Increase Your ROI with Content Repurposing

1. Intro: Hi, my name is Jessica Thiefels and I'm an Organic Content Marketer. What does that mean? It means I love writing. Unfortunately, I know a lot of people, including probably you who's watching right now, don't love writing. Feels like a fruitless effort. You spend hours and hours putting together a piece of content, maybe even days. Then what do you do with it? You share it on social media or it inevitably it's lost in a shuffle. You put it in an e-mail or newsletter where it gets tossed in between a few calls to actions and some product images. At the end of the day, you're not getting a lot for the work that you're putting in. That's where repurposing comes in. Repurposing is the process of taking one of these pieces of content that you've spent hours and hours creating and turning it into one, two, three other pieces of content. Let me give you an example. You might have a piece of content that's full of statistics and leadership quotes. It really represents your brand well, speaks to your target audience and your customers. You take that, you share it as you normally would, and then you extract the best parts of that blog post out and put them into another piece of content. That might be a social media post where you create a great branded graphic that has a statistic on it, that pushes your brand forward, that supports what you are doing. Maybe you create a leadership quote, social media image. That is a quote from your CEO and really speaks to who you are as a company. Those images can then be used for social media fodder. Then, you take one blog post and you have two, three, who knows four, five images, and all of a sudden you have five pieces of content that you can use for various marketing methods. When you think about your content in this way, you realize that you can actually get a lot more for your time. As someone who's worked in a startup and I work for myself. I think about content like this always, because my thought process is always, how can I provide the most value with what I'm doing, not only for myself but for my clients. The great thing is anyone can repurpose content, and most pieces of a content can be repurposed in some way. In this course, I'm going to teach you exactly how to do that. We're going to talk about six different ways to repurpose your content with one bonus idea. Each lesson is going to come with a project as well. So you can practice repurposing your content in the same way that we've talked about doing it. Along the way, I will share tips and tricks and ideas and things that you can use to make your repurposed content as great as it can be. I'd love if you wanted to share your projects in the comment section, I'm happy to share feedback, and I'm sure other students would love to see what you're doing as well. I hope you'll stick with us and I look forward to seeing you in lesson 1. 2. Turn Your Content Into Social Media Images : Hi, welcome to Lesson 1. Today we're talking about repurposing your content as social media images. I talked a little bit about this in the intro, but I wanted to dive in a little bit more to give you an example of what I mean. What I mean when I say strain your content into social media images, is think infographic but smaller. Instead of a number of different data points and statistics and information, it's just one. The value in this is really for your social media posting. Not only to images really help you cut through the clutter a lot more than just say, a regular link post or regular texts post, but studies have shown that posts with images actually drive five times the amount of engagement, allowing you to prove value, not just with content, but now also with the social media work that you're doing. As you're looking for a piece of content for this, you're going to want to find something that is really stat heavy, has some great executive quotes or has a great customer quote. Now remember, it doesn't have to be a really full piece of content, if you just have a piece of content with one great stamp, that's enough. An example of this to help you see what I mean. I started a women in cybersecurity series for this company that I worked for. For each article I pull out a really great quote that really highlights that female who we're featuring that week. The value in this for us is not only are we highlighting someone who's really awesome and doing really great things, but we're also showing that we support women in cybersecurity and women in technology, which if you're not an industry, you may not know, but it's actually something that's a bit of a hot topic right now. As a community manager, this is something I do all the time. The way that I use it is. If you're in social media management, you know that you want to push your content more than once. You don't just want to post it once and then collect dust. So often what I'll do is I'll post the article first just as a link, and then the second time I posted, I'll post it with the image. So it looks different to our followers, has a bit of a different feel to it, but I'm still promoting the same piece of content yet again. In this way, I'm driving a different type of engagement may be even more engagement. As you're looking to create these images, I have a few recommendations for tools. The one that I've been using for a long time is actually called PhotoScape. It's called PhotoScape X for Macs, and it's a completely free tool. I don't use Adobe. I've never learned how to use Photoshop, but from the little that I know of that tool, I know that PhotoScape operates very similarly. There are confusing layers or anything like that. But you can completely build images either from scratch or you can edit image that you already have. The other tool that I really like to use, that actually just discovered is called Canva. Canva is all online while PhotoScape is downloaded to your computer, and the thing I really love about Canva is the built in resources and graphics and, things that they have to use to create your images. So with PhotoScape, I might search on Google for a free PNG of a pencil. With Canva, I can just search their platform and find a free PNG of a pencil. Well, some things are available only for pro accounts and paid accounts. There are a lot of free options. That might be a really great place to start because you have a little help, you're not doing as much on your own. Then if you wanted to customize more, you could either upgrade your account on Canva or you could also try PhotoScape. So your project today is to create a social media image. If you don't have a great article for this just yet, feel free to go ahead and grab a statistic that really represent your brand and the value of your brand, or grab and executive quote, I'm sure you can find one in a press release, and just create the image anyway, ultimately, you want to create something that's going to be valuable beyond this course. Go ahead, get started, and I look forward to seeing what you do. 3. Blog Posts with Branded Content : Hi, welcome to Lesson 2. Today we're talking about creating educational content, educational blog posts with branded content. That sounds weird because I made up the name, but let's talk about it. what I mean by this is we're looking at re-purposing in a slightly different way. Content comes in lots of different forms. We have blog posts of course in articles, but you probably also have social media images which you created during our last lesson. You also probably have Facebook live videos or YouTube videos, or Instagram posts. All of that is content that we also don't want to collect dust. You also want to re-purpose that because you're spending time to schedule It, maybe even create especially if you're creating videos. This reverse re-purposing is a way of using that content in a blog post that shows that you walk the walk and talk the talk, while furthering your brand. As you're looking for a piece of content for this, I recommend thinking about it in two ways. One way is that you could think, I know we have a great series of YouTube videos that could be put into a blog post and then built out to be a greater, larger and even more educational piece of content. The other way of thinking about it is, I have this constant idea that I've been wanting to do for awhile and now that I think about it, with some really great continental for media I can use as examples within that blog post. Now, here's an example of something that I've used this width. I also have a fitness brand on this body fitness. It's an online magazine for women and I started writing this piece of content called, Gym equipment that people don't usually use. As a personal trainer something I realize a lot that there's a lot of things I use that people never touched because it's confusing to them or they're not sure what to do with it. As I started writing this content, I went to my Instagram page to grab a singular example, and when I did that, I realized I actually have a ton of great videos using all of these different pieces of equipment. When I started actually building the post around the videos that I had. As you'll see in the example I have a number of different videos, usually at least one, but usually two or three for each piece of equipment. I thought to myself, this is really great because not only am I providing more value, readers can immediately see the example of what I mean when I'm talking about using that piece of equipment. But it's also helping drive followers. At the time, I was really looking to boost my brand and build followers on my Instagram page, and it was a perfect way to highlight the awesome things that I was doing on Instagram. It's your turn to do the same thing. Start by thinking one or the other. Do you have social media or other content that you know exist that you think you could turn into a blog post? Mind you, this content could also be Survey or pull that you recently did. That's great content to put into something like this showing that you walk the walk and talk the talk, or vice versa or there's a piece of content that you've been wanting to create that as you think about it, you realize you have some really great assets that you can put it in there to make the content more educational and more valuable for the reader. That's your job. Go ahead and get started on that. Again, feel free to ask any comment, ask any questions in the comments. I'm happy to share feedback and give you ideas and let's see what you've put together. 4. Content-Based Emails : Hi, welcome to lesson number 3. Today we're talking about creating content-based e-mails. Now, why do you care about creating content-based e-mails? Here's the thing. Your subscribers don't always want to be getting sales e-mail. They don't always want to be asked to purchase something. Content-based e-mails allows you to stay in touch with them, stay top of mind, while also providing value outside of asking them to purchase something. Content-based e-mails can take a number of different forms and you've probably seen all different kinds. There's probably dozens of them sitting in your e-mail inbox right now. It might be a list of links, suggested reading. It could be monthly newsletter with a bunch of your new favorite blog posts from that month. In this case, we're actually talking about e-mails with the content directly inside of it. In this way, we're driving value without asking them to do something like click to a new blog post to go read it. To choose this content, we're actually going to start with the data. Head into Google Analytics or whatever tool it is that you use to track traffic and whatever with your blog. In this case, I'm going to talk about Google Analytics. So you're going to head into Google Analytics and you're going to navigate on the left-hand side to behavior, then site content, then content drill down. Now you have to decide how you want to parse out this data, really mostly just based on the data. You could look at your top most visited blog post of the month. You can look at your most visited blog post of this time, last year. Whatever seems to make more sense for this particular e-mail. Then you want to take that content that you already have in mind and consider how you can tweak it for the current time, for the season that you're currently in or a holiday. For example, a jewelry store may have their top blog post be about picking up diamonds. But they realized that next month is Valentine's Day. They could take that blogposts about diamonds and repurpose it, or tweak it a little bit, and then have it be focused on Valentine's Day. So suddenly there's more value for the reader and you are being timely and providing content that's really helpful. In the end, perhaps there's one of their subscribers has been getting these e-mails and he's thinking about proposing to his girlfriend, and suddenly he thinks of your brand, because you've been getting these really great valuable content from you, and he thinks, wow, they really taught me a lot, I should give them a call and see what they have for ring options. Now, that's one example. I actually have another example to show you from a really good friend of mine who recently started a Yoga therapy program. She sends really great content e-mails that I love getting. In this particular e-mail, she's talking about your foundation in the value of your feet. What's really cool when I really liked though, is that she immediately shares three ways to understand what she's talking about, three different Yoga poses that you could do right then and right there. That's a great value based content e-mail that's helping the audience, helping the subscribers, providing more value than simply asking to sign up for her program. Now it's your turn to do the same thing. Go ahead. Head into your Analytics account whether you use GA or another platform, and find your number one article. Then, think about ways that you can repurpose that in an e-mail, this week or this month, or maybe during your busiest season, maybe that's the summer or the fall. As always, please don't hesitate to ask questions in the comments and share what you're doing. I'd love to provide feedback. 5. Educational Customer Materials : Hi, welcome to lesson four. Today, we're talking about creating educational customer materials with re-purposing. At the beginning, I talked a little bit about the struggle of trying to provide value with the content you're creating. One way to do that is to directly tie it to sales or customer experience. In this way, we're talking about creating videos, if you have the resources or simply a PDF based on content that you've already created. It's important that you use a very clear strategy when choosing this content. It needs to be a piece of content that you can very naturally fit your product in to support the education that you're giving to the customers. Let me give you an example. An email marketing company has a really great blog post about the best times to send emails, or rather how choosing the best timing is critical to the success of their email marketing campaign. They take this blog post put it into a PDF and then they start inserting their product in to show customers that not only is it important to choose the timing very strategically, but that your product is actually going to help them do that. One part might be talking about how choosing the timing can be really challenging. It's based on the industry, and the type of content in the email and this is where you insert your product. Hey, here's the thing. We also offer auto scheduling that uses industry-based data to choose the most optimal time to send your email. Now, as you can see, not only are you providing education, teaching the customer something they might not have known, but you're also saying, look, our products can actually help you do this better than you already are. That is where you provide the ROI. This type of sales material can be used during the sales process, and maybe even during on-boarding. Perhaps you can even directly tie this content to specific sales that have been made and all of a sudden, you're showing a lot of value with content that you didn't have to do a lot to put together, after having created it in the first place. This is a great example of what this could look like for you. As you can see, this is a really well-designed PDF and they're talking about something similar. They're talking about sending your emails at the right time. They're speaking to an enterprise audience that sends hundreds, if not thousands, of emails a day in a week. As you can see, they did something very similar to what we just talked about. They talk about the value of doing something that uses really great graphic, which could be created after in the re-purposing process as you realize what you need to make this content stand out in this way. Then at the bottom, they insert themselves into the conversation saying, look, we can help you do this. This is what our product does. You're using blog content to educate your customer while inserting your product or service, to show them that you can actually help them be better at that or do that better. Now your job right now, is to find the best piece of content to start with. It may not even be your most popular article and that's okay. It just needs to be something that you can promote your brand through very naturally and strategically. Go ahead and get started with that. Don't hesitate to ask me questions. I'm happy to take a look at the blog posts and let you know if I think it would be a great fit for this. In either way, I look forward to providing feedback, and seeing what you put together. 6. Gated Content: Hi, welcome to Lesson 5. Today we're talking about gated content. What do I mean when I say gated content? I mean an e-book or a PDF, or some sort of downloadable resource that people can only access once they've input certain information. So you've probably seen this before, maybe a report or a survey that you want to access that you can only get when you input your e-mail address, phone number, name, whatever it is. Now the really great thing about re-purposing your content in this way is twofold. The first being, downloadable content is a lot softer of a sale than asking someone to purchase your products straight out. There's less friction and so you're likely to have some pretty good success with it. The second part is that if your sales and data are very well integrated, you're going to be able to track the success of that piece of content in terms of direct ROI, whether that be leads or sales rate through the whole track. So you can see when they downloaded it and then if they turned into a lead and then if they turned into a sale. In that way, you're showing immediate value from the content that you've created. In terms of choosing content for this, there are two ways you could go about it. If you've already done a series of blog posts, that may be a great option. The point is, is that you want to choose blog posts that all fit under the same theme. If you have not done a series of blog posts, that's totally fine. You've likely run content, a number of pieces of content on a very similar theme. So let me show you an example. For a company that I worked for, we created a PDF or an e-book about fundraising with us. We wanted to use it in two ways. We wanted potential people who are thinking about doing fundraisers with us to see how easy it is to do and see all the process works. We also wanted people who had already said that they wanted to work with us. We wanted it to be a resource for them. So it was a lead driving tool and an educational customer material. So in that way you can actually re-purpose the idea we just recently talked about to also create gated piece of content. So as you can see for the example that I'm giving you, you see that we created a really simple title page. We created a table of contents, puts together a nice introduction, and then we have a series of chapters. In each of those chapters is one blog post. So it was pretty easy to put together, added some content, hold some content out, added a few design elements to make it aesthetically pleasing, something that people wanted to read and look at it and share. Then finally, we created a landing page for it. You definitely want to do this because this is how you're going to get the leads. We created that landing page and then shared it on social media and e-mail marketing. I think we even put some promotion $ behind it and then we were able to really easily track leads that came from that one particular source. Now your job is going to be to start with finding the best blog posts. I recommend starting instead of at the blog post at the theme level. So what would be e-books or PDFs or whatever it is that would be most valuable to your potential customer base. So I would create maybe a list of three to five topics and then dig into your content. What articles do you have that fit into that topic and that support that topic? Make a list of those blog posts. So let's say the topic you love most only at really to supporting blog posts versus one that you might not have been super excited about but it has like six great blog was full of awesome content. That's the one you're going to want to choose because you want to put the least amount of work in, that's the point with re-purposing. You don't want to be doing a lot of extra work. You want to take what you already have and make it into something that's also great. So go ahead, start with topics, start brainstorming, maybe even use SEO keywords as your guide here and then start digging up the blog posts and see what you can find, what you can put together. Don't hesitate to ask any questions in the comments. As always, I'm happy to answer your questions. Happy to share feedback, whatever it is and I'm excited to see what awesome ideas we come up with. 7. Round-Up Guides: Hi, welcome to lesson number 6. Today we're talking about creating a roundup guide. This is another name that I made up, so let me explain. A roundup guide is actually really simple. It's just basically a list of resources, based on one specific theme or topic. The value in doing this with re-purposing, there's actually two great reasons. The first is that, for SEO, you want to be linking both offsite and internally, and when you're linking offsite, you want to be linking to related high value websites. When you link internally, it helps Google see that you create a lot of content on similar topics, which means you must be an expert in that topic. That's simplifying it but to give you an idea of how that process works. The second reason is that when it comes time to actually share the content, because you're mentioning a number of different brands, you can tag those brands in your social media posts. That then alerts them. When they see they'd been included in your guide, they may be inclined to also share it. You're able to reach outside of your direct community to promote this piece of content, which is really awesome and not always easy to do. As you're putting content together, keep this in mind. You may want to include links from influencers in the space. It gives you a chance to directly interact with them. As you're putting the content together, in addition to thinking about influencers that you may want to include for outside links, you need to think about topics or find a topic that's going to allow you to include the most links from your own blog. Again, like that downloadable resource or PDF, you want to start on the topic level and then round up how many blog posts you can. In let's say a list of 20, you'd want at least five of those to be from your own website. Let me give you an example of what I mean. An outdoors blog might be creating a blog post called 20 best summer hikes for New England. They have five really great New England hikes that they've already written up as guides. Perfect. They pop those in there, and then they go out and they look for other really great guides, guides that they themselves like, and again, that may be created by big brands or influencers in their space that they want to be able to engage with. They then put that together into their blog post, publish it, promote it, usual thing. Let me give you another example of one that I've actually done personally, and this is for an education company that I worked for, and we do a lot of content on Google. It does really well with our audience. I'm always trying to think of different ways to talk about using Google in the classroom. There are actually a lot of influencers in that particular space. I can name five off the top of my head that create really great content about using Google in the classroom that people love. They have huge followings and they have tons of content. I went through and found some of our really great Google content. I broke the article up, as you can see, into sections. I prefer that just it's very scannable. Then I peppered in our content in addition to the content from these other people and companies. Another cool thing about this too, if you set it up the way I did, where it shows the name of the website that it's coming from, it can also give you a little bit of a brand boost because they see your content listed alongside other really great brands that your readers value and like reading. That's just another way to elevate yourself with your content and repurposing. Now it's your job to start at the theme level. What themes do you have a hunch that you have a lot of content about? Do exactly like you did with the PDF. Start listing the blog posts and find out which theme has at least five really great links that you can include. Then spend some time sourcing all the other links that you're going to include, and simply put it together in a list with an intro. Super easy, really highly valuable. As you do this more, you'll start to realize what your audience likes more, and that will help you create, get even better with each time you do this, and as you create more content, you have more repurpose. It all feeds itself really nicely. Again, don't hesitate to ask questions. Share your finished blog posts with us in the comments. I would really love to see what you've been doing, and I look forward to seeing you for our final lesson. 8. Bonus: Turning Content Into Ads : Hi, welcome to lesson number 7 our last lesson of the course. I'm treating this as a bonus lesson because we're talking about re-purposing content and turning them into ads. But not everybody does paid advertising. Let's be honest, ads don't exactly constitute as content. But in terms of driving value from your content, this could be a really great way to do it because ads obviously can directly correlate to sales. What do I mean when I say re-purposing content for ads? I mean using a great piece of content and I'll tell you how to choose that content as the backbone for a new ad campaign. This is great for when you feel like you've run out of good ideas or you need something fresh. Instead of racking your brain about what to do, you simply find a great piece of content and use that as the resource. So to find that content, you're going to head again into Google Analytic or your preferred analytic tools that you use in your company. You're going to head to, again the content drill down and see which piece of content was your number 1 content for 3-6 months organically. Now organic is the important part here, because organic traffic comes from people searching for that content or that topic and Google are search engines, not from you pushing the content out to your community. So this is an inclination that people are already looking for this and they're already interested in it. You can talk about it and you can offer it. Let's use an example here. Let's use a yoga studio. A yoga studio may head into analytic and see that their prenatal yoga blog post has done consistently well. Number 1 from organic traffic for the last six months. Great. They also have a prenatal yoga class, even better. What they're going to do is turn that blog post into a prenatal yoga campaign. For example, their headline might be, don't let back pain stop you from enjoying the magic of pregnancy. They then use the image from the blog post as their image in the ad and then they have some sort of headline or call to action that might be, check out our prenatal yoga class or see how great prenatally yoga feels for you. Then they're going to test over and over again. That's what you do if your impede marketing you know, you're always testing. So that's where your last project comes in. If you so choose to play around with this, you're going to head into analytic and find that number 1 organic blog posts for the last 3-6 months. You're then going to take that blog posts, go into a spreadsheet and write down three different versions of a headline of a caption and a call to action or headline. Then you're going to test those with the image that you have from the blog post. You may build that or include other keywords. Include if you use Google AdWords, include negative keywords as you're supposed to, and slowly build out a campaign that may or may not be successful. If it is successful, great. This is a process that you should use more often. As always, don't hesitate to ask questions. I am not a paid advertising expert. However, I'm more than happy to give you some suggestions or to consults on your wording or the topics that you're choosing. Please head to the comments and let me know what you think. 9. Conclusion: Well, that's it. You've completed the course and you're officially ready to repurpose content to increase your ROI and value. I'm really excited to have been able to share these ideas with you, and I wanted to just give a few reminders as you embark on repurposing yourself. The first thing to remember is that this is supposed to be easy and quick. You're not supposed to be spending a lot of time on it. You've already put a lot of time into the initial piece of content that you're now repurposing. As such, it's really important that you choose the best content for the way that you're repurposing it. For with the e-book, it's critical that you choose content that most effectively supports that topic or theme. Because that way you're doing minimal writing and you're just inserting blog posts, inner chapters, tweaking things here and there, and adding some graphics. It's also important to remember to find ways to repurpose your content that can directly be tied to return on investment or ROI. This really helps you show the value of your content. Some of those ideas that we talked about in this course, include the paid ads, the educational customer materials, and the gated e-book. I want you to remember that content is everything from blog posts to YouTube videos, to social media or Instagram posts, and you want to find ways to always be repurposing all of this content. You put time into all these things that you put out into the world. You don't want to let any of them just sit there. Which brings me to my final point, which is what I love most about repurposing, which is that it really all feeds itself and is really beautiful cycle. For example, that Valentine's Day e-mail could then be repurposed again into social media graphic with a statistic about the most popular engagement rings. It can also be turned into then a social ad campaign, driving leads and sales during Valentine's Day. Keep all that in mind as you start repurposing yourself, and please don't hesitate to reach out to me. You can tweet me and I look forward to connecting with you again, answering your questions, chatting in the comments, and hopefully we'll get to work together again soon.