Great content is great. It’s also really hard to produce and who has time for that, anyway? You can take a page from Oprah’s book and multiply the value of your content creation efforts by spreading their impact, or repurposing.
Let’s say you have an article “7 Ways to Improve Content Effectiveness”. You’ve posted it on your blog.
What next?
Social Media
You’ll want to share on social media, of course. In addition to posting to Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook, you can:
- Tag key influencers on each platform who care about this content. Don’t just tag them, unless you know them well. Ask a question. Ask if they agree with your central premise. Ask how it applies to their particular niche. Start a conversation. Or an argument (just don’t be a jerk).
- Set an automated schedule to repost your content with a tool like Edgar. Note that you’ll want different cadences for different platforms. On Twitter, you can repost much more often than Facebook and LinkedIn. You can also use a different introduction to the same content.
- Use your content in LinkedIn Groups, Quora, and other discussion forums where it will be useful and contribute to the conversation. If you just spam up discussions, not only will you risk getting banned, people will start to ignore you when you do post relevant, helpful content. You can use snippets of your content that are most relevant, and then link back to your content for people who want more details.
Repurposing Content in Different Places
This is where you can really increase the value of your content.
Re-use the content in different places, in different ways.
- Create a presentation out of the content, and post it on SlideShare.
- Read the content aloud and post the video to YouTube. You can even just read an introduction. YouTube is a great place to help your Google rankings (and YouTube is the second largest search engine by itself, after parent company Google).
- Create a content upgrade, which could be as simple as an online version of the article with PDF export, that people can grab in exchange for their email address at the bottom of the blog post. This is essential to increase not just views, but conversion.
- Turn your content into a live webinar. You can base the content on your article, your Slide Share, your video, or some other way of looking at the issue. This can be especially helpful if you have a demo or screenshots that you want to share. (You can also record the webinar, and use that as the basis for your YouTube video.)
- If you use a service like Webinar Ninja, you can offer pre-recorded webinars, as well.
- You can republish on Medium, or use parts of the content as a guest post on someone else’s site. You don’t want to simply re-use the content (Google does not approve), but you can make some adjustments, or publish as a Q&A with the person who owns the other site.
- You also want to make sure Google recognizes your content as the “canonical” version, which means using some tricks when republishing on Medium.
- Publish an excerpt of your content with a link in your email newsletter.
With these tips, you only have to do the really hard part of creating great content once, to reuse it across multiple platforms and keep the content alive on social media.
And you can start with content in the format you find most natural— for some people it will be a blog post, for others a presentation, for others a video— and port it to the others.
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