When you put so much effort into producing content, it can feel weird to think all of your effort may not pay off if a post doesn’t seem to garner much attention. Of course, we can never control how a piece of content is received, but we can control what we learn from its reception, be it a viral hit or a quiet flop.
Repurposing content can give those pieces you wrote, recorded, and designed a new lease of life, and a second chance to make an impression. But how do we do this without simply reposting it and risking it stagnating a second time?
What is meant by repurposing content?
When we talk about repurposing content, we mean taking an existing piece of content and transforming it into something new.
It should be noted that we’re talking about repurposing your content, not taking somebody else’s!
Repurposing your old content might mean taking a video and turning it into an article or blog post, edited to make it more up-to-date or to make it more informative. It might be that you don’t necessarily transform the format of the content, and simply work it into something new that provides a fresh experience for your site visitors.
Why should you repurpose content?
Generating fresh content ideas on an ongoing basis can be exhausting, and seeking to generate new ones all the time can lead to your marketing largely becoming a content mill—generating stuff as a matter of quantity and regularity, rather than quality.
Revisiting older content can not only provide a much-needed break to let your creative batteries recharge, it can also stop you from essentially repeating yourself. After all, why write a whole new article about the best ways to renovate a home or where to compare car insurance if you’ve already nailed the basics a year or two ago?
Furthermore, content that you made previously has had longer to rank on SERPs, and repurposing it allows you to take advantage of its established place in the results while boosting or improving the qualities that will see it climb higher.
Regularly repurposing content is, in a way, the basis of evergreen content. While updating your evergreen content isn’t necessarily ‘repurposing’ it in the same way, revisiting it on a yearly (or more frequent) basis grants you opportunities to alter the format or add to it with extra forms of content, such as video explainers to aid more complex subjects.
By reworking older content, you give it a fresh chance to reach your audience and grant yourself the opportunity to enhance it.