Content Marketing: Five Creative Ways to Repurpose Content

If we want people to read our content — we’ve got to tell them about it. A great way to do that is to repurpose content as part of a content marketing program.

There’s a good case for repurposing content beyond content promotion: For me, writing, and specifically blogging, is thinking.

Often my best ideas come only after I’ve written a post. Creative PR is part art and part science. It’s also cumulative, which means one idea leads to another — that’s the art.

Repurposing content is also practical — it extends the shelf-life of content. To that end, maybe “repurpose” isn’t the right descriptor perhaps “multipurpose” is better suited, especially if we publish with the preconceived intent to repurpose — that’s the science.

While this post is specifically about taking a blog post and repurposing that content, there are virtually an infinite number of useful ways to repurpose content. I’ll list a few more easy ones below.

First, a some guidelines I think are useful:

Seek to add value to the original content at each step; there’s always room for improvement.
Limit repurposing to the best performing posts.
Vary the time of publication of repurposed content.
Avoid being a noise nuisance — don’t overdo it.

5 Ways to Repurpose Content

1. Select a well-performing post. I wrote 6 Creative PR Ideas for Blended Media a few weeks back and it has earned respectable traction. Since it’s easily broken down into six mini-case studies it makes a great baseline for a presentation.

Choose a post that both performed well and is easily broken down into components.

2. Turn the post into a presentation. As I created the presentation, I changed up the title a bit and plugged in some elements to the presentation that I thought added value. There are a couple memes the presentation has a different setup and conclusion. For an easy way to make memes, I like Quickmeme (with a hat tip to @lspaventa). Since my SlideShare account is connected to my LinkedIn account, any new content I publish to SlideShare is automatically shared with my acquaintances on LinkedIn.

Six creative pr ideas that blend marketing for bigger buzz from Frank Strong

3. Embed the presentation on micro-blogs. By micro-blog, I specifically mean Posterous or Tumblr — which I like to think of as something less than a blog, but more than a Tweet. In many ways, Google+ has incorporated similar capabilities, but I don’t think people or brands should attempt to use Google+ as a blog. Separately, I have my Tumblr account set up to automatically post a link on Twitter anytime I update my Tumblr account — and since it tweets the headline and a link, I adjusted the title accordingly.

Embedded SlideShare Presentation on Tumblr.

4. Pin images to Pinterest. I took one of the memes from the presentation and pinned it to Pinterest and then posted a link to Twitter and a Facebook page with which I’m experimenting. Pinterest and SlideShare will also allow you to pin an entire presentation — and viewers can scroll through it — which I have also done.

5. Embed Pinterest Pins Elsewhere. Memes tend to perform well on social networks and people gravitate towards short, interesting points. It’s easy to understand why: If a picture is worth a thousand words, then memes have both. I can’t get enough of the “Philosoraptor.” I took the same meme as above an embedded it on Posterous — which again automatically posts new content published to Twitter — and separately posted a link to the Posterous post on Google+.

Embedded Pinterest post on Posterous.

So what?

Take the last point — #5 for example and lets use the tweet as the starting point. A person that clicks through from Twitter goes to Posterous, which leads them to Pinterest, which leads the to SlideShare, which leads them to the original blog post. In other words, these are all breadcrumbs — or social outposts as Joe Chernov aptly calls them — aimed at pointing people back to this blog. For brands, I’ve long held and many agree, that a blog is the center of a corporate online marketing framework.

Measurement?

The measurement is easy in Google Analytics (GA) — the first place I check is referral sources. For me, referral traffic (44%) in the last few months from social media sites has outpaced even Google search traffic for the first time. Analytics are easy to measure on other sites as well.

SlideShare has solid analytics for free.
Posterous offers page reads — or you can embed GA.
Tumblr offers a range of free templates where you can embed GA.

Seven Additional Creative Ways to Repurpose Content

The only limitation to creative content promotion is our own minds — here some easy ones:

Break whitepapers into blog posts.
Turn quotes from your content into pins on Pinterest.
Transform a series of blog posts into an ebook.
Make a meme of an old blog post for Facebook. Make a theme one day each week where you promote “Oldie but a Goodie.”
Explain a post in a video; SEOmoz’s “White Board Friday” is a great example that’s been copied by a lot of brands.
Redevelop a mediocre post (writing is thinking) into a powerful guest post.
Explore. Lee Odden has an evergreen post with more than 30 different tactics that can all be mixed and matched for creative content marketing.