How to Turn One Blog Post into Multiple Pieces of Content
A blog is one of the primary pillars of any content marketing strategy. Whether you’re focusing on the attract or delight stage of the inbound funnel, your blog should offer helpful resources to educate and inform people about topics related to your business and the products/services you provide.
According to HubSpot, B2B marketers that have a blog they update regularly receive 67% more leads than those that do not. A blog has tremendous SEO benefits as well if you’re posting high-quality content on a regular basis.
As with most businesses today, there’s a good chance you have a defined strategy for your blog.
You may have an editorial calendar laying out how many blogs you publish per week and what topics you’re going to cover throughout the year.
From a blog distribution standpoint, you’ve probably mapped out a social media promotion plan, figured out your outreach strategy, and identified paid marketing avenues to drive targeted traffic.
For most businesses, this is a set approach: create blog content and then distribute it on various marketing channels.
While that’s a novel way to approach a blog and its promotion, there’s one key ingredient missing: repurposing.
What does repurposing a blog really mean?
Repurposing a blog is a way to extend its impact by creating multiple pieces of content tailored to different platforms and targeted for various forms of consumption (audio, video, images).
In simpler terms, repurposing allows you to breathe new life into a blog by ensuring that its available in different forms and formats so that your audience can consume it when they want and how they want.
Why should your business repurpose a blog?
Repurposing your blog has several benefits for your business:
- It allows for a variety of content — giving your business an edge over the competition.
- People consume information in many ways. Repurposing makes your blog appealing to your target audience by making it accessible.
- It ensures you are on top of trends.
- By repurposing a blog, your content becomes versatile. It reaches an audience at the right place and at the right time.
- It offers multiple ways of engaging your audience.
Now, there are multiple ways you can repurpose your blog. Your only limitation is your imagination.
However, to get started here’s a list of five unique and FAST ways you can repurpose your blog for success.
Let’s get started.
1. Create Videos
Ask any marketer what is their #1 content priority in 2018, and the majority will hint towards videos. According to Animoto, 64% of consumers say watching a marketing video on Facebook has influenced a purchase decision of theirs in the last month.
Consumers LOVE videos and marketers are responding to this with various forms of video content. But in what ways can you use videos to repurpose your blogs — fast and on a budget?
Take Hearst Bay Area as an example: Last year, the team began implementing more video content into their strategy. This led to more videos highlighting the best parts of a blog, all in a fun and engaging way.
Here’s a step by step approach that you can use to create high-quality videos out of your blogs:
- Identify your top performing blog content: Power up Google analytics and identify the blog that’s driving a lot of traction.
- Create a video storyboard: A storyboard is vital before you jump into the actual creation. What’s the flow like? What text are you going to use? Since you already have the majority of this content in your blog, this will be an easy but a necessary exercise.
- Identify the tool (one-time activity): If you are looking for a free solution, I highly recommend Lumen5.com. It does a great job of converting your existing blogs into short videos that you can use for marketing. You can also replace images or change copy as necessary.
However, if you are looking for full creative control, I recommend Adobe After Effects or Adobe Premiere Pro. You can use them to create high-quality videos that are true to your brand and style. Decide on a template using these tools and work your way towards a video for all your blog content. - Publish and repeat: The last step is to publish and repeat the process of creating high-quality video content for other high performing blog posts.
Pro tip: Run a retargeting campaign of the video to people who visited your blog.
2. Get Creative with Your Creative
It’s crucial to think of every blog post as part of a social campaign. Today, putting out a post about the blog or simply publishing a link to it on social media just doesn’t cut it.
Consider how digital marketing consultant Nick Eagle promotes his blog on his social channels.
Each of his blog posts is adapted into multiple creatives (and videos) that are then spread out over a month in the form of a digital campaign.
He converts the most important parts of his blogs into snackable social media graphics. These are easily shareable and help gain traction.
For your business, here a few ways you can achieve this:
- Highlight quotes from the blog and convert them into a graphic
- Convert the blog into an infographic
- Make a graphic on a statistic used in the blog
Every time you create a blog, remember to put some of these or all as part of your digital campaign.
3. Make Interactive Instagram Stories
Instagram stories are powerful. They are engaging, short, and give everyone an interactive way to engage with a brand. If you haven’t yet, we highly recommend developing a content strategy for Instagram stories.
Here are some ways you can maximize your blogs’ impact using Instagram stories:
- Create interactive polls
- Ask questions (Stories version of Ask Me Anything)
- Use GIFs (over multiple stories) to highlight a blog’s main point
- Make a series of posts that take the user through a blog — enough to make them interested in reading more about it.
- Post screengrabs of the best part of your blog and share it as a story
For inspiration, I highly recommend you check out HubSpot’s Instagram.
4. Release an Audio Version of the Blog
Google loves content that offers in-depth insights about a particular topic. As a result, a lot of blogs focus on creating content that’s over 2000 words or even more.
While people enjoy reading articles, they also love listening to it. Which is why we recommend creating high-quality audio content for your blog.
The easiest way (without any investment) to do this is to use the Anchor app where you can:
- Record the audio version of the blog
- Share it within the Anchor community
- Export it as a video to share it on social media
Pro tip: Embed your audio in your blog as well.
Alternatively, you can record the audio using professional equipment — or purchase a Lapel mic — and use Adobe After Effects to convert that audio into a video. You’ll have a social-ready video in no time!
Lastly, you can take this to the next level and do a full podcast on it. You can invite other industry experts or the people you have featured on your blog to get on a quick 10-minute podcast with your team.
Deliver an audio experience, and people will love your business for it!
5. Go Live with Experts
Whether you’re using Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter, live video is always a great way to engage your audience.
Live video opens up your business to the community in a way that invites them to participate in conversations with you. But how can you use it for your blog?
Imagine you wrote a blog on the upcoming trends in your industry. You can get an expert or two to host a live video session with your community inviting them to share the trends they think will be significant.
You can also use this as an opportunity to share more information about your business, the blog you wrote, and your expertise in the area.
Live video enables a two-way conversation with your audience. It’s like your readers commenting on your blog and you answering their questions as the expert, just in a live video format.
Conclusion
Stop retiring a blog after you have posted it as a link on social media or sent an email in your weekly newsletter. A blog is more than that. Open it up, remix it, and don’t forget to do more with it.
What are some of the ways you are excited to experiment? Tell me in the comments below.
