Creating engaging content week after week, month after month is exhausting and content burnout is VERY real. That's why you should try to repurpose your content as much as possible!
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It's not a secret that lots of business owners (and content creators, for that matter) struggle with content creation. It's hard to come up with engaging, interesting content for your business, day after day, week after week, month after month. In this blog post, we are going to talk about a topic that has helped me a lot when it comes to content creation and that is repurposing content!
Little spoiler ahead: repurposing doesn't mean posting the exact same thing all over the different platforms NOR does it mean just taking an old post and literally posting the same image, the same text and the same hashtags - that is not what I mean with repurposing.
Okay, let’s dive into this step-by-step guide on how to repurpose your content.
1) Determine your post frequency:
As your first step, you need to determine how often you want to post in that particular month. Let's say you want to do 3 posts a week which would then be 12 posts per month. Now you have defined that and we can start filling these 12 empty posts with content.
2) Fill your content calendar with important dates:
The second step that you want to take is having a look at important dates that are coming up in the following month. For example, you might be launching a new program or a new course or there is an important date like your one-year business anniversary. You could also fill in any dates from my monthly post "Days not to miss in ..." (check out the previous ones over on my Instagram) that fit with your niche.
Here’s an example:
One of my clients is a book author and in the month of June, they launched a new book in US. We put a date into the calendar and in the days leading up to the launch, we wanted to warm up the audience to the book launch. We then knew the few posts leading up to that particular date had to be about the book launch, preparing people, and bringing awareness to the fact that there was a new book coming out.
If you put these dates into your calendar, you already have a few pieces of content and in this way, you also make sure that you don't miss out on warming up your audience for important events.
3) Make a list of all the BIG content pieces:
The third thing I want you to do is to make a list of all the big content pieces that you're planning to bring out that month. What do I mean with big content pieces? An example of that could be a blog post. In general, a “big” content piece is something that you can draw multiple snippets from and reuse in a different format somewhere else. Another big content piece would be a YouTube video or a podcast episode.
Let's continue with our example:
In July, you want to publish 4 blog posts and 2 YouTube videos. Now you have 6 large pieces of content and, as you remember, we said that we wanted to post 12 posts on our social media in that month. So, with 6 large content pieces, you can make 2 pieces out of each one of them and you're covered for the whole month - it's that easy!
4) Analyze how you can repurpose a big piece into smaller pieces:
Now we come to the part that I think most people struggle with and that is understanding how you can use these bigger pieces of content to make smaller pieces of content for your social media. I'm going to give you a few examples of how you could approach this, but in the end, it comes down to practicing, having an open mind, and seeing opportunities by yourself. Some months, you're not going to see lots of content opportunities and then other months you're going to have way more than the 12 posts that you wanted to do.
Let's continue with our example:
You have a blog post that describes 5 mistakes that your audience makes when it comes to a certain thing, for example: "Five mistakes that new business owners make when they start out on social media".
If you want to make it really easy for yourself, you could just repurpose that and have a post that is “5 mistakes that your audience makes...” but what you could also do, is just take ONE of these mistakes and talk about that in a post.
One of the mistakes might be that they get burned out with content creation. You can make a whole post where you just talk about this specific mistake. You could either talk about that in a reel or you could use it with a trending audio and make a bit of a lip-sync reel out of it - that's up to you then. From this blog post, if you have 5 mistakes, in theory, you can make 5 pieces of content from that if you take each mistake and use it as a single post.
Now let's look at a YouTube video:
You might have a YouTube channel and you might be posting one video per week. This video again talks about some mistakes that your audience makes and again, you can take snippets from that video. You could repurpose that into a reel or you could post that snippet on your stories. You could also take some points from that video and make those into written posts.
👉🏼 Some other ideas could be making a reel with a snippet from your podcast or repurposing a blog post into a quick story. The possibilities are really endless and it's really about finding these opportunities! If you don't have any idea of how you can repurpose your content, let's have a brainstorming session together!
5) Sketch out all of your posts & determine what you need for each one:
The most difficult part is behind us! Now, in this fifth step, you want to sketch out all of your posts and determine what you need for each one. At the end of this step, ideally, you would have a full content calendar that tells you:
Post 1 is going to be the first mistake that I mentioned in blog post #1 & it gets posted to Instagram and Facebook on XY date.
Post 2 is going to be a snippet from my podcast episode #4 & it gets posted to Instagram and Facebook on XY date.
Post 3 of the week is going to be mistake #2 from blog post #1 & it gets posted to Instagram and Facebook on XY date.
....
Once you have sketched out all of your posts, you want to determine what you need for each one of them. As an example, you want to post a reel with a snippet from your podcast, so you will need, first of all, the audio of that podcast snippet and, ideally, a video with that. Then you still need to write a caption and you might also need a cover for your reel.
6) Create graphics, record videos, take photos etc:
In step 6, you create your graphics, record any videos, reels, take snippets from a bigger video or from your podcast, and you might take some nice photos of your products or yourself.
This method also has the advantage that you can batch. Once you have that list of posts, you could have a look at all the graphics that you need and you could do a graphic designing session to maximize that effect of being in the flow. On another day, you could then focus on recording all the videos, so you only have to get "video-ready" once.
7) Schedule or prepare to post manually:
In the last step of the whole process, you schedule your posts or you set them up to be posted manually. For example, a reel that sits in your drafts, all ready to go.
And that's it! Now you have planned and prepared a whole month of content without getting burned out and without having to come up with endless ideas for content!
👉🏼 One last tip I can give you is to set up your content calendar in a way that allows you to have a good overview of your content. I find it really easy to use Trello for that. I have different lists on my Trello board and each list represents one platform. I find that really easy and convenient because I can copy & edit all of my posts in there. It also makes the whole process faster and you have a better overview of what goes out when and where.
Let me know if you are going to try out this way of making content! I strongly recommend it because you can dish out a few bigger pieces of content - whether that means blog posts, podcast episodes, or YouTube videos - and go from there instead of struggling to find content pieces every day of the week.
Talk soon,
Hanna