Repurposing Content Guide: Best Practices, Tips, and Real-World Examples

What is content repurposing?

Content repurposing is taking a piece of content and recycling it for something else, usually via another platform. 

For example, taking a successful evergreen blog post and pulling quotes from it to create an Instagram feed post, or turning the content into an email course. The original content was repurposed into something new. 

This process helps to create a whole wealth of content from a singular piece, which if you ask me, is the definition of work smarter, not harder. 😉

Due to the distinct nature of each platform, different types of content outperform others. Be mindful of this when deciding how you will be repurposing it and where it will be posted.

How do you identify which pieces of content to repurpose?

Repurposing content can help your team expand its capacity without the extra work. There are a few ways to decide which pieces of content can be repurposed for the best results.

• Use Google Analytics to identify the best-performing articles.
• Do a domain search in BuzzSumo to find and breathe new life into your most engaging content. 
• Tap into current trends by checking cross-platform for the content and content types your audience is engaging most with.
• Reflect back on previous successes and what your audience enjoyed.
• Locate your best-performing podcast, video, or social media post (It doesn’t have to be a blog article!)

Now that you have a list of potential pieces of content to repurpose you can double-check Evergreen Scores and total engagement across different channels, in BuzzSumo’s Content Analyzer. 

The key to creating a successful repurposing strategy is to use evergreen content – ie. content that is always relevant (as opposed to seasonal). The reason for this is to create even more content that can be refreshed and recycled continuously while staying on brand. 

How to repurpose content across platforms

Repurposing content has grown in recent years, especially with the rise of new content platforms (such as TikTok). This just means that your content can be transformed into many new formats. 

Determining the best content type for repurposing

Now that you are equipped with a list of content to repurpose, you need to decide which format to convert it to. 

So it makes sense to take a look at which format is the most engaging, and start with that.

BuzzSumo's Content Analyzer can help here.

It shows you the most engaging content types for any keyword or topic.

Once you've found the most engaging content type, you can refresh the report with a filter applied, to hone in on that content format.

This will let you deep-dive into the best networks to publish on, best content length, and best day of the week to post, so that you know exactly how to create and distribute your repurposed content!

Content types are always evolving, and some formats perform better than others on specific platforms. The type of content that works best for your audience also might not be what works for others. 

This is an opportunity to get creative and test a few options. Let's consider the different types of content that can be created.

Examples of successful content repurposing

PDF to online course

Semrush transformed its Ultimate Guide for Content Marketers into an online course. According to their site, they have had over 8000 registrations and claim it to be a big success. 

Artwork to NFT

Beeple is an American artist who created an NFT compiling 13 years of sketches into a collage. This NFT sold for $69 million at Christie's.

Alexa Meade is an artist that works with body painting. She has successfully transformed her work into NFTs which sell at auctions regularly.

Blog post to YouTube video

Backlinko took their popular on-page SEO guide and repurposed it into a YouTube video. While the guide was doing great, it didn't take off until the video was created.

According to Ahrefs, the article received a boost of organic traffic after the video's publish date.

On YouTube, the video was watched over 250k times, received nearly 600 comments, and over 6k likes. I would call that a success!

When looking into the engagement of this article with BuzzSumo's Content Analyzer, we noticed that it has a very high Evergreen Score which makes it a great candidate for repurposing.

Blog post to presentation

This examples goes against some of the advice above. Copyblogger took a blog article that was receiving very little organic traffic and repurposed it into a presentation on SlideShare. As of 2022, it has received over 100,000 views in its new form.

Sometimes the original piece might have been in a format that was not well received by your audience. If you know the quality and content is there, try, try again.

Blog post to infographic to Pinterest

Almost any search on Pinterest will result in at least a few infographics that were created to promote a blog post. This is especially popular in SEO, content marketing, and blogging. These posts on Pinterest can be powerful drivers of traffic to your website and they can also rank in search results.

YouTube video to Instagram Reels, TikTok, and Facebook

Cheryl Porter, a vocal coach selling singing courses, excels at content repurposing. YouTube videos get turned into several short vertical videos which are then used on TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook.

One of her latest YouTube videos hit 4 million views in less than a month. She then took that video and repurposed it across platforms to amass very impressive engagements and stats.

She received over 28 million views across platforms, over 21 million likes, and 17,000+ comments. All of this from one piece of content repurposed. If she had never posted it elsewhere she would have missed out on over 20 million views.

Are you ready to repurpose some content?

Try BuzzSumo’s Content Discovery tool for free right now to uncover real-time ideas for repurposing content!