Marketing a business online can take many different forms, use various types of media and focus on a range of digital platforms and networks. But irrespective of where your main focus lies in the online marketing landscape, creating great written content will be a significant part of that mix. However, producing popular, informative, engaging content takes time and effort. It also takes creativity to come up with new ideas time and again. And that is one of the issues with content marketing… generating new ideas on a regular basis.
You can, of course, rely on current news to help generate ideas but then your content will not be “evergreen” and won’t still be relevant in a year’s time or in several years’ time. Meaning you will be on a permanent treadmill of content production.
So if you want to produce timeless or evergreen content (at least much of the time if not all the time), is there a way of making that content work harder for you?
Image Source: Ditto Digital
Content Repurposing
Re-purposing content is a great way of leveraging every single idea generated in your content marketing process and boosting your online marketing with little extra effort. By first analysing which is the most popular content you have already published you will be able to re-engage with your existing audience and reach new audiences with less effort. That’s because you will already know which content is most popular; and whilst it would be nice to think that all of your content is popular the reality is simply that it is not. Some content just never hits the right note to engage an audience, no matter how well written.
Finding the content worth re-purposing
Let’s have a look at the easiest way of determining which written content in the form of blog posts or articles is worth repurposing. This is with 2 free Google tools:
- Google Search Console
- Google Analytics
Google Search Console helps discover which pages on a website are attracting the most links. If other websites are linking to your content then that is a sure sign of it’s popularity. Take an example of a small business that regularly researches and publishes a price comparison chart for their particular industry. Data from Search Console consistently shows that visitors are interested in comparing prices. That’s perhaps no surprise but the data backs up that common notion.
Google Analytics goes on to provide evidence of how people are interacting with the content. How long do they spend reading it, for example, where they are located, which other pages they go on to read etc. You can use this information to help decide which pieces of content will be best for re-purposing.
Other Analytics Tools
There are other (paid) analytics tools such as HockeyStack that can provide yet more information about which content will help you to achieve your content marketing goals. Which content results in the most sales or the most sign-ups, for instance. Or how much revenue you make from actions originating from a particular blog post. Tools like HockeyStack provide a funnel analysis that shows a clear step-by-step view of every user journey on your website. Yet more data indicating which content is engaging visitors and converting then into customers.
Tools to help with repurposing
Once you know which content is most worth re-purposing you can use this information to leverage the ideas that are most popular to generate yet more popular content. And there are more tools that can make the re-purposing process simpler. Here are just some of them…
Airstory
Make notes, save drafts and related content all in one place that you can share with your team. There is a good free version although you will get more features with the paid version. It has an easy-to-use drag-and-drop system so if you are used to task management tools like Trello you will feel right at home with Airstory. It is particularly helpful when repurposing content because you can create new layouts and resources so existing content can be served in a totally new format.
BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is one of the most popular content monitoring tools because it offers insight into content popularity on social media. It also enables filtering based on different content types such as blog posts, videos or infographics. Plus it’s also handy for finding experts and influencers on any subject you can think of if you want to cite experts or build collaborative relationships.
Airtable
If you are still managing your content marketing strategy in an Excel spreadsheet then Airtable will change your life! You will be able to easily build a database of all your content, create a content calendar, brainstorm ideas and transform existing content. You can measure audience feedback and track metrics to help with continuous refinement of a content strategy. All within a single tool.
