A quick guide to repurposing your web content

Your website content is a very valuable thing – it’s what connects your audience to your brand, sells your products, helps you build links, cements your search engine ranking position and fuels your social media posts. Despite all this it can easily go stale, become out of date or lack the depth and impact that it should have. That’s not to say though that you need to go back to the drawing board and start all over again from scratch. If you’ve identified pages that need improving, blog posts that are underperforming or articles that simply are no longer up to your current standards, it’s time to repurpose.

What is content repurposing?Content repurposing is the art of getting more from your existing content. Most small to medium businesses don’t have the time or resources to craft outstanding content pieces day in, day out and, while you’re busy focusing on other aspects of your marketing such as having a new website designed for your organisation, older content can be left to gather dust and become irrelevant.Content repurposing sees you updating and revamping older content pieces and reusing existing content in new ways. This allows you to get more from your existing web content and the investment you have already made in things like blog posts and white papers.How do you do it?There are a few steps to getting this tactic underway but the very first one is always to update your content. If you have identified a blog post which is a little thin in detail, not long enough or jam-packed with out of date statistics for example, you can’t do anything else with it until you update and improve. This could mean you remove old data and add in the very latest industry stats. You may add more detail or expertise, update the images, add to the resources, link new sources, optimise it for new keywords or otherwise bring it right up to date.Once you are happy with your upgraded piece of content you can now repurpose it – by turning it into a different piece of content. This allows you to eke more value out of an existing asset.·A blog post or report packed with data, facts and figures could be repurposed into an infographic for example. This could then be shared on social media and posted as a brand new piece of content.·A how to or buying guide once updated could be repurposed into a video or a podcast.·A downloadable PDF could be repurposed into an article, a series of smaller blog posts or a SlideShare.The biggest benefit to repurposing your content of course is that you don’t need to continually go back to the drawing board and develop brand new pieces. This frees up time and strengthens your content offering as you’ll always have a wealth of interesting and up-to-date resources to share and market.