Tag Archives: repurposing existing content

Can you repurpose content for email marketing?

The success of your email marketing depends on regularity. Repurposing your existing website or blog content can help.

One of the biggest problems you face when running an email marketing campaign is the lack of engaging content.

Email marketing – especially well-meaning and long-term – means building and sustaining relationships with your existing and prospective customers and clients. If you send out email campaigns just to promote your products and services, you’re not using the full potential of email marketing.

But this update is less about the dos and don’ts of email marketing and more about how to repurpose your existing website and blog content to get quality material for your successive email campaigns.

As this Business2Community update suggests, you can re-purpose your existing content from multiple sources including blog posts, web pages, and even social media updates.

I have been doing this for a couple of months now. I mean, getting content from various sources. I have been publishing my newsletter for years, but the only source of content was my blog.

Whenever I published a new blog post, I sent a notification to my email subscribers with a small intro to the blog and then a URL.

These days I do a lot of repurposing. From LinkedIn to my Credible Content blog to Quora, I’m constantly repurposing and remixing content.

For example, I publish an answer to a question on Quora. From there I have started turning those answers into full-fledged blog posts for my Credible Content blog. Then I write a small intro of 200-300 words both for my LinkedIn update and my newsletter update.

Repurposing isn’t just relevant to contemporary content. Maybe you wrote a blog post back in 2017 and it contains some nuggets of wisdom. You can share in your newsletter. But how do you find such content?

I normally use a site-based search query On Google such as “site:credible-content.com email marketing”.

This brings up all the content I have published on my website on the topic of email marketing. Then I quickly go through the links and find something useful to use for my next newsletter broadcast.

How I’m using my old content to grow my business

Your old content can be a treasure trove of opportunities. I have been adding webpages and blog posts to my website, credible-content.com, for years now. There was a time when I was just adding pages paying scant regard to their SEO. All I wanted to do was, cover as many topics as possible. These days I’m using my old content to improve my SEO and consequently, grow my business.

I manage my website with WordPress. Both the main website and the blog are powered by WordPress. There is a plug-in in WordPress that allows you to create a list of all the posts and pages you have published so far.

After generating the list from my main website (credible-content.com) and the blog (credible-content.com/blog) I copied the list in a text file.

Then I do the following:

Open the URL
Check its appearance on Google for the selected keywords and search terms
If it doesn’t appear on the first page I start making changes to the text and the images
After making the changes I run it through the SEOPressor WordPress plug-in
In SEOPressor I normally aim for a score of 85-90.
Submit the URL to Google and wait for it to appear in the search results with updated information
Check the ranking again
If the ranking has improved I delete this URL from the list and move onto the next URL
If the ranking hasn’t improved I save the URL in another file to be followed on later on and then move onto the next URL
I repeat these steps with all the URLs

There are two things though.

Being the only person managing my website, I know that it is a job that cannot be performed in a hurry. It may take me close to 6 months to analyze and improve all the links and I’m fine with that.

About SEOPressor and its score. I find it better than Yoast SEO. Call it superstition, my rankings have considerably improved ever since I started using SEOPressor.

Getting a score of 80-90 in SEOPressor doesn’t guarantee an appearance on the first page on Google. Despite this score sometimes the link doesn’t even appear among top 30 results or even top 40 results. It’s understandable. Your rankings depend on lot of factors, not just on-site SEO.

What I prefer in SEOPressor is that if you are over-optimizing, it tells you that. If you are over-using your keywords (when I am in the flow, I tend to do that) it tells you that. Then I make changes to make sure that the number of times a keyword appears in the text comes down.

I don’t like its LSI keyword alternatives which it appears to take directly from AdWords. Anyway, enough of SEOPressor.

Why do I save the URL whose rankings haven’t improved, for later?

This is my way of working on the website. Of course, when you are working on a client’s website you have to stick to a particular URL until you have done everything possible.

Have my rankings improved due to this exercise?

They certainly have. Over the past week itself my rankings have improved and I have gotten three business queries more than usual, just in the past week.

You can too use your old content to grow your business

This is, assuming that you have old content.

Whether you want to improve your search engine rankings or not, you should update your old content anyway. The things that you mentioned in your old content 4-5 years ago, may not be relevant now.

But the biggest benefit of updating your old content is that you can actually improve your search engine rankings for the keywords and search terms you were trying to aim at, initially.

Maybe at that time you were not experienced enough or you were not working with a trained content writer, but now you are (if you are).

I provide content auditing services. These services involve

Going through your existing content
Making a list of changes and improvements that can be made
Making those changes and improvements

Let me know if you would like me to have a look at your website. Contact me here.

How to repurpose old content

Repurposing old content means creating different versions of the content that already exists on your website or blog. Do you have many blog posts and articles already written on your website? Have you gained all the benefit that you could have gained from the content you have written or generated so far?

It is a necessity that you constantly need to write new content. You can also use your existing content to create new content. This is called repurposing your old/existing content.

Suppose you have a blog post that you wrote a couple of years ago that was received very well by your audience but right now it isn’t getting much attention may be because it is old or maybe people have moved on. The information contained within that blog post is still valuable. What do you do?

Here are a few things you can do with that old blog post in order to repurpose your existing content

Create a slideshow of the main points – People love slideshows created in PowerPoint and other presentation tools. Extract the main points of your old blog post and then create individual slides from those main points along with attractive visuals. Then distribute that slide’s repurposed content.
Rewrite the blog post with a new perspective – Wisdom is eternal but there are always new ways of making use of that wisdom. Technology has changed in the past two years (since you wrote that blog post). Even the way people do content marketing has changed. Why not rewrite the old blog post by adding more information, updated information to it?
Create graphic visuals of important portions – There might be many important portions – a paragraph, a couple of sentences – that you can take from the blog post and combine them with related images and then create graphics. Then you can upload those graphics to Pinterest or simply share them on Facebook and Twitter.
Post important and impactful sentences from the old blog post on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

These are just a few ideas that you can use to repurpose your existing content. You can come up with many more according to your niche.