Letter #36: 3 content repurposing mistakes to avoid
Your recipe for driving the most ROI from the content you produce.
Holla fam!
How’s it going?
I had a celebratory last week after having made it to Semrush’s list of top content marketing influencers 🎉
In other news, I’ve been thinking about content repurposing a lot lately — particularly, how most of us understand it, talk about it, but rarely practice it effectively.
So to make sure you’re making the most of content repurposing, let’s peep at the top 3 mistakes I’m seeing lots of content folks make:
❌ Content repurposing is not copy-pasting content.
This has got to be the cardinal sin of content recycling.
Sure, it’s okay to sometimes copy-paste content from one distribution channel to another. For example, a Twitter thread on LinkedIn.
But if you want to reuse content correctly, keep the following in mind:
Content repurposing is tweaking — even rewriting content — to fit a platform’s content requirements and its audience’s expectations ✅
So if you’re C+P-ing content from Twitter to LinkedIn, you’ll want to make sure you tweak it to make the content readable (line spaces are bigger on LinkedIn).
❌ It doesn’t come at the end of your content workflow.
Sure you reuse content after you’ve produced it. But planning for the ways you’ll repurpose a piece of content should happen in the early stages.
So remember to plan the ways you’ll repurpose content when you start working on a topic ✅
Ask yourself: can I dress the same content in different formats — maybe create bite-sized videos for social, a Twitter thread, an email campaign, or a long YouTube video?
Bonus: You can repurpose content as you create it. For example, create tweets from the draft sections and headlines that don’t make the (final) cut.
❌ Repurposing a content piece just once.
Made a Twitter thread from the blog post you just published? Created a YouTube video from it too? Good. But that’s not all!
One content piece doesn’t just power one piece of content for another channel. Instead, it can fuel an entire platform-specific content strategy ✅
For example, you don’t need to create new content for YouTube from scratch. Instead, you can power an entire YouTube content strategy by repurposing the content you create.
In fact, each piece you recycle can easily translate to 3-5 videos.
For example: create a video series from an in-depth guide on how to create creative briefs.
Video 1: Why do you need briefs
Video 2: What to add to your brief
Video 3: How to create a brief using our proven template
Video 4: Brief don’ts — X things you shouldn’t be doing
See? That’s amazing, isn’t it? And the content for all these? You have it on your blog. Just recycle it.
One last thing: Repurposing isn’t reusing the same content per se. It’s taking the same core message (steps you’ve shared or ideas you’ve put out) and sharing it in different ways.
That’s all from me this week.
Catch you next Tuesday,
Masooma