Once you publish a high quality post, there is an initial buzz before the topic quickly slips off the radar. For a small business, the investment in a single article could run in to hundreds of dollars. In order to make the most of your marketing budget, you need to follow up, reuse that content as far as you can, and work with a PR agency that knows how to expose content effectively around the web.
How to Reuse Your Quality Content
- Recycle it on social media. Content on social timelines flows continually. If someone misses seeing your post on Twitter, they likely will never find it again. Recycling is also a good idea for Facebook posts, since many are never seen by a human. Select posts to reshare and space them out using Buffer, or automate the process with a WordPress plugin like Tweetily. If you’re not sure where your market is, consult a PR agency to find out which network is most suitable.
- Repost it using syndication. Syndication is the one exception to the duplicate content rule above. When your blog is syndicated, its contents are automatically reposted on another, unrelated blog, and your original blog is credited as the original source (to please Google). The secondary blog benefits from free content, and your site benefits from organic traffic, providing you have positioned links in the content. While syndication offers an excellent way to promote great articles, choose your partner carefully; make sure they manually approve each posts, and check their existing blog to make sure you are in good company. Search Engine Journal has an excellent guide.
- Relink to it using an autoblog. The word ‘autoblog’ is likely to strike fear into the hearts of many content marketers, but it’s not as spammy as it sounds. Autoblogs simply picks up articles from RSS feeds and automatically post summaries. If you’re smart, you can republish content from one of your blogs on another blog to boost exposure. There’s a fine line between autoblogging and spamming; be aware of this as you explore content curation tools with your PR agency.
- Reformat it into an infographic. Neil Patel is a big advocate of the data driven blog post. Why? Readers love statistics, and hard facts always make content more authentic. Statistics also make it easy to repurpose a blog as an infographic, since the research is right there. Use an agency like Lemonly or Visual.ly to create quality graphics, or do it yourself using well-known cloud tools: Piktochart and Canva are our favorites. Some of the best PR agencies can supply in-house infographic creation.
- Rewrite it into a press release. If you’ve written a high quality, exhaustive piece of research, or an awesome collection of how-to guides, shout it loud and proud with a press release. Press releases aren’t just for events or acquisitions; they can be used every time you want to give your content a push, and a PR agency can guide you by creating the content or providing vital formatting hints. Press releases usually get rewritten by other news outlets, which will also provide fresh incoming links.
- Repurpose it as an ebook. Content marketing requires you to produce lots of content around one theme. Once you have a library of past posts, collate them into an eBook and offer it for free download. If you combine this with an email marketing opt-in, you’ll boost exposure while also gathering leads – a great way to build your marketing list. From there, you can market new content to subscribers: it’s a real win-win. Many ebook writers are millionaires; it’s an great way to reach a large audience fast. There’s more information about simple ebook creation in our content repurposing guide for tech.co.
Proceed With Caution
When repurposing and republishing content, never go against your gut instinct. If something feels low quality or spammy, it probably is. Cutting corners should always raise alarm bells, and it’s best to use a quality PR agency as a partner.
Google still penalises duplicate content, so it’s important not to repost the same article on multiple sites. Duplicate content is a prime reason for Google penalties, and the risks apply whether the content is cloned or spun. Fortunately, the best agencies know not to go down this route.
To reuse content effectively, you need to be using safe and proven techniques. Avoid reposting anything without credit (or a canonical link, which is a better option). Don’t rewrite articles without running them through Copyscape to ensure they aren’t similar to each other. And never steal content from a competitor: it’s a great way to get your site de-indexed.
