You have probably heard of the concept of repurposing content before. You may have even tried it out by, let’s say, turning one or two of your blog posts into a newsletter. Or taking the salient parts of one of your more detailed articles and turning them into an infographic to be shared on social media.
These are good ideas for sure. To get the biggest SEO bang for your buck from every piece of original content you create though you need to do a lot more than that. But most people do not.
Many of those marketing their business do not manage to keep up with even their basic content creation plans. If you’re like most companies, it is hard for you to produce quality content at the level required to sustain the momentum of your marketing campaigns.
But don’t worry, you’re not alone at all. The two key issues facing content marketers are, according to one study:
- A lack of time or bandwidth for content production (51 per cent)
- Development of a sufficiently broad variety and amount of content (50 per cent)
So, here is the thing. By learning how to turn one piece of content into lots of pieces of content you will not only get a big SEO – actually lots of them –boost but also solve that content volume problem rather neatly.
How many pieces of new content can be created from a single original piece? What if we told you that up to 49 is a figure that is far from unreasonable? Chances are you might say we are daft, lying or both. However, in this guide, we will prove that we are neither. So, starting with a single blog post, let’s run down those 49 ideas that create 50 pieces of content.
Content Ideas 1 & 2 – Free White Paper and E BookImages
By turning your blog post into an email gated free white paper or e-book research has shown that you will potentially reach an audience who would simply never have bothered to read your post because that’s not their style.
According to that research, these forms of content appeal particularly to those who are researching a product decision:
- 83% of B2B clients said they had used the information from a white paper to make a purchasing decision within the previous 12 months.
- 68% of respondents said they had used an e-book the same way. This was in comparison to just 56% who said a blog post had influenced a buying decision.
Even if creating an e-book and/or white paper from your post simply involves changing the formatting, adding more images, and changing the way it is offered to potential readers you will have the opportunity to not only reach influential people but also to improve your standing as an expert in your field.
Content Ideas 3-7 – The Five-Day Series
Long-form blog posts are great and SEO experts will tell you that they can do wonders for your onsite SEO. And this is broadly true.
However, not everyone has the attention span – or even the time – to get through a several thousand-word post in a single sitting. There are those who prefer their content in bite-size pieces.
To cater to those people, you can take a longer piece, perhaps even an older post that has not seen the front page of your blog for a while but is still relevant or can be refreshed to be and split it into a five-part series.
Begin by breaking down your long-form article into bite-size chunks. Then, publish the five (or more) shorter pieces over the course of several days. Doing so will offer you all the following:
- Five shorter pieces that can all be used as linkable content, both for internal and external linking purposes.
- The series, if engaging and well-written – which all the content on your site should be – will encourage both repeat visitors and extra time-on-site per visit, both of which are great for SEO.
- With a little tinkering, each new piece can serve as an introduction to future new content, saving you time and effort brainstorming new topics.
Content Idea 8: Newsletter
Email marketing still works, even though it is an ‘older’ technology. To take advantage of that fact you want to have some solid content to share with subscribers, given the value of a strong email newsletter.
To add value to a week’s worth of emails, your five articles can now make up a perfect set of content snippets-all you have to do is upload the shorter posts you have already generated to your email service and add a short blurb to each email.
Content Idea 9: New Subscriber Drip Email Campaign
Alternatively, your five well-written short articles are the ideal fodder for a new subscribers’ drip email campaign that will:
- Promise the perks of a quick, useful email every day for five days to subscribers.
- Increase the immediate brand engagement of the subscriber, as from when they first sign up, you will be on their minds every day.
- Demonstrate what kind of quality content users can expect to receive on a regular basis, increasing the likelihood that they will be eager to open your emails going forward.
- Increase the click-through-rates by up to 12x
All right, so you’ve got your five articles. But what if you break them down to components that are even smaller? What else can they do for your SEO, and your brand, then?
Content Idea 10: Fact List
A series of short, sweet factoids that are easy to absorb and are a godsend for anyone who follows the subject you are writing about can easily be created from that initial piece. And the Internet loves a good list.
This may often also mean, of course, that someone writing an article in a similar niche, or on a similar topic, will link to your content, which is good for numerous reasons.
It will help build your authority in your field, – crucial for a good EAT rating – and by giving site visitors clear, no bull facts improve your content’s usability.
Content Idea 11 Fact Posts for Social Media
On social media,’ Did You Know’ facts do really well you can use a few of the facts from your list to create short social media posts.
These quick snippets make excellent social content, given that the best average tweet duration is about 100 characters, and on other social sites like LinkedIn or Facebook, snippets from your fact list can be excellent clickbait. Add some great images, and you will have some great Instagram posts too, with plenty of room left over for those all-important hashtags.
Note: if you want to automate this process as much as possible, consider using Missinglettr. This tool will take your ‘Did You Know’ facts post and turn it into a stream of social shares ready to be reviewed and put to work hard on your behalf.
Content Idea 12 Quick Quotes
Quotes, especially if they are used with bold visuals and funky fonts, stand out, both on blogs and on social media.
Often, rather than asking them to wade through a full-text post, it is easier and sometimes even more effective to offer your readers a lengthy list of easily shared quotes. This is because:
These quick consume lists keep users reading.
It allows users to quickly recognise and understand the most significant points you are trying to make.
You can easily rework a quote list into a number of posts and other content for social media.
A list of quotes also helps because, as evidence, it would be quick and easy for them to take a quote from your list to add credibility to their analysis when other people who are writing papers on your subject come across your stuff. This helps raise your topic/niche/industry authority even more and creates even more website traffic.
Content Idea 13 Facebook Quote Post
Simple quotes can make excellent little snippets of social media content, as with factoids.
Over the course of a day, you can fire out several, or post one a day for an extended period. To help drive more traffic to your content, each additional post should connect back to your original article or your quotation list.
Distributing your favorite quotes through Facebook can add diversity to the content of your social media feeds and can help bolster your perceived authority on the subject at hand.
Content Idea 14 Online Quizzes
A quiz is a perfect way to attract visitors to your website while making use of your existing content as well. People enjoy an opportunity to test themselves.
Even better, it is extremely simple to turn each main element of your article into a quiz question once you have produced a broken-down list of factoids, and doing so helps to further develop your authority, especially as you can link to your own five articles as sources of information in the responses.
Content Ideas 15 & 16 Checklists and How-Tos
How-to guides are a perfect way to use authority to rework old content since they cater to consumers who are searching for clear guidance about how to accomplish a specific task.
If they’re after learning more about how to do the stuff you’re blogging about, they’re also likely to be fantastic customers in the making.
Checklists are similar to how-to guides, but they’re the bare-bones edition, providing clear directions to everyone who wants to get it right, like the fact lists and quizzes above.
In reality, they are more likely to cater to members of the audience who are concerned about missing a key phase in a given process and want to engage on an ongoing basis with the guide (and who are, again, perfect potential customers).
Content Idea 17: Quora Posts
You can use your content to answer questions on Quora by chopping up the advice provided in your original blog post even further.
Doing so can help build the authority of your brand on the topics you’re talking about.
It will also help to subtly attract individuals to your website. Just don’t make sure that your responses are not just overt advertising for your products-nobody will appreciate that, especially Quora moderators, even if your responses are good.
Content Idea 18: FAQs
At this point, there is a fair chance that people will ask questions about your blog post after working through your diverse types of content. Further clarity may be required on some points and readers may also have concerns about how concepts can be implemented.
You should write a follow-up article answering the common issues and problems that have arisen from your original article to help answer these points. An FAQ-style post that constantly links back to the original piece(s)
Not only will readers appreciate you clarifying any points of misunderstanding, but this gives you an opportunity to aid site visitors who are a little further down the conversion funnel and are thinking about your product’s practicalities.
Content Idea 19 Viral Images
Remember our suggestions about creating sets of facts and quotations?
To put them on a vibrant backdrop and turn them into perfect visual content does not take much effort:
- With a few taps, Canva transforms quotes into pictures
- Pic Monkey places text on top of the backgrounds of images
- Quotes Cover enables you to convert quotes into images and page covers of perfectly sized for social media profiles.
These visual content pieces go well on websites as well, as they are useful to use as promotional materials and to help create more insightful and visually impressive your social media feeds.
Content Ideas 20-25: Image Tweets, Facebook Posts, Pinterest Boards, Instagram Posts and Tumblr Content
Social media is among the best ways for you to use the new photos you’ve created. But each popular site should be approached in a slightly different way:
Twitter loves images, and image tweets perform substantially better than those without messages.
Instagram is the second biggest outlet for social media and is completely image-based. For your images to perform well you will have to add some great hashtags too though.
A lot of organizations, especially retailers, use Pinterest, and using your new images to create your own customized Pinboards will help grow your following there.
Tumblr has a comparatively small user base, but its users are younger and very engaged. So, if your target audience is young and tech-savvy, it is great.
Each social media site has its own unique quirks, so you’ll want to customize each one of your photos. But creating content for all these realms of social media will help get the message out quickly to as many people as possible.
Content Idea 25: Infographic
One of the best pieces of content you can create a nice infographic.
According to research:
- On social media, 39 per cent of B2B buyers regularly interact with infographics.
- In 2014, 52 per cent of B2B marketers used infographics in their buying decisions.
Thanks to their engaging visuals, and rich, useful content, infographics pull in readers and are great for backlinks too. Adapting your blog post into an infographic could make a significant difference in the performance of your website and the number of high-quality backlinks you can get for it.
Content Ideas 26-30: Infographic Series
With just one infographic, why stop? It is easy to turn all five of the new articles you have produced into infographics that cover each of your key points in detail if you’ve extended your article into a collection.
Content Idea 31 of Content: Slideshow
Logically – and carefully – breaking up the infographics makes it possible to transform them into a slideshow. And sharing material on SlideShare makes sense, both for SEO and general engagement in our experience.
Slideshows should include quick and easy to digest details and are excellent for attracting attention from potential customers who are grateful for free access to the slides.
Piece 32 of Content: Instructographic
An instructographic expresses a message visually, just like an infographic.
The difference is, rather than just giving them details, it teaches the reader how to do something.
Instructographics can be easily generated by integrating visuals with your how-to guide and from your infographic.
On Pinterest, Instructographics perform especially well. As with the distinct types of text content listed here, an instructional lets you reach diverse groups of potential customers than your infographic might draw in.
Content Idea 33: Video
One of the most popular forms of content on the internet in 2020 was still video. In fact, the various global lockdowns due to COVID-19 led to more Internet video consumption than ever before, and not just on YouTube.
Your blog article already lays the framework for a video:
- It provides the transcript.
- The voice-overs can be easily combined with visuals from your infographic.
- You can use it to create a video quickly and simply with the strong production value that does a fantastic job of selling your product for you. All you need is a smartphone and some basic lighting (we know, we do it all the time, even in lockdown.)
Content Idea 34-39: Video Series
Only one video? Why stop there?
(Have you seen a pattern yet here?)
The series of text articles you have created are also ideal for adaptation into a video series, as was the case for with your infographic.
A video series provides several advantages:
- They add more non-text content and keeps web visitors coming to your site.
- You will organically guide viewers from one clip to the next, keeping them watching for longer, which improves your bounce rate, which is still an SEO thing.
- A series of videos can discuss the questions that viewers have about the product or service at the heart of the pieces at various stages of the conversion funnel.
Content Idea 40: TikTok Videos
TikTok is relatively new, but it’s certainly the hottest social media site going into 2021. Much like Vine before it (remember that?) Tik Tok is made up of very short video clips that cover almost any subject under the sun.
If you can think of a clever, engaging way to take just a tiny portion of one of your videos or use your written content to create a new just for TikTok short it can be a wonderful way to connect with an increasingly diverse audience.
Content Ideas 41-45: Podcasts
In 2020 podcast popularity soared. Millions of people livened up their lockdowns by tuning into podcasts of all kinds (the diversity of the Apple Podcast Top 100 shows just how varied the niches people enjoy are) and it’s a habit likely to be here to stay, especially with the adjacent rise of the use of smart assistants like Alexa and Google Home.
So, you should definitely consider taking some of this content you have been working with and repurposing it again, this time into podcasts.
That five-part series you created will translate into five podcast episodes fairly easily, especially as you can flesh each one out ‘on the fly’.
Content Idea 46: Webinar
To adapt your content, this one will take a little more effort, but it is possible to use your text to create the basis of a webinar that teaches viewers the lessons covered by your post.
Interestingly, today’s marketers have rated webinars among the most successful content marketing techniques. In one survey, 92 per cent of B2B marketers said they found highly efficient webinars to be useful.
A collection of slides (which you already have) and someone to stand in front of a camera to explain the points in your article is all you really need for a webinar.
If you do this one right, you will drive considerable interest in your brand and your content marketing activities.
Content Idea 47: FAQ Follow-Up Webinar
You can use the same webinar set up to provide answers to the questions audiences have about the subjects you’ve covered, in a similar way to how writing a follow-up FAQ for your article can help resolve problems and issues for readers while helping to generate more quality material.
You help to create a relationship of trust with them when you reply directly to a viewer, which allows them to feel comfortable and confident in turning to you for data, guidance, and product assistance.
Content Idea 48 Update All That Content
Maybe six months or a year have passed since you first posted your article online.
Now’s the time to review it, adding an extra few paragraphs to the piece as it was originally written that encompasses and developments or changes.
Updating your content in this way helps to bring back relevance to your old, well-written material. And whenever anyone comes across it in a search, the content won’t be out of date.
Similarly, all the additional content pieces can be updated to reflect these improvements, putting even more content at your disposal.
Content Idea 49 Guest Posts
Okay, so one thing you can’t do is offer an article that you’ve already posted as a guest post.
But you can rework the original text to create fresh content that will make a big splash as a guest post by rewriting the article from a slightly different point of view or with a slightly different emphasis.
What’s more, within the guest post, you can connect back to your original post to help those who want to know more about the same topic.
This is a perfect way to get the most out of the potential of your existing article when it is also be used as a link building tool.
Content Idea 50: Create a Resource Pack
By this point, you’ve turned your single blog post into, among other things:
- White Paper
- eBooks
- Different Infographics
- Images
- Videos
- Podcasts
Now, for anyone looking to learn more about the subject, it’s time to bundle everything together and offer it as a downloadable or members-only access resource pack.
These resource packs are useful for anyone who wants to know more about the subject, as well as anyone who conducts research to create their own content.
This means that:
For prospective customers, you grow your credibility as an authoritative and helpful source.
As they use (and reference) your services, you can turn other content marketers into proxy salesmen.
And there you have it: how to turn a single blog into fifty pieces of valuable content that will help you take your content marketing activities to new levels. We told you we were not daft or crazy!
Need help with your content creation strategy? The Pearl Lemon team can help. Contact us now to discuss what we can do for you.
