Double your Readership and Half the Time it Takes to Create Content
When it comes to content creation for your blog or newsletter or social media channels, the time it takes can be a real burden! Everyone from the latest YouTube star, to the Fortune 500 companies are all demanding attention and they are all putting out great content all the time. And you’re expected to keep up? Yes. People expect good content, and all the time too. This post aims to both help you save a bit of time when thinking about content creation, so you can get on with your day! Moreover it also aims to help you capture a larger readership of your content. This is important, you want as many people as possible reading your content.
Here’s a clue, it’s all about repurposing content.
Repurposing is essentially looking at the content you already have and making the most out of it either by re-writing it or by changing the medium it comes in. There are lots of different mediums for content to come in for example:
– Blog Posts
– Infographics
– Memes (memorable images combined with a single line or phrase to create a viral presence)
– Video (could you record yourself for a quick video?)
– Slideshow Presentations
– Photos
– Graphics
– Comics
– Drawings
– Quick tip guides (E.g. 3 Reasons why… or; 7 Tips on…)
– Small eBooks
– Definitive Guides
– Short Quotes
– Podcasts
– Templates
– How To Guides
– Case Studies
– Help Sheets and so on.
When you have created content, and you announce it to the world via social media or newsletters or whatever it is you use, is that it? Do you announce it once or a few times? It’s always worth directing people back to past content a few times, as chances are, in the fast paced world they will probably miss it the first time. This also helps with thinking of content to put on your social media, even if you just post an article once, and then again a week later (as long as you have posted frequently between posts), this makes finding content for each day twice as easy! a You can then try different titles to see which ones perform best at getting clicks on your links. Great.
Where people miss a trick is by not repurposing content fully to attract a larger readership.
Some people prefer to consume content differently, some may prefer long form articles, others an Infographic or slide presentations. Some want real in depth knowledge in the form of full ebook downloads, and others just want some quick tips instantly. By repurposing content you can appeal to the different needs of different audiences. Your audience will only click to see your content if the medium and content appeals to them. By repurposing your content, you start attract those people you missed the first time.
So what you need to be doing is looking back at the content you have and seeing if you can make more of them, by repurposing, to therefore save you time and effort writing another from scratch. After all it can take time to research, write, proof, check for SEO keywords, put together a design for it, and think of a catchy title. This method of repurposing takes half that time.
Don’t just repurpose for re-writings sake, try to add a little bit more to the content and keep them fresh. Is there new research that supports your ideas, or new products on the market that can help. Perhaps you could ask someone else to share their view and shed a fresh perspective on it. The point of repurposing an item of content is to appeal to the people who didn’t read it the first time, maybe because it was in the wrong medium for them, so make sure the medium changes this time too.
Another benefit to re-purposing is sometimes your content is just not as awesome as it was back in the day, and maybe it is time to get upgrade it. It could actually be damaging to your reputation if out of date content is freely available.
ACTION: Use a content audit to look back over any content you have. What got the biggest reaction, the most comments or shares. Pick out three to repurpose.
ACTION: Think about how you could repurpose them. Could they be re-wrote slightly, split in two or turned into a different medium? Look at the top of this article for ideas of alternative mediums.
ACTION: After deciding how you are going to repurpose your three articles, get to it and see what the reaction is this time, better response? Different audience clicking this time?
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BONUS tips:
– Social Media: Repurpose your posts on social media channels. You can also easily create shorter content of your longer posts by by taking small snippets of your existing content, and perhaps linking back to the full article. This makes it easier to think of things to post, so you never run out of stuff to say. In the fast pace world of social media, repurposing content is great for showing snippets of your work to draw in the audience and offer them more if they are interested. Can you make a nice graphic with a 3 point summary on, or a quote from your writing, or even a screenshot. Anything visual goes down well on social media.
– Change the dates: Make sure phrases like, ‘recently’, or ‘a couple of days ago’ are altered so the content doesn’t appear out of date.
– Don’t Repeat yourself: Google really doesn’t like duplicate content, so avoid being penalised, and make sure your main content isn’t exactly the same as past posts.
– If you feel motivated or inspired to write then go for it, it can be hard to get yourself in that creative mindset so if take the opportunity where and when you can.