How to Create and Repurpose a Season of Content: 6 Top Tips

You’ve created and published a brilliant season of content – now what?

On the surface, repurposing a content season and repurposing a piece of content that’s part of an ongoing show follows the same process. But once you’ve hit publish and stopped recording new episodes, how do you maximize your content’s performance in-between seasons?

In this podcast episode and blog post, I share my six-step process to help your content season keep generating results, even when you’re not creating new episodes.

Each step is a top piece of repurposing advice that you can apply to almost any form of pre-existing content – so even if you don’t create content in seasons, tune in to find out how to do more with the content you’ve already got.

Press play to listen to the episode…

…or keep reading for more.

What is a content season?

Before I dive into the nuances of repurposing a season of content, I want to share a little bit about the pros and cons to creating content in a season and creating it on an ongoing basis.

I see a content season as a limited run of episodes, videos, articles, etc. This might be a collection of 10 podcast episodes, for example, all released in one go Netflix-style, or periodically over time, such as one-per week over 10 weeks.

Meanwhile I see ongoing content as content with no defined breaks, like The Content 10x Podcast. I publish one episode every week as part of a long-running series that I’ll keep producing until I run out of things to say about repurposing (who knows, maybe that day will come!).

Why create a season of content vs. ongoing content?

There are definitely pros and cons to both. Creating content in seasons is often better for those creators who are time-poor or don’t have the capacity to create content all year round. Or sometimes creators go for a season because they want to try a new content format or concept with their audience, e.g., trialing a podcast season without committing.

Also, another reason for a content season may be that the creator doesn’t think that they will be able to create enough quality content about their chosen topic for anything more than a defined amount of time.

All perfectly good reasons to go the season route.

But publishing content in seasons can mean that you may struggle to realize the benefits of content marketing as quickly as those who produce more regular, ongoing content.

That being said, plenty of businesses take a seasonal approach. It’s a brilliant way to still get your messages out there and connect with your audience – and is better than not creating content at all!

Here are just some examples from two clients of ours:

- Linode, Cloud computing

We help Linode transform customer success stories into podcast episodes to share as a collective – and repurpose them into social media content too.

- Molecula, operation AI

Molecula creates Leading With Data, an interview-style podcast featuring conversations with renowned business trailblazers, in seasons. We help repurpose the content so Molecula can drop launch all episodes at once, ready for their audience to binge!

We’ve also created content as part of a season before! Our It Started with Content episodes were part of a limited series that we ran within the weekly Content 10x podcast. So a little bit different to a completely stand-alone season, but the repurposing strategy I’ll get into next still applies.

6 steps to repurposing your content season

One of the downsides to creating content in seasons is that you run the risk of losing traction – how do you retain your audience in-between seasons? How do you keep your audience if it was a one-off season?

Publishing a piece of pillar content each week, repurposing it, and getting as much content out there as you can compounds your growth. But when you can’t do this, what’s the solution?

If you want to create content in seasons, the best way to make sure that you’re still going to get some traction and attract audiences even when you’re not creating is to repurpose. However, repurposing a season, or any collection of existing content, requires a slightly different approach to repurposing weekly content.

Here are my six top tips for repurposing content seasons. You can treat each tip as a great piece of repurposing advice, or put them all together to create a six-step plan that will help you keep generating results long after you’ve hit publish.

1. Create your content with repurposing in mind (if you can)

If you’re reading this after creating your content, this piece of advice might be a little late, but if you’re yet to plan your content, do bear this in mind.

There are two ways to create content that’s ready for repurposing. The first is to make sure it’s evergreen.

Whether this is possible is totally dependent on your topic, but evergreen content will live on for so much longer and hold its value far better than topical content. So if you can make it evergreen, do.

The second is to segment your content. This makes your content so much easier and faster to repurpose. For more on how to segment your content effectively, check out this blog post: How to Segment Your Content for Ultimate Repurposing (with Lessons From TV Talk Shows).

2. Publish your season in an easy-to-access location

Collecting your season’s episodes into one space is going to save you a lot of time and energy, and is paramount to securing more eyeballs on every episode.

Think about it, if people have to hunt for the next piece of content, they’ll switch off. By collecting it into a blog post, a YouTube playlist, an Instagram guide, etc. etc., audiences can easily see the next episode and are primed to binge!

Whatever format your content season is in, I strongly recommend putting together a blog post or page on your website with all of the episodes linked to it. It’s a brilliant way to boost your website’s SEO, and is easy for you to link back to from social media. Let’s not rely solely on other platforms – this ensures the content is on your own platform too. 

3. Repurpose your content

Of course, there’s a repurposing stage! This is where you maximize your long-form content by repurposing it into different formats for different platforms.

So if you have a video series, think about whether that could become a podcast series too. Create a blog post to accompany each episode and don’t forget about creating a wide range of social media content too. Videos, graphics, audiograms, and text posts are just some of the content you can create. Then there’s infographics and other visual content. It’s never one content format vs. another – it can be all of them!

I recommend creating as many posts for social media as you can while the episodes are still fresh in your mind. You want to squeeze out every last drop and pack out a content library full of assets. Trust me, this will help you out A LOT later on!

A season of content can feel like a real handful, even at the best of times, so my top tip is to create a checklist of content and work through it methodically for each episode. This way, you won’t miss anything and be able to take stock of exactly what content you have for each episode.

4. Use a content calendar to keep track of your posts

A content calendar is a must-have for any business creating and sharing content, including those who create in seasons. If you don’t have one, now’s a great time to put one together so you can keep track of what episodes you’re promoting and when.

As you distribute your social media content about your content season, consider how you want to promote the season. Do you want to promote all the episodes at once? One episode per week? Or mix it up? It’s completely dependent on how you’re launching your season and what you’d prefer.

You could experiment and see what works best, which I advise doing, especially if this is your first ever content season. This leads me nicely into point 5…

5. Monitor your season’s performance

Data is so important to your content strategy, so keep an eye on the performance of your repurposed social media content and how it’s affecting your content season. If one post drives lots of traffic to the season, make sure to share it again in future.

This is where your content treasure trove comes in really handy. You can find out more about what that is and how to create one in this post, Content Library: How to Create a Content Treasure Trove for Unlimited Repurposing.

If you’re faced with a big gap between seasons, say 6 months or so, you might want to do an entirely new promotion of the season all over again. Your audience may well have grown in that time and people who missed it the first time round may now be ready to tune in. So don’t be afraid to re-promote.

6. Share, share, share

This tip is specific to those who have guests on their shows – share your content with them.

Whether you’ve invited someone to join you on your podcast or video show, or even guest-post on your blog, sharing your repurposed content with them is a fantastic way to show how much you appreciate their input and (hopefully) get that content in front of their audience too.

It’s best practice to ask them nicely if they’ll share the content on their own platforms but if they choose not to, don’t be disheartened. You shouldn’t bank on guests sharing your content – it’s a “nice to have” not a “need to have”.

Tagging guests can also help your content reach their audience, but do be careful not to over-tag and annoy them!

Remember that your guest’s audience will have grown since you launched your season, so when it’s time to re-share the content, do approach them again and ask if they’re also happy to re-share it.

And that’s it! My six steps and top recommendations for repurposing content seasons to maximize your results.

I hope this post has given you some inspiration for how to repurpose your existing content, whether it’s a season or not, and can act as a helpful reminder of how to get the most out of your fantastic content!

Want to get more from your content seasons but don’t have the time to repurpose? We’re the trusted content repurposing partner for Molecula, Linode, and more businesses who create content in seasons. We specialize in turning your content seasons into shareable assets that can be used time and time again. Discover what we could do for your content and your business here.