As someone who spends a majority of my work week blogging, I feel I have some authority when I say blogging isn’t always easy.
Once you decide to blog you need to first come up with a relevant, timely, useful or at least interesting topic (which sometimes is easier said than done). Then, you actually have to take the time to write it out, which can take some time even for an experienced and comfortable writer. And, if you’re like me, you also like to take the time to plan it out on paper with some chicken scratch notes, which can add to your work time.
With all that time and effort, it’s a bummer when your blogs go unnoticed. Sure, you share them over social media, but news feeds are dog-eat-dog and tough to have content noticed en mass (unless you are willing to put a little bit of cash behind a post).
And while it’s true that great quality blog posts will draw steady traffic from Google searches, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to get a little extra mileage out of your content that you worked so hard to create?
Fortunately, with a little creative thinking, there are ways that you can not only reuse blog posts, but repurpose them into great additional content.
Write a roundup
What’s a roundup? It’s something cowboys do to cattle.
More relevant to your content marketing, however, a roundup is a collection of previously written blog posts all related to a particular topic that are compiled into one. Write an introduction and then link to each individual article throughout.
Roundups are the best. They can help you reintroduce old and forgotten blog posts with good content back into your blog roll. On top of that, it also gives you a little break on your blogging day if the creative juices aren’t quite flowing. The blog posts have been written, you just have to tie them together. All the heavy lifting and hard work has been done for you!
As for what a roundup looks like – that’s for you to decide. But, if you need a little inspiration, here’s an example for you.
Turn it into a podcast
Have you dipped your toe in the podcasting waters yet? Podcasting is all the rage right now and it provides a unique outlet for you to reach potential customers and clients. Podcasting also helps position you as an expert in your industry, or at the very least someone who knows what in the hell they are talking about.
Don’t know what to talk about in your podcast? Your blog posts make great topics!
The blog can serve as the structure or outline of your conversation and provide you with talking points for you and whoever else joins you. Once it’s recorded, edited and published, you can also provide a link to the original blog post. Alternatively, you can also go back and embed the podcast in the blog.
Create a whitepaper
A whitepaper is meant to be a resource for potential customers to download to get additional information on a subject. Typically, whitepapers are put behind an email wall, meaning that if someone is interested in the material, they can get it in exchange for their email address.
A whitepaper is a win/win for both sides. They get a free resource. You get a new email address to add to your newsletter mailing list or to follow up on personally.
Whitepapers are very similar to a roundup, but are presented in a very different way. You can still build them up by using the information from previously written blog posts. However, instead of laying it out like a blog post, put the content in a Word doc and lay it out into different sections like a work book.
The content you’ve previously written serves as the back bone, and you can always add to it as time goes on.