Recycling and Reusing Content

One of the best ways to add content into your marketing activity is to reuse and recycle existing content.

Used strategically, repurposing content can be a great way to take advantage of multiple advertising platforms without the need to reinvent the wheel each time. Plus, it also means that that article idea you had could end up being much, much more. 

But what about duplicate content?

Duplicate content would be a worry if you are simply republishing the same piece of content on a large number of sites without referencing the original piece. We do this by asking the publishing site to add a canonical tag to link to the original piece. Or, if they are unable to do that, then have a link at the foot of the article to say where it was originally published and have any links nofollowed (This helps Google understand that you are not doing this for link value).

So why do this it if not for link value?

Some of the places we can add this new version of the content or repurposed content to will have traffic of its own that you want to attract. By adding content to these other sites, you can drive actual traffic and get brand awareness from them.  This could be seen as an SEO advantage but that is an added bonus if true and not the reason you are doing this.

So what can you do with content to help your marketing efforts?

Repurposing Content

The 5 brief ideas below can be used for any blog post, site page or guide that you currently have on your site and can be recycled into a number of different formats.

1.     Using a tool such as Audacity you can create podcast (spoken word) versions of your content.  Then upload them to itunes or soundcloud.  If you don't feel like you have a good voice for this, you can hire a freelancer or speak to us and we can help you put something together.
2.     Turn them into downloadable PDF’s. Maybe group 4 or 5 posts together and tie them into theme and publish them on sites such as issuu.com or scribd.com. Speak to your website designer or web design company about having these branded.
3.     Create PowerPoint presentations out of them and publish on slideshare.net – you could even record these as a slideshow with voice over, and run them into videos.
4.     Take blog posts and enhance them with 2 or 3 more points and then post that onto LinkedIn Pulse or on any relevant forum or community site relevant to your niche.
5.     Take any top tips posts and maybe convert them into infographics and then post on a number of infographic sites.  You can then also share these on your blog, or social media channels

As you can see, each one of the above ideas can spin out its own number of further pieces of promotional activity.  By taking some time to look at your existing content and coming up with ways to recycle it, you can build yourself a huge amount of content that you can use both on your site and in your marketing activity for a long time to come.

The actual hard bit has been done for you as the content is already there.  Simply use your Google Analytics account to show you which pages are the most popular or most shared and then start there.