Marketers: how can your content help more of your audience more effectively AND perform better on search engines?
The answer: repurpose blog posts (specifically your super-SEO-friendly ‘how-to’ ones) into searchable tutorial videos.
In this episode, I share the three reasons why so many businesses and thought leaders create instructional content such as ‘how-to’ blog posts and tutorial videos, and guide you through the step-by-step process to repurpose your ‘how-to’ blog posts into helpful video guides.
I also share the tools you will need, and the tools you won’t. Some of these might surprise you!
You could say this is a how-to post all about how-to content! How very meta!
Hit play to listen to the podcast episode…
Or keep reading to find out how to grow your email list…
3 reasons to repurpose blog posts into tutorial videos
I’m sure you already create ‘how-to’ content in some way, shape or form. After all, it:
- Establishes your brand as an authority on that topic
- Helps your audience (building trust, increasing your likeability and genuinely showing them how to do something or solve a problem)
- Is fantastic for SEO
But why should you repurpose blog posts of the ‘how-to’ variety into videos specifically?
First and foremost, think about how your audience learns.
The key aim of your ‘how-to’ content is to be helpful, right? So you need to help you audience in a way that actually helps them.
People have different learning needs and preferences. Some of your audience may learn just fine through text-only blog posts. But some may prefer being shown a process or listening to it. This is where video content comes in.
According to Social Media Today, searches starting with the term ‘how-to’ increase on YouTube 70% year-on-year. As the world’s second largest search engine and first largest provider of video content, that’s a huge audience demand for instructional content in video form.
Repurposing blog posts into tutorial videos isn’t just about helping your audience get value from the content, it’s also about helping them find it.
If your audience prefers to search for their ‘how-to’ content on YouTube, and not on Google, you’re going to miss out capturing that traffic.
But if your audience does search for ‘how-to’ content on Google, then you’re in luck. As Google owns YouTube, it returns video results in the search results pages.
This could mean two potential opportunities to get your brand in front of those people who are searching for help with the exact thing your business can help them with (aka, very likely your ideal audience!).
What you need to repurpose blog posts into tutorial videos
If you’re thinking, “I don’t have the time or resources to repurpose blog posts into tutorial videos”, let me give you a quick idea of what you will need and what you won’t…
You will need:
- A how-to blog post (to repurpose...of course!)
- An external mic, if you’re planning to record the video in-house
- Video editing software or help from a video editor
You won’t need:
- A camera (lots of great instructional videos use alternatives like screen recording or stock footage with voiceover)
- A full script
- To do all the editing/additional content/promotion in-house, if you don’t want to. Outsourcing all of that to a content repurposing agency like us, is always an option.
I always say create content with repurposing in mind. So if you’ve not got that how-to blog post written yet, think about how you could write it to maximize its repurpose-ability – especially into tutorial videos.
But in this case, I’m assuming you already have the blog post and are raring to repurpose it.
So let’s dive into the process.
How to repurpose blog posts into tutorial videos
1. Decide how you want your tutorial video to look
As I previously mentioned, you don’t have to use a camera to create a great tutorial video. You could use screen-recording or stock footage and pair it with a voiceover. Or you could use a combination!
If you want to record your video in a talking-head style, you’ll need to use an external mic to record the audio (and potentially any voiceover) and a suitable camera (such as a DSLR or your smartphone camera) to record the visuals.
If you’re using screen-recorded footage, a tool like Camtasia is great for capturing and editing all the footage. For b-roll or stock footage, check out iStock, Pexels, and Shutterstock.
Consider what medium is going to communicate the process to your audience best. What video style is going to help them get the most from the content? You could storyboard it out to get a feel for what visuals will work best where.
Which brings me onto the next step…
2. Repurpose the blog post into a storyboard or script
Just like you don’t have to use a camera to record a useful tutorial video, you also don’t have to record the audio in-house. You could repurpose your how-to blog post into a script, and give that to a voiceover artist to record for you.
For your tutorial video’s script, I recommend keeping it to the point. Shorter videos typically perform better and you can always add a call to action to check out the original blog post for more information.
Remember that we speak differently to how we write, so for advice on writing a more naturally-spoken script, check out this post, How to Repurpose a Blog Post into a Podcast Episode.
If you’re recording the video in-house, then I highly recommend getting the speaker to become familiar with the blog post and using a storyboard, rather than a full script. This will result in a much less wooden and natural recording.
TIP: Always use an external mic for recording audio. Built-in mics just don’t cut it!
3. Edit your audio and video recording
Options here include, upskilling yourself and investing in video editing software or passing the content along to a video editor (in-house or external).
Depending on what your audience expect from your brand, you might want to add transitions, music, closing slides, effects, and so on. But don’t add these in just because you can.
Repurposing is about making format- and platform-specific changes, but it’s also about increasing value. So ask yourself if the video does its job, answers your audience’s question and helps them as much as possible.
That’s the content that will win (and keep) your potential clients’ attention.
4. Prepare your accompanying content
You’ll definitely want to embed your new tutorial video within the existing blog post on your website, but you’ll likely want to upload it to YouTube too.
To do this, you’ll need to prepare a video title, description and eye-catching thumbnail graphic too. These all help people find your content and entice them to watch your video.
For the thumbnail, you can use a tool like Canva or get a graphic designer to help you out.
The title and description should be keyword-rich to improve SEO, and cover what the audience can expect to find out in the video, so they can discern if this tutorial video is right for them. I suggest linking back to your original post in the description too!
5. Repurpose your tutorial video into helpful/promotional content
The final step of any repurposing project…repurpose your new content!
Video content is the best type of content for repurposing. So consider how you could repurpose your video into bite-size teasers or snackable tips for sharing on social media platforms, and get the word out there about your brand new video!
So, those are the 5 steps to repurpose blog posts into SEO-boosting, audience-helping tutorial videos.
I hope you’ve found this ‘how-to’ post very helpful – maybe we’ll take a leaf out of our own book and repurpose it into a tutorial video ourselves!
Let me know if you’re going to give this a try, and if you have any questions about repurposing or working with a team to get your content repurposed, then get in touch with me on social media – I’m @content10x on all platforms.
Marketers, remember that you don’t have to go on this repurposing journey alone! To learn more about how the world’s premier specialist content repurposing agency works with businesses to create, repurpose, and distribute on-brand, message-led content, then check out our services and our case studies.