How much content do you have sitting on your computer or out there in the blogosphere? If you’ve been writing for any length of time, you probably have several folders of content on your computer building up. Maybe you’ve spent some money on some PLR articles or you have some of your own that you’re particularly proud of. Either way, it’s a real shame to let it gather dust and hide in the digital dark.
Why You Need to Repurpose Content
Don’t limit the number of people who see your content by keeping it in one form or place. Stretch it to its maximum length and use it over and over again in different ways. People want to hear what you have to say, and your message will be heard best if you expand on it and approach it from different angles.
If you’re worried about reusing your content, think of it this way. You are actually being selfish by keeping your ideas in one place. Why would you only deliver your great writing to one group of people? When your content is just sitting in one place, like a blog, its audience is restricted to the visitors of that site.
Repurpose for Extra Mileage
One of the easiest ways to freshen up your content for a new audience is to repurpose your articles into different formats. Just by changing the perspective of your content, it will appeal to a whole new market that you may have left untapped. Not sure how to change the article perspective? Standard article templates and title swipe files can make this exceptionally easy.
Take a title like “How to Write an Affiliate Product Review” as an example.
Now take 5 different article templates and rewrite the article to fit each. Here are five examples of what that article could look like:
1. Avoid These 3 Mistakes When Writing Affiliate Product Reviews
List the top 3 mistakes by taking some of the “how-to’s” from your article and turning them around. Then provide the solutions. This type of article is sure to appeal to people who are already writing product reviews or need to improve.
2. Top 10 Tips for Writing Affiliate Product Reviews
Create a list of 10 tips from the article. Write a sentence or two about each. Then add a brief call to action at the end. Everyone loves the “top ten” template, regardless of what you’re talking about!
3. Write Your Affiliate Product Review in 15 Minutes or Less
Organize your “how to’s” into very short steps. Make sure your explanations are brief and you cut out any steps that really aren’t essential. Don’t make the post take longer to read than the amount of time you’re promising in your title. Who doesn’t like an article that promises to save them time?
4. A Newbie’s Guide to Writing Affiliate Product Reviews
Another form of “how-to”, a newbie’s guide should break down everything into the most basic steps. If you had more complicated terminology or techniques in your original article, explain them or write alternatives here. You could even divide it up between newbie tactics and advanced tactics and come up with two different articles that will appeal to both audiences.
5. Writing Affiliate Product Reviews – 3 Easy Shortcuts
Pull out the 3 most important steps from your “how-to” and suggest tips or tools that will make them faster to do. Just as with time-saving, people want an easier and faster way to get their work done.
You get the picture?
The same article can be written dozens of different ways to give it new life and purpose. You might need to add more information or take some out. Use different examples and most definitely reorganize it. But there’s nothing wrong with that. While one version of your content may appeal to one type of person, another version will attract an entirely different group of readers. What an easy way to expand your market!
Of course, this is just the beginning. Start combining a variety of articles on related topics and your options increase exponentially.
Try it out. Take one of your articles, whether it’s PLR or something you wrote yourself. Then pick one of these title templates and rewrite your article to fit the template. Now you have another piece of content to use on your website, blog or anywhere else. Have fun with it!
Hi Sharyn,
Thank you very much for sharing these tips about writing content for blogs. You have explained it very well . Another very handy way to use content again is to turn an article into a video or slide share. Take care Rosemary
Hi Rosemary,
You are absolutely right! While I only talked about repurposing articles, you can transform them into different media formats too. You could also combine a few into a pdf and share them on places like Scribd, or give them away as free reports to build your list.
All the best,
Sharyn
Excellent ideas, Sharyn, on how to repurpose the heck out of your content. We only have so much time to spend online building our businesses, it’s a good idea to work smarter, not harder. 🙂
Peggy
Repurposing is a good way to make content go farther. That is something I should be doing more of. Thanks for the tips.
Hi Melodie,
Glad you like the tips. I know I need to do more repurposing myself. Sometimes you just forget about great content that you’ve published before. Time to go back through the archives or even things you’ve written offline. Hope you get to use some of these ideas!
Thanks,
Sharyn
Hi Peggy,
Ah, the famous refrain – “work smarter, not harder”. And it’s got nothing to do with what grades you got in school!;) Still, I wish there were more hours in the day to work on building our businesses. In the meantime, definitely go for the repurpose and reuse philosophy.
Sharyn
What I did before with a client is I made some slideshows and spread it over to youtube and other video sharing sites. It really works well and our client was happy with the outcome.
Hi Herbert,
It’s definitely a great idea to do slideshows. You could even do it for each version of your repurposed article. That would be a ton of content! Then you could create pdfs also and spread them on pdf sharing sites like Scribd.
Keep those ideas coming!
Best,
Sharyn
I’ve been working on repurposing more of my content and while I rarely write reviews your tips are very helpful overall. Thanks!
Hi Marquita,
You don’t have to be writing reviews to use these types of templates and repurpose your articles. For example, with your latest article on better decision, you could write several new ones that build off of it – The 3 Keys to Making Better Decisions, How to Start Making Better Decisions Today, 10 Tips for Making Better Decisions, etc. You could even pull out each bullet point and write a separate article on each.
Go for it!
Best,
Sharyn
Hi Marquita,
You don’t have to be writing reviews to use these types of templates and repurpose your articles. For example, with your latest article on better decision, you could write several new ones that build off of it. How about a 10 Tips for Making Better Decisions. You could even pull out each bullet point and write a separate article on each.
Go for it!
Best,
Sharyn
Hi Sharyn, really useful article – thanks. I can see at least three things that I can apply to my current content to get more mileage from them 🙂
Glad you liked them. Hope you get to put them to use – and reuse! 😉
– Sharyn
P.S. – Love your tips about embedding tweets in a blog post!
Hi Sharyn,
your article has helped to expand my mind in regards to writing posts, as well as ‘re-writing them.
You made a great point about why to repurpose the posts.
After all once a post has left the front page of the blog, the likelihood of it being ‘found’ again are very slim.
Thank you so much for you helpful post!
Hi Yorinda,
So glad you liked the post! I think people often feel like they’re cheating when they reuse content, but they forget that there’s a huge market out there that hasn’t seen it and can benefit from all your wisdom.
By the way, the link to your own website didn’t work for me. You should check out what the problem is.
Best,
Sharyn
Thanks, Sharon, for letting me know about the link!
when I click on the commentluv link and the link with my name it does work (???)
It’s working today! Maybe it was just my computer. You never know.
Excellent points! It is something I have actually been doing for a while. By taking some articles on my primary website and re position them on other second tier sites that I own. It’s been successful!
Hi Stevie,
Isn’t it great to know you can get so much out of your efforts? That’s one of the reasons it pays to write something high quality from the get go!
– Sharyn
There are other ways to generate content. Let’s say you heard a podcast and wrote a transcript and a review.. can you imagine the word-length of a podcast and the SEO-value it would have? Technically, if it doesn’t appear anywhere as text, then it’s original content. By the way, I’ve actually written a review for a site that I use to save money and stuff and I’ve been using approximately the same methods that you list in this article.