Having trouble coming up with a new content idea? Whether you’re a brainstorming pro or novice, sometimes the creative river just runs dry. But, alas, don’t give up! There are ways to repurpose your existing content and create something new and great. Here are few ways to leverage your blog content to craft up something new, this way you never stop publishing great content.
Leverage Existing Content
Go through all of your old blog posts, starting from the very beginning. Oh how times have changed, right? Take this blog and create a 2015 Update on the topic. Not everything is the same, so you can cite update, changes and post your position on the topic. Granted, this tactic may not work for every type of blog post – but it’s a good place to start.
For example, let’s take an older CM blog: Paid Content Promotion & Discovery: GTMFYM
As you may notice, we write a lot about content promotion and discovery platforms, and there’s a reason for that. Both StumbleUpon and Outbrain are consistently improving and updating the services they provide. Whether targeting improves, or the platform gets more robust and you can better target your content is crucial in this instance. You’ll want to highlight any updates or refreshes on the platform and republish the content with the latest news.
In addition, you might as well use some of the existing content to spark additional blog ideas. Since content promotion is one of our core offerings we can technically exploit it for the betterment of our customers. Here are few other topics that we can write about from this one post:
- Understand Your Audience for Content Amplification
- How to Use Outbrain for Your Brand
- Best Tools & Resources for Content Promotion
- How to Use StumbleUpon for Your Content Promotion (oh wait, we’ve done that. Check it out here.)
So in this section alone, we have updated and republished content as well as sparked some new blog topic ideas from the same blog. Now it’s your turn.
Turn into a SlideShare
Transform your content into a visual presentation that will engage users in a different way. Some readers are more likely to flip through a SlideShare presentation than read a long blog post. This is how you can get your content in front of them.
Take the main points of your blog and break them out into different slides. Work with your design team to have them put together some awesome backgrounds, add your logo to it and voila!
That’s the simple way to do it. You can definitely make a more robust SlideShare that incorporates more design, additional images, graphs, statistics and points from your blog. Best of all – you can share each individual slide to your social profile. So, you’re getting your content in front of a new audience via SlideShare and then in front of your social audience = win.
Break into Micro-Content
We just touched upon sharing your SlideShare via social media. But, what about re-purposing your blog content as micro-content? It’s a great way to tease your great content across social media and then drive the reader back to your blog to engage with all of your content. You can see how we did it with our Hashtag blog – we incorporated pieces of micro-content into the blog and then shared each one individually on social media that included a link back to the full blog.
You’re getting more return for your time investment with this strategy – because you’re including images into your blog and then promoting your blog with those images. It’s simple and with the help of a designer or a tool such as Canva, you’re on your way to being a content-producing machine.
Create an Infographic
One of the biggest challenges of producing infographics is coming up with an idea! But, when you have a blog filled with content then do you really have a problem? You can do a few things to help you come up with topics:
- Search your analytics and see what blogs are performing the best
- View your social media stats and see what blog got the most interaction
You’ll want to make sure you pick a blog with content that is visually friendly. Conveying information through imagery can help make your infographic perform better. So, a text-heavy blog may not make the most sense. Of the following blogs, which do you think could be the best infographic for us to create?
Option 1: Brainstorming Success
Option 2: Best Times to Post on Social
Option 3: Bid Adjustments for Beginners
Creating an infographic is a great way to cross-promote your blog. You can distribute your infographic and link to your blog and you have some new content to share via social and direct users back to the blog. Your content has really come full-circle.
Schedule Out on Social Platforms
Content should never get published and be left there for users to “find”. You need to ensure that if you’re creating content and getting it out in front of your target audience. We like to follow this scheduling outline and post the same content multiple times across platforms and at different intervals. Since Twitter moves so rapidly, who is to say you can’t post the same blog for two days straight?
As soon as a blog is published, shoot it out across your social media channels, then schedule it across all of the different platforms. Mix up the copy, the images, the dates and times, but get it out there! Of course, every post should be strategic, so this takes a bit of time. But, the rewards your blog will reap are endless.
Email Series
If you have an email marketing campaign in place, then great! You’re already one step ahead of the rest of the team. If you’re not currently adding your blogs to your emails or including links to read your blog, then you should start doing so.
Emails are a great way to get engaged customers to read your content. They already subscribe to what you have to say and now you can get them reading and interacting with more content. If you don’t want to bombard subscribers with blog content in your normal email newsletter, then create a one-off series of emails. For example, take the creating a blog strategy blog – each main point can be its own email for a total of 8 emails. Every week, we could send out one quick email with a snippet from the blog, link back to the blog and include a fun image. There you go, you’re connecting with users and not bothering them with an extremely long post and they’re still getting valuable content.
So, now that you have a few new ideas to help you make the most of your current blog content, what are you going to do? Did I miss any other ways to leverage your content? Share with us in the comments below and stay tuned to find out how we may repurpose this content (the excitement is palpable).