Content Repurposing: The Complete Guide for Beginners

Have you ever published content that got an incredible amount of traffic, comments, backlinks, or shares?

However, you must have also noticed that the traction it got began to fade after a few weeks or months.

And it left you wondering: How do you replicate the same success once again?

The good news is that you don’t need to create something new.

Creating fresh pieces of content from scratch is time-consuming. But with content repurposing, you can repackage your content and put it in front of new audiences.

This guide will show you how to repurpose and recycle (in style!) your existing content in several ways while saving both time and money.

This guide is divided into the following sections. Click the links below to skip to a specific section:

• Why you should repurpose content
• How to decide which content to repurpose: A framework
• Tools to help you repurpose content
• Content repurposing tips and best practices
• How to repurpose blog posts
• How to repurpose long-form videos and webinars
• How to repurpose podcast episodes
• How to repurpose virtual events

When done right, content repurposing is the key to a positive content marketing ROI (return on investment). 

Here are the top three reasons why you should repurpose content:

Creating content takes time, and it’s also expensive. An average blog post, for example, takes more than four hours to write. You also need to devote more time editing the draft, creating visuals for the blog post, and uploading the polished piece to your CMS (content management system).

When you create content around an idea that resonates with your audience, it doesn’t have to end with a single piece. It would be best to get as much mileage from it as possible. Content repurposing makes this happen.  

Incorporating content repurposing in your content creation workflow means that you and your team will not need to create each piece of content from scratch.

Instead, you can use one piece as the foundation for other types of content like video, infographics, and social media posts. This makes scaling the process much easier. 

Different people have different preferences when consuming content. Some like to read, some would rather watch a video, and others would like to listen to audio content while they’re on the move. 

With repurposing, your content reaches a new set of prospects. For example, when you repurpose a blog post to a podcast, you’ll reach people who prefer listening more than reading. 

Now that you’ve understood the value of content repurposing, keep reading to learn how you can put it into practice.

Since evergreen content doesn’t get old fast, you get a long time to repackage it for different formats and platforms. 

Here’s how to identify the best topics to repurpose for your brand:

Browse through all the content pieces you have created so far and select the best ones in terms of quality and long-term relevance. 

These pieces should be interesting and valuable enough for your audience to consume on various online platforms. Before publishing, make sure to run the selected content pieces through a reliable grammar checker to ensure they are polished and error-free for maximum impact across diverse online platforms

Use Google Analytics to see which pages are driving the most traffic. You can do this by accessing the “landing pages” report. Go to Behavior > Site Content > Landing Pages.

Type in your website domain in a tool like Buzzsumo to check which of your pages have the most social media shares. 

As you go through all the reports generated by the above tools, you’ll see specific topics and pieces of content stick out. This will give you a good sense of what you can start repurposing. Plus, you’ll need some great tools to help with the process, which brings us to the next section.

Yes, there are hundreds of content repurposing tools available online.

But instead of building a complicated tool stack, pick two to three of the best apps that will meet most of your content repurposing needs.

Piktochart is a versatile graphic design tool. You can use just this one tool to repurpose your content into several visual formats such as presentations, infographics, social media graphics, and more. Try Piktochart for free.

Plus, it comes with drag-and-drop functionality and hundreds of readymade, customizable templates, allowing you to create stunning visuals without any design experience. 

For example, here’s how Socialinsider repurposed its written content into Instagram carousel graphics.

Like Piktochart lets you create any type of visual graphic, Piktochart Video is the swiss-army-knife of video creation. Piktochart Video is a powerful video recorder, trimmer, editor, and caption generator — all rolled into one. Try Piktochart Video for free.

Not just that. Despite having several useful features, it never gets overwhelming and takes seconds to learn.

You can use it to repurpose your written content into long-form or bite-sized videos, like those produced by Amy Woods, founder of Content 10x, a content repurposing agency.

If you have been blogging, conducting webinars, or podcasting for a long time, then you surely have enough content to create an ebook. Blurb’s BookWright is an ebook creator you can use to make downloadable PDF files from your existing content. 

Ruth Soukup, New York Times bestselling author, repurposed her blog posts on the Living Well Spending Less blog and turned them into an ebook — 31 Days To A Clutter-Free Life.

Audacity is a free audio recorder and editor. With this tool, you can read your written content aloud and turn it into an audio file or podcast episode. 

Copyblogger is a great example. They run a podcast called Rainmaker.FM, and regularly use their blog content for making new podcast episodes. 

Okay, time for action!

When it comes to content repurposing, the possibilities are endless. Here are our content repurposing tips and best practices that you can start implementing right away. 

Repurposing allows you to use and publish your content across many platforms. But just converting your content into a new format is not enough. 

Every platform has its specifications and quirks. It’s crucial to follow those to achieve the best results in terms of distribution and engagement.

For example, Facebook and Linkedin posts usually have just a couple or even no hashtags, whereas tweets and Instagram posts are expected to have plenty of hashtags. 

Similarly, every platform has its own preferences for video length, image dimensions, and the number of characters. So make sure to keep these specs in mind when posting content. 

Stasher is a good example. When the company tweeted about #WorldOceansDay, they kept the tweet short and to the point. 

In contrast, when they repurposed the same content for Instagram, they used it as a way to promote a live interview with a divemaster.

Syndicating (also known as republishing) is another great content repurposing tactic. 

You can publish your best-performing content on other platforms such as Medium and LinkedIn to reach a whole new market. 

Buffer, for example, republished their old blog posts on Medium, leading to a 1,215 percent growth in traffic.

Quora is one of the most popular question-and-answer websites. If you are active on Quora, you can turn your answers into other types of content, such as blog posts.

Again, Buffer has used this tactic with great success. Someone asked how to land an interview with the company. The COO answered the question, which was later turned into a blog post. 

Don’t let your white papers and reports just sit and collect dust. 

You can take their key takeaways and turn them into engaging social media graphics. 

For instance, here’s an Instagram post where Wyzowl shared highlights from one of their research reports. 

Creating blog posts from your research reports and white papers is another great way to maximize their potential. 

Hootsuite, for instance, plucked insights from their Digital 2021 Report and used them to craft a blog post and a video.

By repurposing the information from your book into your emails, you can kill two birds with one stone: Spread awareness for the book and keep your subscribers engaged. 

Productivity guru James Clear does this well. You can see snippets from his book Atomic Habits used in his newsletter regularly.

Content repurposing can help you scale guest posting.

Take an existing topic and use it as the base for writing guest posts for authority sites. You’re not duplicating the same content but extending it with different angles or additional details. You can also try another writing style for your guest post, like concise AP writing style to freshen it from the old post and reach a wider audience.

For example, when Brian Dean wrote about the Skyscraper Technique more than five years ago, he used guest posting to spread awareness about the concept. He also published several guest posts that talked about the technique in whole new ways.

With some basic tips out of the way, let’s see some more ways to repurpose the most popular content formats. 

Blogging is one of the first and most popular types of content marketing. No wonder 54 percent of marketers report repurposing their blog posts.

Here’s how to make the most of each. 

Slideshow videos combine the familiarity of presentation slides with the engaging power of video.

For example, Julie Weishaar, a visual digital marketing specialist, transformed this blog post Mirror Mirror On The Wall, What’s The Best Visual Content of All? into a SlideShare presentation.

You can use Piktochart and content from a blog post to make multiple photos for Instagram and post them as one post. The post will then run like a slideshow. Here’s a great example from Adobe:

LinkedIn is useful for a lot more than just posting a link to your blog post.

You can use Piktochart to repackage your blog posts into short LinkedIn blurbs with engaging graphics. To understand better, look at this example from Shiv Narayanan, CEO of How to SaaS. With Piktochart’s LinkedIn post templates, you don’t have to make your LinkedIn visuals from scratch.

If you run an email newsletter, repurposing content is a no-brainer. You can insert full posts instead of just a link that risks not getting any traction. 

Maria Popova’s well-known newsletter — The Marginalian (formerly known as Brain Pickings) — has been following the same approach successfully for years.

Your blog posts can also be used as great ‘microblogs’ on other social media platforms like Instagram. And with Piktochart’s Instagram post templates, you can pair each post with a stunning visual.

Here’s an example from Work Brighter, a digital media company —  an Instagram post about resolution shaming that has been repurposed from a blog post of the same topic.

A LinkedIn carousel is another way to repurpose your blog posts in an engaging way.

Again, you can also use Piktochart to create LinkedIn posts that put you way ahead of others. Matt Higgins’ LinkedIn posts demonstrate this tactic really well. 

Who doesn’t know about Facebook?

Brand strategy and online business coach Fabi Paolini, for instance, often combines information from her blog posts with eye-catching visuals to post on Facebook. The Facebook post below is from one of her blog posts about setting and accomplishing business goals.

Piktochart has a wide selection of Facebook post templates you can pick from to repurpose your blog content.

Infographics that use a variety of colors can improve brand recognition by 80 percent and increase comprehension by up to 73 percent.

For these reasons, 67 percent of marketers are creating this type of content. You can do the same with Piktochart in less than 30 minutes.

Here’s an example of a blog post about graphic design trends here at Piktochart that we transformed into an infographic:

Podcasting is huge these days as podcasts are more accessible, allowing people to listen on the go.

With podcast listeners increasing by 29.5 percent in 2021 from 2018, you can’t go wrong with repurposing your blog post into an audio file.

For instance, entrepreneur and alignment coach Melyssa Griffin often makes audio files from her blog posts. Tools like Narro can help you convert your articles into podcast episodes. 

A lot of work goes into recording long videos and webinars, so you should squeeze out as much as you can out of them. Here’s how:

GIF is an image format with the ability to store multiple pictures and show them sequentially, causing an animated effect. GIFS are great for grabbing attention in landing pages, emails, blog posts, etc. 

Starbucks is great at using GIFs. Here’s an example.

To turn your long-form videos into GIFs, first split them into bite-sized videos. You can do this easily with Piktochart Video. After that, it’s just a matter of using any free video to GIF converter.  

Create a teaser or distribute takeaways from your long-form video or webinar on social media, along with attractive copy and eye-catching graphics created with Piktochart.

Need inspiration? Here’s an example from one of our social media posts promoting our webinar:

As we discussed, an Instagram carousel gives you the chance to post multiple videos or photos as a slideshow. You can create short clips with Piktochart Video and social media photos with Piktochart. Afterward, combine them to make carousels like this.

Long-form videos work great on YouTube but they may not perform well on other channels like Twitter and Facebook.

For this reason, it’s better to extract key moments from your long video and turn them into small clips with Piktochart Video.

For example, Brian Dean from Backlinko published an in-depth video on YouTube. But to repurpose it for LinkedIn, he created a short clip with the best takeaway from his long video.

Apart from short videos, you can also turn content from your long-form videos and webinars into bite-sized graphics for better engagement on social media. And who is better than Gary Vaynerchuck to demonstrate this in action!

Last but not least, a blog post is a prominent method to repurpose long videos and webinar recordings. It can communicate the granular, hard-to-remember details better than a video. 

The good news is that you can use Piktochart Video to automatically generate text from your video and polish it into an article in no time. 

Look no further than Moz’s Whiteboard Fridays to see this repurposing technique in action. They consistently turn their whiteboard videos into blog posts with transcriptions. 

Whether you want to build your brand, sell more products, or gain more listeners, diversifying your podcast content can do the trick.

Here’s how to save time and grow your podcast with content repurposing. 

You can use Piktochart to turn highlights of your podcast episodes or other audio content into attractive social media graphics and combine them into a carousel post to boost engagement.

Struggling with generating fresh content for email subscribers?

Repurpose your podcast content. Towel & Basin is great at this, as seen in the example below.

An audiogram is a small audio file turned into a video file. It’s great for sharing audio content as part of your social media marketing strategy. In fact, audiograms get five times as much traffic for the same ad spend on Facebook.

Intercom, a customer communications platform, often posts audiograms (extracted from their podcast episodes) on Twitter like this one episode where they interviewed Jay Baer, a marketing and customer experience expert.

The best way to create an audiogram is to record yourself on camera while creating your podcast. This way, you’ll have both audio and video of your content. You can extract prominent takeaways from your video with Piktochart Video to use as an audiogram. 

Another ideal approach to repurpose a podcast episode is to extract powerful quotes and insights from it. You can use these quotes as image quote posts that you create through Piktochart.  

For a real-world example, take a look at how we use a quote by one of our podcast guests to create an eye-catching social post for Facebook.

It’s a good idea to transcribe your podcast episodes and use them to craft text articles for those who prefer reading. 

This is what Marie Forleo does to her podcast episodes. Take a look at how she has repurposed a podcast episode with Tank Sinatra into a blog post. 

If you record your podcast episodes as videos, transcribing them becomes really easy with Piktochart Video.

Virtual events are easy to record. These recordings give you a treasure chest of content to extract and repurpose in different forms. Here at Piktochart, we have done this many times ourselves. Here’s how we repurposed our Business Storyteller Summit with 17 talks.

Videos of speakers who participated in a virtual event can bring in additional traffic. So we turned the talks from the virtual event into a series of videos into a YouTube playlist.

The different content clusters pulled from your virtual event can be used as material for blog posts. Here’s how we transcribed many of the talks from our virtual event using Piktochart Video. We then used the text to publish a blog post about ways to share your business story and about business storytelling in 2022.

We’ll repeat this. Bite-sized videos are your best bet for social media platforms. So we used Piktochart Video to make short clips from the sessions of our virtual event. This helped us create engaging updates for LinkedIn (like in the example below) and other channels. 

Ebooks let you create something tangible that your prospects can save on their device — perfect for lead generation. And you can use the report templates in Piktochart to make highly visual ebooks. 

For example, after our virtual event, we compiled insights from seven speakers into an ebook with highlights of the summit. 

Podcasts are wildly popular across every possible niche, so we also extracted audio content from many of the talks and repurposed them into podcast episodes, like this example.

Repurposing content can be a game-changer for your marketing strategy.

Every piece of content you repurpose ensures that more people get their hands on it. Furthermore, it lets you save time and shift your focus to content that’s already getting results.

It’s high time that you add content repurposing to your routine workflow. Go over your content library and see which content can be transformed into several assets.

Afterward, use Piktochart Video and Piktochart Visual to repurpose your most popular posts. Try Piktochart for free.

With a little bit of creativity, you can ensure that each content you create and repurpose will live up to its full potential and help increase your content marketing ROI.