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8 Ways To Repurpose Your Content For Increased Visibility

Publishing and promoting content is a labor of love. We spend weeks researching, designing, and developing creative content, all while planning its promotion. Once the content has been birthed, we put that promotion plan into action -- and if all goes well, we bask in a glory of social shares, links, and other ranking signals.

After the wave of tweets, +1s, likes, and links taper off, most marketers move on to the next shiny thing. But promotion activity shouldn’t end as the natural initial interest tapers off. Rather, to extend the childbirth metaphor, we should nurture our content and send it off into the world (wide Web) to have new and exciting experiences.

Whether your content is a deeply researched white paper based on consumer data, an interactive HTML5 scroller, a static infographic, or a simple listicle, there are ways to squeeze more value out of the precious content you have created. Here are 8 different opportunities for you to repackage your content so it can be promoted in different ways.

1. Turn it into a SlideDeck

Turning a content piece into a slide deck is one of the easiest and most effective ways to repurpose a piece of content. Once you have your slides created, you can upload them to your SlideShare account, a platform where there’s a built-in audience to share your content with.

If your content is mostly text, you can build a traditional style slide deck by trimming back on the amount of copy and highlighting the main points. Then just add some supporting graphics and you are set.

Here is an example from Darren Rowse, who did a version of this by repurposing his most retweeted Tweets into a Slideshare deck.

For more visual pieces, whether interactive or static infographics, simply work with the original designer to turn it into a deck. Here is an example where we turned this interactive piece into a slide deck.

2. Turn it into an Infographic

Infographics are a staple in the content marketing world, and while bad ones have made people question their efficacy, great infographics are powerful tools. The most effective infographics are driven by data. If you have a piece of content you have written that is data-based, such as a research study or data analysis, turning it into something visual may give it even further reach. I would embed an example of an infographic here, but I suspect we’ve all seen more than our fair share, so I’ll spare the pixels.

3. Turn it into an Instructographic

Instructographics are the oft-forgotten but valuable little brother of infographics. Your classic Casey to Ben (Affleck, of course). Rather than displaying statistics and data points, an instructographic provides a set of steps to complete a task. If you have content that provides instructions to a user on how to do something,, it would be great as an instructographic. In fact, instructographics are incredibly popular on Pinterest.

5. Slice it up into Smaller Pieces

We’ve been experimenting with breaking up our infographics into several smaller images rather than one long-form graphic. The value in doing this is that you have useful, bite-sized nuggets of information that can easily be shared on Twitter (which will display in the stream). These types of things also do well when published on imgur and posted on a relevant subreddit. If you have an infographic with 10 data points, you could break it into 10 separate images for each piece of data, and then promote those images separately by writing a separate blog post about each or sharing them on social media.

Here is an example of a tutoring firm taking a dynamic content piece and creating separate graphics from it.

6. Turn it into a Story with Storify

Storify is an underused tool for combining several pieces of media into a cohesive story. You can use Storify to build a curated story around your content. With their platform, you pull elements from your content piece and enrich them with relevant YouTube videos, tweets, articles, and images. Here are examples from MSNBC, which routinely receives thousands of views on their Storify stories.

7. Schedule it for Updates and/or Re-promotion

When you create content, it is easy to get caught up in the wave of excitement at launch and then shift focus to other projects as that excitement wanes. This can lead to a trail littered with neglected, aging content. But if you have a content calendar, a couple of small additions can ensure that your content continues to be an asset to the company even if it is no longer the focus. In your content calendar, you’ll want to note two things:

1) When the content should be updated next (if it is not evergreen)

2) When to re-promote the content on social channels

3) Those simple additions will ensure that content remains fresh and is re-promoted to keep continual visits coming to it.

8. Write a Third-Party Blog Post About It 

The old saying "If you build it, they will come" doesn't always apply to content. So, I say go to them and then build it. Take your content to an established community and write about it. Set up shop on Medium.com and write content there, or find an industry blog and pitch them an article for their audience. This strategy will ensure that your content, in its new form, will get further exposure to your exact target market.

By using just a few of these promotion tactics, you can get a lot more mileage out of your content that you put so much time and effort into making.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to turn this post into a slide deck, video, and instructographic.

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