Do you have lots of content that you’ve created in the past that you would like to bring to life again?
Perhaps you’ve got hundreds of blog posts, many are still just as relevant today as the day you wrote them.
Or maybe you’ve just given yourself a pat on the back for recording your 100th…1000th…10,000th podcast episode…but you feel that your episodes could really do with reaching so many more people.
If any of this sounds familiar, then this week’s podcast episode is a great one for you. I talk about the process of choosing content that you have already created so that you can repurpose it. So that you can bring it to life again and not let it languish in your content archives!
Your content will thank you for it (remember podcast episode 2, when I received an open letter from a sad piece of content!).
How do you decide what content to repurpose?
Here are some simple steps that I’d recommend:
Identify your most popular content by looking at your analytics
Find your most popular content – the content that your audience has really responded to. Clearly you struck a nerve with people or managed to really connect with them with that particular post/video/podcast because it was SO popular. This is the kind of content that you should consider repurposing, so that that it can reach more people.
How do you know if the content was popular?
Firstly, you can look at your website analytics, presuming your content is on your website. Most of us use Google Analytics, but I know there are other tools/apps that can be used as well. If you don’t use any analytics tools at all I really recommend that you do – Google Analytics is completely free.
From your analytics you can find the content on your site that had the most hits and people stayed around long enough to consume it. This popular content would be good to repurpose.
Secondly, look at your social media analytics. You can get really good insight into the content that your audience loves the most by looking at your social media analytics. For example, if you have a Facebook Page, you can look at Facebook Insights and you’ll see all sorts of information about your most popular posts etc.
If you have a podcast then of course don’t forget to look at the analytics provided by your podcast host so that you can spot your most popular episodes.
Discover what your audience want to learn about
Are there particular topics that your audience clearly love to learn about/talk about? Do you have existing content already covering those topics that you could repurpose?
You can find out by the art of good old fashioned speaking to people! If you have a business where you interact with your clients and your target audience regularly, have a think about what they are asking you about the most. Do you keep getting asked the same questions? Have you written content, filmed a video or recorded a podcast that answers the questions people keep wanting answers to?
Ask your audience what they’d like to hear more from you? Again, in person, or on social media – do a poll – Facebook and Instagram are good for running polls. Or, email your email subscribers and ask them. You could even create a survey and ask your social media followers/subscribers if they would mind filling it in.
You will be able to find a whole list of topics that people want to hear more about. Then, look through your content and identify where you have already created content on those topics. This is the kind of content that you want to add to your ‘must repurpose’ list!
Is your content timeless or does it need refreshing?
When you have identified some of your most popular content. The next question that you want to ask yourself is – is the content timeless?
Is it still as relevant today as the day I wrote it? Or, does it need a really good refresh? Or, was it totally related to a point in time and not really repurposable (e.g. that 5,000 word blog post on your predictions for the US elections!).
On the other hand, your post on ‘The 3 Reasons Why You Should Drink Wine’ – that’s likely to be timeless.
It may be that you just need to tweak some popular content to bring it to relevancy again.
Is it really high quality
Now now, I’m not suggesting that anyone reading this would ever create terrible content!!
However, I think we all know that some of our content is good, some very good, and some is INSANELY brilliant and you should actually be awarded some sort of prize for its brilliance…is there a Nobel Prize for online content?!
I always think it’s a good idea to try and repurpose your popular, timeless, cornerstone content. If it’s one of your epic pieces of content it’s likely full of repurposing gold.
Can your content break down into stand alone points/thoughts?
This is something that can make content repurpose like a dream.
Some types of content are structured in such a way that they consist of stand-alone thoughts or points.
For example, one blog post could form 5 mini blog posts. Or one twenty-minute video could become ten 2 minute videos.
Some really good content for repurposing comes from list-type content, e.g. 10 ways to do this, 5 reasons why…etc. They make really good infographics, great SlideShare presentations, impactful videos, a really good suite of social media images, and so on.
Handy checklist!
If you’d like a checklist that summarizes everything that I’ve just covered (and more…) then please get yourself a copy of ‘Repurposable Content: The Ultimate Checklist’ by filling out the form below.
The checklist comprises of two parts. The first part helps you to plan and create content for repurposing. The second part is a checklist on what I’ve covered in this post – how to select content from your archive for repurposing.