“Reduce Reuse Recycle” has become the mantra of the save the environment movement. It’s simple and catchy and, quite honestly, it makes a lot of sense. It refers to three things you can do to limit the amount of waste you put out into the world. If you reduce your consumption of things like aluminum cans or paper bags, reuse or repurpose items such as empty food jars or scraps of material, and recycle any relevant items, you will do your part to minimize your carbon footprint and contribute towards saving the planet.
What, you may be wondering, does this have to do with content? Isn’t the whole point of content to be constantly new, fresh, and on-trend? How else will you keep your followers engaged and attract the attention of influencers?
Contrary to what you might think, applying these exact principles to content creation is actually very sage advice. Think about it for a second – what’s your goal when you put out a piece of content? You want to provide your audience with something of value, right? You want to be seen as a trusted source of information that will ultimately lead people to buy whatever it is you’re selling. This means you need to be strategic about what content you put out into the world. You don’t want to clutter up the environment with excess waste…do you see where I’m going with this?
You want to take your very best content and reduce, reuse and recycle it. Ok, so maybe that isn’t the exact right terminology, but the point is this: it takes a lot of time and effort to write high quality content, especially if it’s longform like an ebook or a whitepaper or requires a lot of research. So, you might as well get a lot of bang for your buck and repurpose and reuse that content as much as you can.
I am not saying you should write a blog post and then wait a week and publish the exact same thing again. That is more “repetition” than “recycle” and is not likely to be very effective. Instead, you can focus on repurposing your best content. Repurposing content means either changing the format of the content (i.e. turning an ebook into a blog post or a podcast), the target audience (i.e. taking a post you wrote specifically for small businesses and changing the focus slightly to make it relevant for solopreneurs), or both. But all of the initial research and hard work that you did remains relevant and the meat of the repurposed content.
But WHY is this better than coming up with fresh ideas all the time?? Here’s a rundown of the main benefits to you and your business when you repurpose content:
Save Time
How often do you find yourself wishing there were more hours in the day? Well guess what? You can’t create more time, but you can use your time more wisely. When you repurpose content, you only need to do the bulk of the research once and then you can use that same information for a blog post, a social media post, a podcast, an infographic, etc. And all that time you spend looking for the perfect image or the perfect quote to go along with your piece? Once you find it, you can use it again. And again.
Achieve Multiple Goals
I am not a big believer in multi-tasking (a topic for another post), but if there is a way to achieve more than one goal with the same piece of content, then sign me up! Let’s say you have a store and you want to increase visitors to your website and to your physical location. If you’ve got an amazing blog post that is drawing people to your website in droves, consider turning that into a social media post with a coupon valid only in-store.
Expand Your Reach
Not everyone consumes content in the same way. For example, I love podcasts and listen to them every chance I get. I’ve got a friend who is an avid reader and will sit for hours reading blog posts and articles. My daughter gets all of her information from YouTube. You could reach all three of us (or people like us) with the exact same ideas just in different formats. Ever heard that expression “meet people where they are”? That’s exactly what you can do when you repurpose your content and put it in formats and places where your target audience is likely to be.
Boost & Diversify Your Online Presence
They say you can’t be everywhere at once. But in the land of the Internet and social media, you actually can be. You can take your best work and repurpose it for Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, your website, your blog, Medium, YouTube, Tik Tok, the list goes on an on. You obviously don’t have to (and shouldn’t) go overboard – and we will share specific ideas and best practices in future posts – but you can repurpose the same content into different forms to make sure you and your brand show up in all of the relevant places online but with consistent messaging.
Improve Your SEO
The more high-quality content you put online, the more Google and other search engines will learn that you are a reliable source of information, improving your SEO. By repurposing your content, you can continue to target the same keywords. By using them in different formats, Google will see you as providing consistently high-quality content on the same topic, but not repeating the exact same thing over and over again.
I challenge you now – go back to a piece of content you created that you really loved, that you think best speaks to the essence of you and/or your business. Think about what else you can do with that content – can you turn it into a video? An infographic? Or, go back to a piece of content that didn’t perform as well as you thought it might…maybe it was just the wrong format and all you need to do is repurpose it into something else and then it will go viral! You never know until you try.
At Purple Chia, whenever we write content for our clients, we are always thinking of all the different ways it can be repurposed and reused. We’ve seen this strategy work wonders and we would be happy to help you too, so be in touch…