Once you’ve written and published your blog post, don’t let that be the end of your all your hard work! If you re-purpose the content, you may reach more of your readers or branch out to new target audiences.
There are plenty of ways to re-purpose your blog content, but we’ll focus on 3 easy ideas in this post.
[updated 3/7/17]
1. Write a Few, Short Tips
If you’ve written a post that contains at least 500-1000 words, then it should be easy to come up with 2-3 short tips. You can then share your tips on any social site.
Keep your tips to 140 characters or less and they become Tweets. It’s even better to shorten your tips to 120 characters or less so you can insert a hashtag, and leave room for others to re-Tweet them.
There are several tools (plugins) for WordPress sites that let you put a “tweetable” tip within your blog posts like the one below:
[clickToTweet tweet=”Repurpose blog content by creating 2-3 short tips from each post. #blogging” quote=”Repurpose blog content by creating 2-3 short tips from each post. #blogging”]
Start a “tip of the week” post and share the tips you’ve pulled from older blog posts. If you’ve written a series of blog posts on one particular topic, then you can create a free report of Top 10 Tips or something similar…
2. Create Simple Graphics or Short Videos
Photos and videos get some of the best reach and engagement on social media, so use a few tools to put together visual content.
You can take some of the tips you’ve written from idea #1 above and overlay the text on photos/graphics.
Tools like PicMonkey or Canva make it easy to design graphics in just a few minutes:
Or you can create a short video that summarizes your blog post or highlights the main points. Use your smartphone to create a short video of you summarizing the post, or use a tool like Adobe Spark to create a free video (use built-in themes, photos, and music).
Here is one for this post, using free images from Pixabay and Adobe Spark:
3. Share Older Blog Posts on a Regular Schedule
As your blog audience grows, you’ll pick up readers who have never seen some of your earlier posts. Even long-time readers may not always read every post you write.
So don’t take the “once and done” approach to your blogging. Create some posts that are evergreen (topics that will be relevant a week, month or a year from now) and make it part of your content strategy to re-share those older posts.
If you use WordPress.org for your blog, you can automate this process with several different plug-ins. You can set parameters, and publish older posts according to a custom schedule.
Or set up your own sharing schedule. Depending on the number of posts you’ve written, you may want to make it a weekly task or twice a month occurrence.
You can use a theme like “Throwback Thursday” to share an older post each week. Use the hashtags #throwbackthursday and #tbt when you post the older content.
Another suggestion is to start a social media post with a question and then reference your older blog post for more details on the topic. Include a call-to-action “click here for more information on …” and the blog post link to send users to your site.
So there you have 3 relatively simple ways to share your older blog posts and get more mileage out of the content you’ve spent precious time preparing.
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Top photo credit (derived from): Nicholas_T via photopin cc
About Terry League