Business Writing

How to Repurpose Content into Different Formats

Posted on by Anthony James

What is content repurposing?

Content repurposing is creating modular content that you can modify into different formats. For example, one hub article could create several spokes articles if repurposed correctly.

But it is not copy and pasting or spinning articles to create low-quality articles. If done right, it allows you write many interrelated articles very quickly. It keeps readers, customers, and search engines happy.

Content Repurpose strategy

Why repurpose content?

Elli from New Jersey wrote in. She wants to start a blog about her new accountancy business.

She says, ‘Writing article after article is a bit of a grind. Is there some way I can speed up what I’ve written or re-use it somehow?

There’s two questions here: speed and volume. Let’s focus on volume today. How can we increase the word count and make the writing tasks a bit easier?

How to start repurposing your content

Here’s some of the email I wrote back to her.

Hi Elli,

Someone who has helped me a lot is Chris Knight, the CEO of EzineArticles.

He writes about developing writing frameworks that you can use to speed write.

Here’s how I approach it.

Create the Pillar Content First

Say you’re going to write about Hedge Accountancy.

  • Start off by writing an overview of hedge accountancy, say 1,500 words.
  • Next identify the five advantages that hedge accountancy offers.
  • Next flip it around and identify the five disadvantages.

This should be easy to write as the advantages are still fresh in your mind. Essentially, you’re looking at it from a different angle and adding some more details.

Modify into FAQs

Now that you know that advantages and disadvantages, you can create an FAQ.

All you have to do here is summarize what you’re written in the first two articles using a Question and Answer format.

Next, using this FAQ post, you can then create a checklist. It’s the same content but you’re going to write it as a series of steps to follow. Again, you can sprinkle in some additional text to increase the word count and offer the reader more information where possible.

Modify into How To Articles

For example, I have a framework for How To articles that lets me get 500 word articles out in less than 15 min. It works like this:

  1. Identify the problem
  2. Explain how you’re going to solve it
  3. List the steps as a numbered list
  4. Summarize what you’ve covered

Modify into Other Content Assets

We should now be able to create list articles. 5 ways to test hedge accounts… 7 warning signs for hedge accountants, 3 little known facts about hedge accountants, and so on.

Understand how we read on the web

How do we read on the web?

We like to scan.

Like this.

It’s easy on the eye.

We like short sentences and headlines.

Write an interesting topic sentence at the top, and a ‘call to action’ at the end. The call to action, by the way, can be a question that you pose to the reader. Something that makes them stop, consider, and then do something. The point is to encourage the reader to think about what you’ve written.

If someone finds your opening sentence interesting enough, they’ll start to scan down the page, and stop when they hit the summary.

If it’d good enough, they’ll go back to the start and read the content again but this time more slowly.

Summary

So, let’s recap.

  • First, write a pillar article. Think of a tree trunk and branches. This is by far the longest article.
  • Think of the questions readers will likely have about hedge accountancy.
  • Then take some of the content in the pillar article and reshape it into a How to, FAQ, List, Features, Benefits, Risks, and Little Known Facts about Hedge Accountancy.

As you can see from above, you’re really writing one article – the pillar. Then you’re taking parts of it to create sub-articles that branch out.

Remember, you’re not copying and pasting. Rather, you’re reshaping content to fit different styles.

Some people don’t want to read long articles; they want to find a specific fact. FAQs solve this.

Others want to know the risks or the gains or the unknowns. So, write short articles on these points. Where possible, add more detail to flesh out the article.

7 Steps to Better Content Repurposing

  1. Consider how your content will be consumed.
  2. Write so that you can reshape, aka the content, for other articles
  3. Don’t copy and paste. That defeats the purpose.
  4. Publish frequently.
  5. Analyze the results.
  6. Ask readers what they like. See what they’re hungry for.
  7. Then give them more of that.

Finally, ignore what the experts say.

See what works for YOUR business and work towards that.

Anthony James