strategy! That’s right…moving forward, you should consider the ability to repackage or reuse content as part of your creation process. Instead of using old content as a bailout or a last-ditch measure, we’re going to talk about repurposing as an everyday concept.

Create Content That Holds Value

All too often, we hear about how important it is to get in on the ground floor. We try to be the first to blog about breaking news, or we jump on the bandwagon of writing about what’s trending on Facebook for that moment. This is smart, of course, but it’s not an entire working strategy.

It’s equally important to create content that lasts. You’ll want to have blog posts, videos, and white papers that will be just as valuable to people a year from now as it is today. Why? Because having only having content that people are interested in today is not going to help your search engine rankings!

See, you might get a traffic spike when you first share a bit of timely content, but content that holds its value will continue to be searched out, discovered, and shared for a long time – possibly forever. That’s the sort of content that Google regards highly. As such, content that’s not time-sensitive will work wonders in getting your website ranked.

That’s great, but there are two other benefits to switching your focus toward content that holds its value:

• It’s much, much easier to repurpose timeless content. (Your post about a celebrity divorce might get you a lot of traffic for a day or two, but good luck sharing it again next year!)
• Repurposing, as we’re going to learn, saves you so much time that you’re getting exponentially-multiplied value from timeless content. You’ll be getting more results with far less work!

You might not have any timeless content right now, but by the time you finish this article, you’re going to start creating it!

The Hidden Benefits of Repurposing Content

On the surface, the benefits are obvious. You save time and you’re not pressed to come up with as many new ideas. But how else will your website benefit from making this part of your strategy?

A Consistent Brand – We’ve all run into that problem where we start to meander away from our blog’s actual niche. (Some can be worse than others! I’ve seen relationship blogs that inexplicably post about Star Wars or racism issues.) When you repurpose and re-promote your old content, you’re keeping everything on track and showing your audience that you can stick to a theme.

A Broader Audience – The internet is notoriously fickle and fast-paced. You can share an awesome blog post on Twitter, but the lifespan of that tweet might only be seconds long because of how quickly notifications are pushed down. Promoting your content a second (or fifth) time ensures that it’s seeing a larger swath of potential fans.

Bigger Payout for Hard Work – Have you ever had a great idea for a post, but you decided against writing it because it would take hours to research? That can be discouraging when you think about posting it one time, where it might only see a few dozen readers. That reasoning shifts quite a bit when you think of your well-researched article as a timeless asset, something you can promote and share and post multiple times!

How to Make It Happen

Repurposing your content takes a bit of planning and thought. While you could simply re-post or share your articles over and over again, that’s probably not the best idea. Here are a few guidelines that you’d be well advised to incorporate in your repurposing strategy:

• Repurpose the best stuff!
• Maybe I don’t need to tell you this, but I will anyway! When you’re looking for content to repurpose, choose from your top performers. Seek out your posts that generated the most traffic or highest engagement.

• Rewrite the worst stuff.
• We’ve all written posts that aren’t the best example of our work. They might have terrible headlines, bad formatting, or not enough research to make them a valid reference. Instead of letting that stuff rot at the bottom of your website, open up the posts and fix them! When you approach that old content with a fresh perspective (and more experience), you’ll probably be able to give it a new life. Fix the problems and share it all over again!

• Make it easy to find.
• Your website probably has a way to “feature” articles or pin lists to the sidebar. (If you’re using WordPress, there are tons of ways to do this!) Make sure that all of your best, top-performing content is easy to find on your site. Stick those posts to the top, add them to a special menu, or create a carousel that displays them prominently.

• Find new venues.
• Sometimes repurposing is simply a matter of redistributing. When you published that great post, did you share it to Facebook? How about Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr, LinkedIn, or Quora? There are scores of great places where you can publish your existing content to give it new life – and a new audience. Just be sure to post your content in the relevant forums, feeds, or subcategories. No one likes a spammer!
• Change the format.
• Do you have a great series of posts that all stick to a theme? You can combine them into an eBook and publish them to Amazon, Smashwords, or Wattpad. You could also read them on an engaging YouTube video, or even turn them into a series of podcasts. When changing format, it helps to add a bit of extra content to each iteration (otherwise, you really are just recycling old stuff and your audience will probably catch on).

Tools Make Everything Easier When It Comes to Repurposing Content

I’ve said it before: if there’s any task that’s monotonous or time-consuming, someone has made a tool to automate it! There are a few tool out there that can make repurposing a little bit more streamlined:

• Hootsuite: One of my favorite social media tools. This can be critical in widening the reach of your timeless posts. Create a series of notification tweets or Facebook updates to alert your followers of the post. Schedule them at varying times throughout the day and on different days of the week.
• it: This is a pretty straightforward content curation site that lets you add your posts to the feed simply by copy and pasting a link. Yet one more way to get your hard work in front of more readers!
• Pinterest: You’ve been using awesome images in your posts, right? Work that to your advantage by making attractive pinboards from those images, helping to send traffic your way.
• com: This site allows you to create images using your own text as an overlay. The resulting picture is optimized for sharing to social media, giving you a new way to put your words in front of others.

Repurposing isn’t just a lifesaver, it’s a smart strategy. You can make this concept work for you by creating content that holds its value over time and sharing it on as many channels as possible. As you start to repurpose your own work, be sure to keep the above best practices in mind!