7 Ways to Repurpose Old Content to Drive New Traffic, Leads and Conversions

Are you struggling to build your audience’s reach and drive new visitors to your website? You’re not alone. In fact, generating traffic and leads has been proven to be the biggest marketing challenge for professional marketers:

Figure 1: Top marketing challenges (source)

…but you can solve this dilemma (along with "securing enough budget" and "proving the ROI of marketing activities") by incorporating one thing into your strategy: repurposed content.

Content marketing takes time. It’s rare to create a piece of content which generates thousands of social shares overnight, and it might take years to finally see the rewards of your SEO activity. We’re always looking for ways to save time and boost the ROI of our marketing, right?

That’s where repurposed content helps. Instead of crafting a unique piece of content from scratch, you’re able to take one piece of excellent content and repurpose it for different formats.

That’s right: a simple blog post (and a nifty repurposing strategy) could be the fuel you’ll need to supercharge the results you gain from a piece of content.

In this article, I’m sharing the benefits of repurposing old content, along with the seven ways you can get started.

Why Repurpose Old Content?

Repurposed content is a phenomenon that’s set to change the way we do content marketing. Almost 60% of marketers reuse their content two to five times:

Figure 2: Content marketing tactics (source)

…but what results should you expect to see when repurposing old content?

It Builds Your Reach

To start with, let’s think about your business goals. Are you looking to drive sales or improve your site’s conversion rate? Whichever goal you’re working toward, you’ll need to build your reach. We do need people to meet these goals, after all.

That’s where repurposed content shines.

While people in your target audience share many similarities (such as the topic you’re discussing), they probably don’t have the same learning styles.

Granted, over half of people are visual learners – but repurposed content could help you perfectly target the 30% of auditory learners you could be otherwise missing out on, hence the increase in your reach.

Plus, repurposed content can help to expose your content to people who may not have seen it before, despite being part of your community. Think about it: it’s unlikely that a blog post you wrote back in 2015 will reach the same Facebook audience if republished again today, right?

Ben from Goins Writer generated 20,000 subscribers by repurposing his blog content on Medium. Since members of this platform weren’t previously exposed to the original piece of content, it helped drive new traffic (and convert them, too!).

It Saves Time

Did you know that 22% of bloggers and marketers can’t find the time to consistently create content?

**Figure 3:**Marketing challenges (source)

Another benefit of repurposing old content is that you don’t have to invest time into creating new, unique resources. Instead of spending six hours crafting a new blog post, you can half that time and spend just three hours repurposing an old one to still get the same results.

You’re saving time because you’re not starting from scratch.

…And in the fast-paced marketing world, this valuable time can be spent on other areas of business development.

It Helps with SEO

Another benefit of repurposing content is the SEO value you’ll build on your website. Since Google prefers websites that are trustworthy, you can ace the SERPs by creating high-quality, informative pages that have buzz elsewhere on the internet.

Pages that rank highly in Google have high engagement rates on social media. So, by taking an old piece of blog content and repurposing it for each social channel, it’ll help the original piece of content rank higher for your long-tail keyword.

It’s not just social shares that could supercharge your SEO activity, though. Repurposing content makes your content visible; remember how we discussed how it can help to build reach? These people could be looking for interesting images and content to reference in their own marketing material, giving you a great chance to earn juicy backlinks to your website. And we all know how important backlinks are for SEO.

10X Content: A Solid Basis to Repurpose From

You’re ready to spin the wheels on your new repurposed content strategy, but where do you start? Before we do anything, we’ll need a solid base to work from.

That’s where 10x content comes into play.

The concept of 10x content is simple: your original piece needs to be 10 times better than your competition. (You can find this by Googling the long-tail keyword you want to rank for. Pages ranking on page one are the ones you’ll need to beat.)

You can turn your original content into 10x content by adding:

• Infographics and visual data

• More data points

• Extra detail into sub-sections

• Your own (unique) opinion

But why is 10x content crucial for repurposing? Well, to have any chance of success and drive those conversions you’re working so hard to achieve, your original content needs to be more comprehensive than the other results.

Plus, because 10x content is long-form, there’s enough content to repurpose on other channels.

7 Easy Ways to Repurpose 10X Content and Drive Results

Once you’ve built a solid piece of 10x content to work from, you can drive leads, conversions and site traffic through repurposing.

Here’s how:

1. Write Smaller Articles Using Snippets from Your 10X Content

If you’ve created an ultimate guide to something, why not repurpose each section and create a smaller article on this point? Similar to the hub and spoke framework, you can improve your internal linking structure and drive traffic to the original piece by repurposing snippets.
Think about the most readable content types. How-to articles and listicles (made famous by Buzzfeed) are extremely popular, no matter the industry you’re writing about.

For example:

• 29 Clever Kitchen Cleaning Tips Every Clean Freak Needs to Know

• 8 Ways Your Mechanic is Ripping You Off

• …and this article you’re reading!

So, check back on your 10x content and see if you can bulk out each point into a longer explanation with much more information. You can then re-write and repurpose this 10x content into new, shorter blog posts – giving you much more content to share on social media, and reach a new pool of people.

2. Repurpose into an Infographic

Infographics are liked and shared 3x more than any other type of content. Why not take the facts, data and information you’ve shared in your 10x content and transform it into one?

As proof that this tactic can work in any industry, let’s take a look at this example from Animal Friends. As a pet insurance company, they analyzed data on the most popular pet names in Britain. But, instead of leaving their data at a single blog post, they repurposed their data into a cool infographic:

Figure 4: Data portrayed in infographic (source)

If you’re looking to use this approach to repurpose your content, don’t worry about sourcing budget for a professional designer. You can use Canva, select an infographic template, add your branding and list the facts shared in your piece of original 10x content.

3. Write a Guest Post

Guest blogging is a fantastic way to grow your site’s traffic and leverage someone else’s audience to build your own.

Bamidele Onibalusi used guest blogging to grow his site’s search traffic by 342% in one year, and you could see similar results by including this tactic in your content marketing strategy. Instead of spending hours creating a totally unique piece of content from scratch, head back to your original 10x piece and think about how you could repurpose it for a guest post.

Could you:

• Follow our first step and write a smaller article based on a snippet from your 10x content?

• Re-write the piece, following the same structure but including less detail?

• Turn your 10x content into an infographic and write a small, 250-word description to act as your guest post?

Whichever option you choose, remember: the audience reading your guests post are unlikely to already know you. For that reason, you should give them your best ideas -- which means slightly altering and repurposing the highest performing content from your own site.

4. Republish to Other Platforms

Republishing content to other platforms is similar to guest posting, but comes without the pressure of having to re-write or edit your original piece of content. It’s really as simple as a quick copy and paste!

Sites like Medium, LinkedIn Publisher and Business2Community allow content syndication, where you can re-publish content as it was found.

These larger platforms can help to expose your content to a larger group of people. And, if you’re using a website with a niche audience (such as marketers, rather than the general public), you can demonstrate your expertise by delivering valuable content you haven’t had to create from scratch.

However, republishing content to other platforms comes with a warning: it can negatively impact your SEO as search engines won’t know which page to rank.

Before agreeing to syndicate your content on these huge websites, check whether they include a “rel=canonical” tag. This small piece of code tells Google where to find the original piece, allowing your content to rank higher than the republished piece.

5. Build or Use a Presentation

Another great way to repurpose old content is to turn it into a presentation.
Sites like SlideShare and Slideboom allow you to upload a presentation to the internet, giving you a unique way to present the information in your original 10x piece.

Similar to the other tactics we’ve explained here, this strategy helps to save time. If you’re speaking at a conference or simply exploring new ways to increase the number of eyes on your original piece, you can:

1. Turn the 10x content into a Microsoft PowerPoint, using a new slide for each sub-section.

2. Upload to SlideShare.

…But you can also take it a step further by recording audio over the presentation (as if you’re really presenting it!), and converting your 10x content to video.

The best part about doing this? Turning blog posts into presentations is proven to work. Eugene Cheng generated 2+ million views to his SlideShare presentation, and 400 new email subscribers in one month through this technique.

6. Republish on Social Media

People who follow your business on social media will be keen to see what you post. You can repurpose your 10x content (and build relationships with other influencers in your industry) by sharing snippets of your original blog post on social media.

There are many ways you could do this, including:

• Tweeting a quote from your article

• Copy and paste a section of your 10x content to your LinkedIn page

• Discussing the topic in a Facebook Live

• Sharing the infographic on Pinterest and Instagram, using the content introduction as your caption

Buzzfeed, which has become synonymous with republished content on social media, created a 10x piece of interactive content. After sharing a quiz titled “What City Should You Actually Live In?” to each social platform, it was viewed over 22 million times.

Wouldn’t you like to see that level of reach from a single piece of repurposed content?

7. Talk About the Topic in a Video or Podcast

Earlier, we mentioned that people have different learning styles. A surefire way to appeal to visual (or auditory) learners is to repurpose your blog content into a video or podcast.

Simply use the 10x content (or part of it) as your video script, and upload to YouTube. Once you’ve optimized the video for YouTube SEO, you’re in with the chance of ranking in another search engine – in video form.

78% of marketers say video gives them a good ROI, and the average person watches 1.5+ hours of online video content every day. It’s certainly worth the effort!

And, with podcasts becoming extremely popular, turning your content into audio is also a great idea to make better use of old content.

Figure 5: Podcast listening rates (source)

To do this, simply write and follow a script so you don’t forget any vital information. Once you’ve recorded it and you’re good to go, consider where it would best to upload and syndicate it.

iTunes, SoundCloud and Overcast are popular options, but you can host this audio file on your own website to gain additional traffic.

Conclusion

Repurposing old content allows you to boost the traffic to your original piece and ensure great work isn’t dead and buried. Not only does it help to expand your pool of potential customers, but the various types of repurposed content will help revive one key marketing metric: engagement.