In order for your business to rank highly, Google expects quality content; quality as judged by your audience through shares and interaction. But creating good content takes time, time many business owners simply don’t have. Here are a few ideas on how you can use existing content to increase your content offerings with a minimal amount of time.
Before you repurpose your existing materials, know that Google will penalize your business for duplicate content, even if what you’re duplicating is yours. Please don’t copy a blog post and make it your web copy verbatim.
Google will notice.
Transcribing Video and Podcasts
If you use videos or podcasts, each one should have an accompanying transcription posted on your site. This does not count as duplicate content because it’s in a different form/media.
Also, go through each video or podcast and pull quotes or tips. These one-liner gems can be used in social media either as direct quotes typed as posts with a link back to the original or through creating image quotes. You can also use them as image quotes throughout your site to bring interest to its design and create skiable learning opportunities for your visitors.
Blogs Become Articles
When Hollywood has a successful TV show or movie, it creates a spin-off or sequel/prequel. You can do the same of your popular blog posts. If your posts are on the shorter side like 300-500 words, pull an old one and add more information to it until it’s about 1,000-1,200 words. Change the tone, if you need to, as many blog posts are written in a more familiar tone than that used in articles. Add real world examples (and corresponding links, where appropriate) and you have a full-length article.
If long articles aren’t your thing, turn your blog post into a podcast episode or webinar. Take a deeper dive into the topic with a subject matter expert or bring someone in for an interview who feels the opposite of what you’ve written in your post. While some of these take more effort and time, they’re still quicker than creating them entirely from scratch.
Blogs Become Checklists
If you’ve written a “tips” blog post, many of those convert well to a checklist. For instance, “10 Tips to a Better Blog” can easily become “Better Blog Checklist: 10 Things to Do Before Hitting Publish.” Design it as a checklist and cut away a lot of the extra words. You can create this piece in seconds on Canva, which is made for non-designers as well as those who know what they are doing.
If you want to make more of an impression, create a PDF out of it, add a button to your website, or a call-to-action, inviting your audience to download the checklist. Then share it everywhere.
Get More Traction on Your Existing Content
If you don’t have the time for repurposing, here are a few things you can do in between meetings to get more traction for blog posts:
Scan old posts that resonated with the audience. Update the information contained in them and repost them with a revised date. This is great or pieces with old stats.
Use a scheduling platform that reposts old content. There are many platforms and schedulers that will allow you to keep certain specified posts in circulation. You can customize the posts to read “ICYMI” (in case you missed it) or “Classic Post.” These designations make your reader aware that it’s something from your content vault. Many businesses do this around the holidays when they’re not creating new material. It can even be advertised as a year–end wrap–up or best-of posts.
Create title images for blog posts to post to social media. Social media profiles have become more visual. Creating title images for your posts will get them clicked on more often. Use an intriguing image, add the title of the post, and start getting your content more attention when you post it on social. Canva offers blog post title templates that are easy to use and free as long as you own the design components/images.
Use a related post plug-in on your blog. There are a number of these types of plug-ins in WordPress (such as Yet Another Related Post plug-in). They use your designated tags and content to recognize posts with similar themes and present three additional posts to the reader at the end of the blog post. It’s a similar idea to “You might also like” suggestions in e-commerce.
Some bloggers use pop-ups when the reader gets to the end of the post or some save the suggestions for additional reads for when someone shares a post. Either way those tools help get more eyes on your content and cause your audience to spend more time on page.
Google relies on your audience to tell it if you’re producing quality content. Every piece of content you create should exist in multiple mediums for two reasons, it expands your content offerings and increases the possibilities of shares and it means no matter what type of media preference each member of your audience has, you have them covered. Give your audience helpful content and they’ll share it and interact with it.
If they share it, Google will take notice.
