Lately I’ve been doing a lot of work on content repurposing, starting with a collaborative blog post and several articles on specific ways to repurpose content, including using infographics, press releases, slidesharing services, Listly, Squidoo and more.
Naturally, as a way to get them out to the widest audience possible (plus repurpose their content on these social media sites) I’ve promoted these articles to the social networks including Google+, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
Recently, a reader on one of the social networks took issue with my content repurposing strategies and called me on it with a comment that implied I was taking the very same piece of content and simply blasting in all over the web with no thought to quality or duplicate content.
That is NOT what content repurposing is about! For one thing, the search engines (Google in particular) wouldn’t like it at all if I just started blasting out the same content in the form of hundreds of articles that say the very same thing.
But I do have to confess that my definition of content marketing may have unintentionally misled this person.
Here’s what I originally said:
content marketing is simply taking one piece of high quality content at a time, and then using multiple channels of distribution and strategic repurposing to spread that content all over the web.
What I should have said (and originally meant!):
Content repurposing is taking one piece of high quality content at at time, transforming that content using a variety of tools and techniques into high value information pieces that stand on their own, and then using multiple channels of distribution and strategic repurposing to spread that content all over the web.
You see, it’s the transforming of the original content that not only adds value, but enables you to reach different segments of your intended audience, as the same readers who find you on your blog are unlikely to be the ones seeing you on the slide sharing services or looking at your Squidoo lens. And even if they are, that’s all to the good, as each piece they see will be sufficiently different that they will receive value from everything they encounter.
So don’t be afraid to produce good quality content and then repurpose that content all over the web by transforming that content into high value information pieces that will reach and serve every segment of your audience. Soon they’ll be saying, “I see you everywhere!”
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image marteza bahmani
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Speaking of good quality content- I just downloaded and actually read your “Zen and the Art of List Building.” I confess that I seem to be one of those people who sign-up for stuff and never get to reading it. (because I’m too busy building my own list
However I read it and loved it. In fact I laughed so hard because it could have been me writing it! Really good and thanks so much.
I totally hear what you’re saying Ellen. As someone who started doing repurposing in 1992 for large companies, there were many objections and structures to put in place. Sometimes repurposing the same exact information is the “right” thing to do (for example, how you log onto a system is the same whether it is in a blog post or a user manual), sometimes the context is different, so you surround the basics with other information, and sometimes it is the same information in a different format (such as video, audio or image-based). Simply throwing the same thing out in a gazillion locations isn’t, in my opinion, strategic repurposing. Great article and much appreciated!