Spinning Words in Different Ways
When you are producing content, always keep in mind other ways you can reuse it.
Content is king, or so they say, but if you’re not in the business of producing content, it can be a heavy task to undertake consistently. The reality is that you can’t just produce any old content and throw it up on your blog hoping it will stick, like overcooked spaghetti to a wall. You need a solid content strategy and the first step to that is to make sure that your content is good: useful, readable, engaging, and most of all, shareable.
Once you are creating some readable and engaging content that fits your brand, the next thing to consider is how you can reuse it.
Plan your content with recycling in mind
Whether you post 600 word missives to your blog or produce a weekly podcast, you need to consider how the content you are working so hard to produce could be reused in another format. Why? Because you worked so hard to produce it in the first place!
Getting more out of one piece of content is an efficient use of your resources and will produce a higher return on investment. In other words: you will get more bang for your buck out of your content if you recycle it in different formats, for different audiences.
Now understand that when we say ‘reuse’, we’re not talking about how the content will be shared. Any good content strategy will include a social media marketing plan that will reflect the different ways the same content can be shared and re-shared on a variety of platforms.
When we say ‘reuse’, what we mean is: how can you take piece of blog post A and turn it into LinkedIn article B, infographic C and book D without repeating yourself endlessly?
Ways you can recycle your content
Some of the ways you can recycle your content:
- A series of list based blog posts — also known as ‘listicles’ — that focus on a certain area of business could be grouped together and pitched as an article to a business publication you admire;
- A few articles that you have written for a magazine but for which you retain copyright could be pulled together and form the basis of an eBook that demonstrates your industry knowledge;
- Have you already written an eBook? Break down some of the chapters into individual blog posts;
- A post that you researched heavily could be story boarded and turned into a podcast that you could publish for those of your followers who would prefer to acquire their information on an audio platform;
- Take a list blog post and create an infographic;
- Did you have Twitter marketing success utilizing a hashtag? Storify your hashtag stream and re-publish it as a blog post;
- Take a list based blog post and turn it into a template that your customers can download for free;
- Take points from a presentation you did and turn them into social media posts.
A great example of recycling is the Content Marketing Institute. Their whole reason for being is to collect and showcase creative examples of content marketing but they themselves were looking for a way to repurpose all the information they had collected. Result? An eBook entitled: “75 Examples to Spark Your Content Marketing Creativity”.
The possibilities are limitless but there is ONE important caveat that you cannot lose sight of when you are recycling content: never, ever duplicate it.
Reusing doesn’t mean duplicate
This point is worth repeating: DO NOT duplicate your content. It must, for all intents and purposes, appear to be ‘fresh’. Copy and paste is not your friend here, unless you enjoy watching Google wreak havoc with your SEO standing.
All search engine algorithms are designed to seek out duplication so it’s vital to avoid it.
Make recycling a part of your content strategy and see a return on investment both in terms of loyal brand followers and search engine standing.
Need help to spin your content, or advice where to start? Talk to us!
