4 Ways to Repurpose and Personalize Content

If you’re a content creator, you probably spend a significant amount of time brainstorming, researching, drafting, and publishing fresh ideas regularly. There is a small sigh of relief once the piece is officially published, but it’s not long before you are on to the next idea or project. However, you don't always need to create more content, but rather smarter content! For example, you may look at a video, eBook, or blog post and see just a single piece, but there is an opportunity to repurpose or personalize that information to create something new. You can breathe new life into old content and continue to increase value from your popular posts. By repurposing, you already have a head start on the creation process. To start, take your best performing content, including blog posts, videos, podcasts, or infographics. Once you have that, let’s consider 4 different ways that you can repurpose your content:

1. Combine the best articles into a listicle 

If you are constantly producing resourceful content, you can create a roundup post that promotes pieces that performed the best or garnered the most interest. To start, collect distinct resources that are relevant to your target audience, for example, statistics, tips, people, events, books, reports, or websites. Then, publish the compiled resources as a blog post with your comments or rankings. You can even create recurring lists by serializing your ranked lists monthly, quarterly, or annually. Moreover, each data element of the list can be used as an individual nugget for things like social shares or used to add to other content such as newsletters, blog posts, reports, or presentations.

2. Reconstruct your content
An easy way to make the most out of your most popular posts is to publish an eBook! Now, that may sound like a big project, but remember, the content is already there-- you just have to organize it. You can group different themes by topic or turn a lengthy post into one short book. Begin by pinpointing a key topic that presents a solution you offer and create a resource that provides comprehensive information. You can structure your eBook like this:

1. Trend
2. Examples
3. Case Study
4. Best Practices
5. Influencer quotes throughout
6. Industry statistics throughout
7. Next Steps CTA

For example, after Disqus produced a substantial amount of content surrounding engagement, we compiled it into an eBook called The Ultimate Guide to Increasing Reader Engagement. In this eBook, we used real customer examples, case studies, external resources, statistics, and included some pro tips for our digital publishers. 📖 Most of this content was covered in our blog, but now it’s nicely compiled and packaged into a downloadable resource for our audience!  

3. Crowdsource within your community 

Another great way to gather and personalize content is to ask specific questions your followers may have and present them to your audience. As you read through the tips or advice, you may be able to recognize a theme or pattern. Try to identify the key interests and pain points for your audience, and then organize your content in a way that makes it easier to reuse and customize. Compile the best answers into a resource: blog post, eBook, email, or infographic. You can also go the poll approach, which involves posting content that explores a topic or current event that includes a poll at the end. For example, we created a poll asking readers why they pay for news online, and then later did a follow-up post discussing the results. You can also add your own expertise to the crowdsourced tips, and remember when publishing the completed resource, always recognize your contributors. 🏅  

Interviewing influencers or experts that are specific to your target audience or industry is a great way to produce reusable content. This opportunity allows you to publish the interviews as a blog post, use in your eBook, post the video, or use in a podcast. It’s also handy to create a library of quotes from the interview and use them to share on your social channels or case studies periodically. You can even use the tips or quotes to create a graphic. Circling back to my first point, if you conduct a series of interviews, you can curate a “best of” roundup for a specific theme, and publish that as well. This also allows you to add your own commentary to the existing content, which will hopefully create more value for your audience.

Repurposing content can save content creators a lot of time, as one story can lead to multiple other pieces. It’s all about identifying the key interests and pain points for your audience and then organizing your content in a way that makes it easy for them to consume. Remember, in order to successfully repurpose content, you should focus on adding value to the original content. As long as that content provides useful information to your audience and presents them with solutions, you’re succeeding.