You may finally be sitting down to make improvements to your practice’s website. Here’s why you shouldn’t ignore your own blog page.
What to Do With Old Blog Posts
People commonly treat their blog page like a library full of old books – you might keep adding new books to the shelves but you certainly wouldn’t start designing new covers or ripping out the boring pages.
Thankfully, your blog page is not a dusty library. You can have some fun with what’s in there – and you should. You can give your best posts a new lease of life by repurposing them in numerous ways that will help to build your business.
Repurposing your blog content essentially means providing the same content in a fresh way, for example by turning long-form text into an infographic.
There are several benefits to repurposing content. Ultimately, the purpose is to generate leads by repurposing your best content. You might reach a new audience or be able to promote really important information for the second time in an at-a-glance form.
How to Reuse Old Blogs
Your blog is there to share your expertise, build your reputation, and connect you with the people who need your services. Repurposing existing content is sometimes a better way to achieve your goals than writing on a totally fresh topic.
Read through your old blog posts. Look for content that is:
- Relevant, but outdated: it is possible to be both at once if the basic material is still useful but the blog is full of references to products we no longer use or shows we no longer watch.
- Popular: Check Google analytics and your Facebook insights to find which content performs well. Look for posts that your readers read, liked, commented on and shared. Clearly this content hit the spot with your intended audience. You can hit that spot again by repurposing the content.
Types of Repurposing
There are many ways to change your blog content into a different format. Here’s 6 ideas:
1. Ebook
Expand your content into a downloadable pdf and, hey presto, you’ve made an ebook. This brings your guidance on a topic together in one place, meaning people can refer to it easily and often.
Like a printed book or published report, this will need a clear structure with headings and subheadings to guide your reader through the material, images to aid understanding, and white space to let the eye rest. This will take a fair bit of work since you’re aiming to provide authoritative, well-referenced, well-presented content but it’s worth the effort.
Once you’ve written your ebook, you need to ensure it rewards your effort by generating leads for your business. Create a landing page for your ebook and ensure visitors must give you their email address to download it – meaning you can follow them up later.
2. Video
Video is particularly popular with younger audiences. It’s also great for the sizable group of people with low literacy who may find a long blog post off-putting but will happily listen to you speaking.
And some things are just easier to understand when you can see them. If you’re an exercise physiologist, you might do a video on the correct technique for squats or lunges, for example. It’s a much better way to teach people than text would be.
Video also helps your audience get to know, like and trust you. It’s easier to relate to someone you can see – you get a feel for their personality, their approach, their surroundings and, of course, you see what they look like.
It does take more time and money to produce a good video than to type a blog, though. That means you want your video to be relevant for a long time – evergreen content in other words.
It’s well worth it though, if you choose the right topic and make a good video. YouTube is the second biggest search engine in the world. Turning your blog content into a video gives you a presence on YouTube. Some people will probably find you there first and then go to your website. Others will follow the link from your social posts or your website.
3. Social Media Posts
Take a section of your blog and turn it into a social media post. For example, I could take that section above on the benefits of making a video and turn it into lead-generating content on LinkedIn or Facebook.
Consider your audience and choose the right social media channel to connect with them.
4. Website Page
Creating a new webpage gives you a chance to rank for more keywords. If you’re a psychologist, you repurpose your blog on anxiety into a whole page on the topic, giving you chance to rank for long-tail keywords like:
- What is anxiety?
- How do I know if I have anxiety?
- What are symptoms of anxiety?
- How do you treat anxiety?
These what-how-who-why-when questions tend to be how people talk to Siri, Alexa or Google when using voice search so it’s great to write your content with that in mind.
5. Podcast Script
Some people prefer to read, some like to watch and some love to listen. Some of your old blog posts might make perfect podcast scripts. You might ask a colleague to join you so that you can have a conversation on your chosen topic, giving your listeners the benefit of two voices and perspectives.
A single podcast looks a bit lonely though. Try creating 5 episodes so that, if your listeners enjoy the material, they can play the next one too.
6. FAQs
Voice search is increasingly popular thanks to Siri and her friends. That means people tend to phrase their search queries as questions. Repurposing your old blog posts into FAQs gives you a chance to turn everything into a clear question and answer.
There are many other ways to turn your existing content into something different to generate fresh leads for your business or practice. If you’d like help repurposing your content or designing a content marketing plan, then please get in touch with the team at Splice Marketing. We’d love to help you out.
