Is it good idea to repurpose my blog content?
Content creation presents a great opportunity to repurpose it in various formats. A great first use would be on your newly created accounts on social media networks.
It is better to create enough content first before going down the repurposing path. Creating content and simultaneously engaging in reusing it, can be too staggering for anybody.
Benefits Of Repurposing Content
Let’s discuss the benefits of repurposing our written content.
Travel The Extra Mile On The Content Bandwagon
Each piece of quality content you develop involves research and putting down thoughts on paper. It takes a lot of your time and effort. Reusing that content is making the best use of all the time involved in creating it.
The more number of formats you repurpose your content in, the more fruits for the picking in a single swoop.
You highlight the main points of your content in your repurposed format. Apart from the conversion of formats, there is not much other work involved.
Building Authority Status
Your blog is looking really healthy with all the hard work you have put into creating awesome content.
Repurposing the content in different formats on your social media accounts extrapolates your visibility and reach. You are becoming an authority in your domain of business and growing your credibility at the same time.
Quality matters more than quantity. If you let the quality of your content decline, any amount of repurposing of poor caliber content will end up becoming your nemesis. Remember to put your audience in the center of all your content recycling activities.
Content Repurposing Generates Backlinks
When you publish your repurposed content on major social media sites, you get backlinks to your site. There are two ways of looking at this.
1. From SEO perspective
These links are for the best part nofollow links in that they do not pass link juice from the social media sites back to your site.
But the most important point is that your site gains back links from social media platforms that have a huge domain authority and trust authority. These definitely help your site in the long run.
2. From Web Traffic Perspective
These social media behemoths drive tons of traffic to your site as users throng these sites in huge numbers. No amount of link juice or anything like that can compare to web traffic which is pure gold.
This drives increased readership, more time spent on your site and calls to action being fulfilled on your site. Google definitely takes note of these factors pointing to the increasing popularity of your site.
A share worthy article of yours on a major social media site impresses others to share on their sites and elsewhere. These shares in turn introduce your site to new groups of readers. These are the healthy consequences of creating and repurposing great content.
What Are Popular Formats For Repurposing Content?
There are several popular formats to repurpose your content to. Before you begin, identify the formats that are already popular on the platforms you have in mind.
Online Video
When you think video, then lights, camera, background and you talking away in front of the camera are the first few things that cross your mind. Youtube, the most visited site on earth, is the next to appear on the mental horizon.
You can invest in a great video camera and quality microphones to get into the video creation process. If you are a natural in front of the camera, this is your best crack at success!
Sadly, not all are endowed with such traits. Nervousness is a major issue for most. Being camera shy does not help. Plus the knowledge of handling all the equipment and video creation skills don’t make it a breeze.
What If You Could Create Videos Easily From Content?
Technology helps achieve exactly this. It’s high time you started playing with a free tool like Lumen 5
All you have do is enter the URL to your content. Lumen 5 does the rest by retrieving the content and creating an editable storyboard.
With the free version (limited features and fewer videos you can upload), you can use your brand logo, photos and videos related to your business. With paid membership plans, Lumen 5 provides tons of media files that you can use without fear of copyright infringements.
Another interesting cloud based drag and drop video creation tool is Animoto You feed the photos, video clips and music and the tool creates professional videos, that double up as slideshows and web presentations.
Their free plan lets you create unlimited videos and free forever. But they are watermarked using the Animoto brand. There are other paid plans with all the bells and whistles to create top notch videos.
Social Media Imagery
The striking aspect of social media is the riot of colors by way of visuals, images, videos and the works. The visual appeal is what attracts viewers initially and helps register the brand/service before content is consumed.
With heavy competition in this space, and the human attention span dwindling so rapidly in today’s distraction filled world, you need your content to stand out from its peers using visually appealing graphics.
Canva is a very popular online design and photo editing tool. You can do a lot even with a free account.
Log in and select your favorite layout depending on the social media network you are targeting. Canva has them all.
You can upload your own images or use Canva’s paid stock images. Add some filters and text to the mix showing your brand name and the URL of your site to watermark the image. It’s ready to share on your social media site(s) of choice!
It takes time to create a top quality social media graphic specifically for say Facebook. Work grows and so do the number of images, when you start targeting Instagram and other social media sites. It is best to create a social media calendar (just like you did for creating content calendar using your Google Calendar account).
This article provides other alternatives to Canva
Podcasts
Podcasts have exploded in popularity as they stand for “content on the go”. You are not tied to your desktop. You can stream episodes to your phone and listen as you travel, go for a run or whenever you get a chance.
If you are repurposing your content as a podcast, get a top quality background noise canceling microphone and settle down in calm surroundings during recording. A noisy background will be a horrible audio experience for your listeners.
Start reading your blog content in its current form or create a customized version to read from. Avoid monotony and sound upbeat.
Free Audio Software Does A Great Job
You don’t have to splurge money on expensive recording software. Audacity is an awesome software to record audio and edit your recording.
A professional way of starting a podcast is to have an intro jingle to warm up the audience for the cool stuff. It is ideal to have an outro to close the podcast episode.
Infographics
Infographic in its basic form is meant to take a ton of available information in any field and present it in visual format that is easily digestible and at the same time captivates the viewer’s attention.
Who Uses Infographics?
You can be a startup trying to woo investors by communicating your company’s market share and plans in the cutting edge technology domain you expect to dominate, an academic helping students master a difficult concept just in time for exams or a designer carving a niche for herself in creating infographics to catch a recruiter’s eye.
Using Infographics For Your Small Business
At the business level, there are designer brands that spend gazillion dollars on hiring a top agency to create infographics. At the small business level, infographics are seen as a major source of high quality backlinks.
If you / your designer can communicate the problem and solution in your domain effectively using infographics, it gets shared around with several backlinks pointing back to your site. This makes your site a hot candidate for top rankings on search engines.
If you are an expert in the truest sense in your domain of business, you can use Canva or your best friend, Powerpoint or Google Slides, to create your own infographics.
As long as the content of your infographic is easy to consume in a short period of time, you have met the objective of putting out an infographic in the first place.
Use more of high quality graphics with smattering of words to support the information you disseminate. Adding data makes it more powerful.
If you have a mental block, go to Google and search for say – infographics for restaurants. Then click the Images tab and you can get your creative infographic juices flowing when you analyze the tons of infographics out there.
Ebooks
What are ebooks?
An ebook is an electronic book filled with content formatted for a desktop or variety of handheld devices. Consuming content on the go is the order of the day.
All said and done, physical books still outsell electronic books as people love curling up with the physical version. For once, unlike other industries, digital media has not been able to disrupt the world of physical books. Find out the reasons for yourself.
Using Ebooks As Lead Magnets
On your business web site, condensing the lengthy content into abridged ebook versions with a few punchy tips that cannot be found on your site, primarily serve as “great” lead magnets.
Create a landing page with the benefits your valuable yet free ebook provides. You can give it away in exchange for the user’s email address. You get to do email marketing for the life time value of the reader.
The standout part should be your ebook cover. Get it designed professionally. Alternatively, there are tons of free and paid ebook cover software in the market. Again, you can’t go wrong with using Canva. The cover should appeal visually to your audience.
If you are interested in creating ebooks and selling them online, then Amazon Ebooks is the grand daddy of them all. Their Kindle books have gone on to become best sellers.
Slide Presentations
Use Powerpoint or Google Slides to repurpose your blog content into glitzy slide presentations.
Ensure that you present a single point on a slide with a useful description related to that point. Do not clutter every slide with blocks of text. It becomes visually distasteful and information overload.
Add pleasant backgrounds to make it enticing to the user, to a point where it is not distracting. Standardize the fonts for headings, main point and description across the entire presentation.
Add your business logo or site URL as watermark so users know its origin clearly. This is a simple yet effective deterrent to plagiarism online.
At Traffic Alignment, we are primarily content marketing service providers for small businesses and can help businesses get their digital moorings fastened and well established online. Give us a chance. Call us or email us today.
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