25 Ways to Repurpose Content

We wrote a shorter blog some time ago about the types of content you should post based on what your objective is on social media. This blog goes a bit beyond that.

Every piece of long-form content you create is an investment in time and effort. If it carries value for your audience and is optimized for search, you will reap the rewards of it long after you've created it. Don't have the patience? You can accelerate the process by repurposing your content into other popular formats.

This is a list of such content formats that you can repurpose your original content into to get more mileage out of it 🏎️.

Repurposing Video Content

Long form videos such as interviews, talks, documentaries, and case studies can be great sources of repurposed content. They're full of value, they're highly relevant to your audience and they're aligned to your business. So every new viewer of such content is a potential lead. Here are a bunch of ways you can repurpose them.

Teaser video 👀

Before you actually release the longform video, you can increase the number of views it will get by preparing your audience for it. Sneak peeks of the guest, the controversial one-liners, and the core of the video can make for a good teaser video. Need an inspiration? Check out a few movie trailers. 😉

Short video clips 🥪

After you've posted video and you feel like it's doing well on YouTube, you can crop 30 second bits from it and schedule it on your social media.

💬 Make sure to subtitle it carefully. You can use YouTube's subtitle feature to generate subtitles automatically, and then adjust the timestamps and typos later.

✍️ Add a nice caption to it. Here's a guide to help you write a good caption.

🔗 Link to the original video in the caption or in the first comment.

Gifs 🖼️

You can import your original YouTube video into Giphy's gif maker and then crop a small portion of it to use as a gif. The ways you can use a gif are endless. You can insert them into an email promoting the video or you can attach it to your social media post.

Make sure you link it to the original video and that the gif has subtitles added to it if something is being said in it. You can add visual subtitles in the video itself with Kapwing or any other online video editing app.

Video Transcript 📄

A great way to repurpose your video (and to make it more accessible) is to upload a transcript of it too. Services like Rev, Temi or Google Transcribe auto transcribe any audio input in your file. Microsoft Word also launched a new feature to transcribe your audio files You might need to check for typos to make sure there aren't any glaring errors. But this is an incredibly low effort way to repurpose your video.

If it is a documentary or an educational video which has performed well for you on other channels, the transcript can help you post it as a blog on your website. This can help you increase search traffic coming to your website, and it can help your audience who might want to skim through your content rather than have to sit through a long video.

Voice tweet 🔉

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The voice tweet format is new and hasn't been rolled out over Android yet, but it seems worth trying out. Frankly, we don't know if it is here to stay. But if you can create a voice tweet with your Apple device, try posting a sound bite as a voice tweet. Make sure to add the right caption to it that explains exactly what the sound bite is about, and who is talking. Tag them too!

Podcast 🎙️

For a video that you feel has done well and keeps getting traction on Youtube or wherever you've posted it, you can create a podcast based on it in two ways:

1. You can simply separate the audio from the video using Audacity or convert it to mp3 and then upload it as a podcast through your preferred podcasting platform. This will, of course, make more sense if the video doesn't depend too heavily on the visual elements in it.
2. If your video doesn't make sense without the images or the visual part of it, you can use the topic and the content of the video to create a podcast around the same topic. You'll need to vary the format of the podcast. For eg. You might repurpose the video into an interview like podcast, or a narration that doesn't rely on the visual elements (instead add sound effects to it).

Interview blog 💁

If your video was a long interview with a guest or someone on your team, it can serve well as an interview transcript with supporting text such as an intro and a conclusion of your own. Other than that, you can pretty much post the blog as just a back and forth between the interviewer and the subject.

Feature blog 🐋

In contrast with the interview blog, a feature blog focuses instead on the topic, rather than the person. So the way to repurpose the video would be to write about the topic as it is shown in the video, and then place quotes and analyses from the people interviewed strategically, so it comes across as a journalistic, well-researched post.

Vertical 30 second video cut📱

If you're part of the group whose motto is "PLEASE PUT YOUR PHONE IN LANDSCAPE MODE WHEN MAKING A VIDEO," you might need a rethink. Vertical video is slowly taking every platform by storm. All of Instagram, Tiktok, Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedTn (yup LinkedTn too) have been trying out Stories (30-sec impermanent vertical videos) on their platforms. Vertical video social media ads are also reported to perform better than horizontal video ads.

So it couldn't hurt to extract vertical videos from your main video using a tool like Kapwing to crop it to the right size, and post it on the relevant social media channels to get to a wider audience.

YouTube ad 📢

Video ads get some of the highest conversion rates of digital ads. You've already invested in created this long form video, might as well use snippets and highlights from it in your social media ad if you don't want to spend additional budget creating something from scratch.

You can use tools like Promo to add CTAs, logos, and text over the video very easily, and then use it as an ad to start generating business leads right away.

Doodle video ✏️

If you ever saw videos from RSA Animate on YouTube, you'll see right away how doodle videos make complex concepts simple to understand. Doodly is one of many  (paid) drag and drop video making tools that allow you to make such a video very easily. Grab a sound bite from the original video, create a short doodle video to go with it, and use it on your socials.

Doodle videos have a very particular style. If it goes with your brand, stick with the style. Make a handful of doodle videos to post every month. In fact for repurposing, you can create 4-5 good doodle videos from one-long form video every month.

Post a quote from the Video 🎤

It can be that simple. Pick a simple idea or a quote from the video, put it in a template in Canva, and schedule it on your social media. You can link to the original video in the caption or in the comments too to get more traffic to it.

Repurposing Blogs

Overtime some evergreen blogs might start bringing in regular traffic to your website through organic search, or through backlinks from other websites. It's never a bad idea to repurpose these blogs to tap new channels. Here are a few ideas.

Medium mini blog 📡

Adapting your main blog for Medium means that you shouldn't copy paste the whole blog or the titles from your original blog. That might compete with your own website's blog in Google search. Since Medium has a high domain authority, chances are, it will rank higher for the same keywords than your own website.

Instead, you want to write a shorter blog, written especially for Medium that leads to the original blog without copying any of its content.

Note: Posting on Medium doesn't guarantee the distribution of it. Your blog won't land on Medium's curated pages directly. You're going to have to build some authority on the platform, or share it through your social media.

LinkedIn Pulse mini blog 🦪

Repurposing a long-form blog for LinkedIn Pulse is similar to Medium. You need create an article that is adjacent to the long-form blog you want to link to, or it talks about the same topic on a high level, so people can go to the link to read on.

LinkedIn Pulse is an interesting platform for more than one reason.

1. Since you post the article through your LinkedIn personal profile, and not as a business, it has a bigger impact. People trust other people more readily than businesses. LinkedIn's algorithm recognizes that, so your content is seen by more people in the feed.
2. LinkedIn doesn't treat LinkedIn Pulse articles as an external link, so its algorithm will keep showing it to people if people engage with it.

Audio version of the blog 📻

Here's a very interesting way of repurposing your blog. If your blog is quite long - think about 5000 words - you might lose people in your target audience that don't have the time or the willingness to read through the blog. I don't know if other people do this, but I regularly save or bookmark comprehensive articles that I want to read later, but I can't find the time to do it. But if I could listen to the article while I was walking or doing groceries, I'd get through it pretty easily.

A lot of CMS (content management systems) allow you to insert an audio file into the blog itself. You can simply go to a quiet room, record yourself reading the blog, and then upload the file into the blog itself. Make sure it's right at the top, so it's easily accessible.

Audiobook 📚

Got content that is even longer than 5000 words? An audiobook is a good way to keep people engaged with your content. It also provides audiences with the same value in a way that is more digestible for them. If you want to self-publish it, you can read about the process in detail here. But briefly, this is what you need to do.

Depending on your budget and wordcount, you may or may not want to get a narrator for your book. You will also need to go through the blog and prepare it to be recorded in a way that it makes sense for someone just listening to it. So pictures in the blog won't be seen, and links won't be clicked on. You'll need to say, for eg. "Go to www.willow.co/blog".

Once you've recorded it, you can publish and distribute it with ACX (Audiobook Creation Exchange) to platforms like Audible.

Ebook 📖

Again, for content that is super comprehensive and packs a truckload of value for your audiences, you want to help them get that value, and you want to capture them as a lead if they're that interested in it. That's where an ebook works like a charm.

Combine your blog or series of blogs around a similar topic into one ebook. The paid app Designrr helps you create an ebook just by plugging in a few urls, picking a template, and then hitting publish.

Place your Call-to-Action allowing people to leave their email to download the blog as an ebook, and you have yourself a lead generating machine created from repurposed content.

Blog highlight video 📼

If ease of use is your key metric, Lumen5 is your North star. Plugging the url of your blog into Lumen5 will auto generate a short video from the blog. You can change the videos, template, design, and text to polish it before publishing it to your channels. Eg. here's a video I created from our blog in less than 10 minutes.

Carousel post 🦚

Carousel posts are having their moment on at least 2 platforms: Instagram and LinkedIn. They generally get good engagement, they're visually appealing, they're a great way to fill your social media calendar and get more traffic back to your original blog too.

To repurpose your blog into a carousel, break it down into it's 8-9 main bullet points, and then create a carousel. You do not need to be a designer for that as long as there are apps like Canva that make it really really easy. This short tutorial should teach you exactly how to use Canva to make carousels for Instagram and LinkedIn.

Remember to link back to your original blog in the caption or in the comments, and to save one image in the carousel to create a call-to-action.

Infographic📊

If you can distill the longform blog into one infographic, you're going to ensure that it is shared with a lot more people. Instead of a few bullet points like in a carousel, your infographic needs to make sense as one connected picture.

With your blog in mind, start with browsing through these free infographic templates here in Canva. Choose the one which can convey the idea or the process the best way. Replace the text and pictures, add your logo, and publish it on your social media channels. If it makes sense for your audience, you can also post your infographics on Pinterest with the right tags and link it back to your original blog.

Turn blog into video 🎞️

Businesses like G2 and Ahrefs use this tactic to repost well-performing content for a wider audience. Well structured content, such as listicles (like this one), and how-to's, is easy to make a video out of. Take all the headings in the blog, sit in front of a camera, and telling it to your audience in a short video.

Again, you can use a lightweight app like Kapwing to create the Video title screen and the headings for every pointer you want to include in the video.

You can post these videos on YouTube and on your social media channels with the link to the original blog in the description. YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine after Google, and would open your content up to a broader wider audience.

Bonus: You can also include the video within the original blog itself to improve its SEO score.

Webinar 🎥

Do you think the longform blog is worth its own live discussion? Use a platform like Restream or Zoom to do a webinar with an expert within your own business or an external partner to talk about the topic. Feel free to draw heavily on the longform blog to build a slide deck to use in the webinar.

Ask people to register using a link for the webinar or just broadcast live for everyone on your social media channels. Plug the website and the original blog at the end, and ask people to drop their emails so you can send them a recording of the webinar later. Leads? Generated.

Update older blog🔧

Blogs like "Top Trends in..." will get outdated in a year, but Google will still keep showing it if you keep it updated.

Take this blog for instance. A lot of these ways to repurpose your content might cease to exist in the next few years. Updating it in a year will...

• show Google that this piece of content is still relevant a year from now
• and it will give us the excuse to post it again on our social media channels.

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Use as Guest Post 👓

Backlinks are the best way to increase your domain authority. Your best posts are your currency in the process of getting backlinks. When you've targeted a few other websites to place your link on, and reached out to them to write for them, you'll need to lead with quality content.

At the end of the day, people want other people to visit their website. If your amazing content can do it for them for the cost of a backlink on their website, they won't always say no.

Google Search Ad - Content 🚀

Businesses like Tilio write content that ranks well for keywords, but not just for organic traffic. They run Search Ads that lead back to their longform, highly valuable blog. Here, more than repurposing the article, you're optimizing it to convert visitors into qualified leads.

That entails adding calls-to-action in the text, and around it so visitors can move down the marketing funnel.

Repurposing content is about creativity, or figuring out which type of content is trending on which channels right now. The effort you have to make is to research and create content that actually helps your target audience, and convinces them of the value you bring to them. Got more creative ideas for repurposing content? I'm all ears!

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