One really great thing about blogging is that while you’re promoting your products and services, you’re also creating a tangible, lasting asset for your business — one that can and should be repurposed, promoted and amplified many times beyond its original use.
Because if you’re not re-using your posts, you’re not maximizing the ROI on your content-production resources whether that’s time and effort — or money.
Here are 12 ways you can repurpose, reuse and recycle your blog content.
1. E-blast a post to your mailing list. Even if you’re not doing a formal newsletter, why not blast out a great post to your mailing list. This can be especially effective for timely and seasonal content.
2. Push out an excerpt on social media. Tease your blog post with a compelling pull quote in a Facebook or Twitter post. Then link back to your blog to drive traffic to your site.
3. Add more content to well-performing posts. Track your analytics to see what kind of traction your content is getting. Consider lengthening a post with high audience engagement with supplementary material to boost its performance even more.
4. Incorporate your blogs into an e-book. If you blog for a restaurant, for example, why not repurpose some of your best posts and create a short downloadable e-book on seasonal entertaining? Then leverage that new content to grow your mailing list.
5. Repurpose blog content for marketing collateral. Create a printed flyer to hand out or mail out to customers. You could also adapt your verbiage to use in a targeted direct mail campaign.
6. Turn a blog into a video. If you’ve created a great post, shoot a video based on it to use on your YouTube channel. Create a “best of our blog” playlist that encourages more people to visit your site.
7. Create an infographic from your post. If your content has some compelling research or statistics, you can create an infographic to tell the story visually. If that’s too much work, we can create an affordable mini-infographic to call out a few main points. We can even animate them.
8. Distribute a press release. If your post is about a new product launch, innovative technology or company news, you can turn that content into a press release for distribution to encourage reporting on your company.
9. Share your blog on LinkedIn. Expand or adapt your post and publish it as an article on LinkedIn. Or take an interesting excerpt from a post and share it as an update. Either way, you can leverage your content to grow and engage your professional network.
10. Turn a post into a slide deck. Create a slide deck from the your blog content to upload to SlideShare. It can be less complicated than creating a video and allows you to demonstrate your expertise in an industry.
11. Recast your blog content for Instagram. Post a pull quote, video excerpt or mini-infographic on Instagram and expose your ideas to a different demographic.
12. Make your blog into a podcast. Read (or improvise off of) your post and upload the recording to iTunes. Busy commuters love listening to podcasts on the go — you may cultivate an entirely different audience for your content by leveraging this highly-popular medium.
Getting extra mileage out of the content you’re already producing can increase your ROI. At least once a quarter, it’s a good idea to do an audit of your content to see what content has the potential for a second or even third life.
Get into The Nexus: How have you effectively repurposed your blog? Share your experience in the comments below.