How to Repurpose Content and Make More Impact With Less Effort

Maintaining a consistent content schedule can be tough. Many content marketers wear multiple hats, meaning you only have so much time to work on your content. And when you do have that time, it gets tricky to constantly come up with ideas.

But what if I told you that you could work smarter, not harder? Content repurposing lets you get more value out of one piece of content to free up your time and energy. In this blog post, I’ll teach you how to repurpose content with a step-by-step process and example.

In this article:

What is content repurposing?

Content repurposing is the practice of re-using parts of your existing content to make new content. It usually happens across channels, like in the case of someone using a video to create a blog post. But you can also repurpose content in the same channel, such as when someone uploads clips of a video to highlight certain parts of the original video.

What are the benefits of repurposing content?

Three of the most important perks of content repurposing are:

Getting more results with less effort: Content repurposing takes less effort than making content from scratch — and it gets results. Sixty-one percent of respondents in Semrush’s 2020 State of Content Marketing Report considered content updating and repurposing one of their most efficient tactics.
Reaching more people in more places: By expanding your content to multiple channels through content repurposing, you’ll get it in front of more sets of eyes. The different audiences across your marketing channels will all get to see your work.
Creating more time to spend on your priorities: Since content repurposing gives you topics to fill your other content channels with, you’ll free up time you’d use thinking of new subjects. You can use that time on your top marketing priorities.

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A repurposing process that works

Follow these steps to create a piece of primary content and repurpose it into additional pieces of content:

Decide what kind of primary content to make

Repurposing becomes easier when you make your first piece of content with a repurposing process in mind from the start. You can repurpose just about any type of content, including:

Blog posts
Podcasts
Videos
Webinars
Round table discussions
Email sequences
Social media posts
Infographics
White papers

Don’t limit yourself to the ideas in this list. You can find repurposing opportunities in unexpected places.

For example, Matt Oldham repurposes the coloring pages for the Bip Bap Bop wiki for kids. After making social media posts for a coloring page, Matt records a video of the page being colored in that becomes a second round of posts. Look how one of these bear coloring pages turns into a YouTube Short.

Identify a topic your audience cares about

Next, define a topic for your primary piece of content and its repurposed counterparts.

The subject you choose should match your audience’s interests and needs. If you don’t know your audience well, check out HubSpot’s guide to audience research to get some ideas on how to understand them better. Some easy audience research methods include running surveys and paying attention to what your followers talk about on social media.

With your audience’s profile in mind, use our brainstorming technique to generate topics. Write down every idea you can think of for ten minutes, then narrow those ideas down to ones you can use in your content strategy. Choose one you want to work on for now and set aside your other finalists for future projects.

Build an outline

Every piece of content can benefit from an outline or plan, even if it’s not a blog post. Your content will follow a logical structure and become easier to create. An outline especially helps with repurposing because you can reference it in the future to find ideas for your repurposed content.

A good outline covers the main points you want to make in your content and the subpoints that back up those points. Our guide to writing an outline with examples provides a thought process for you to follow. While it’s geared toward blog writing, you can apply the principles to any content endeavor.

As you write your outline, you might come up with good ideas or research that don’t make it into your final draft. Set these tidbits of information aside to consider for your repurposed content or future primary content.

Choose your repurposing channels

Now that you know what type of content you’ll make and the topics you’ll cover, you can pick the channels you’ll repurpose content for. Consider the format of your primary content and the nature of its topics as you choose places to repurpose content. Let’s look at some examples of how this channel spread can work.

At We Are Rosie, Briana Palma found success in repurposing a webinar event on professional development into two separate articles on resume tips and LinkedIn tips. She shared those articles on social media and the company newsletter, leading to the LinkedIn piece becoming We Are Rosie’s second-most-viewed article of 2022. Even later, she created a video to share on social media based on the LinkedIn post. Think about your content’s long-term journey, and don’t be afraid to remix repurposed content a second time.

You can also repurpose content along the same channel by changing a major factor like format or language. The PhotoAiD team translated an English article on film tourism into Spanish and Italian, and it ended up being featured in Italy’s Repubblica magazine.

Back when Office Otter’s Nneka Otika was a solo content marketer, she pulled an example from an article to use as a LinkedIn post. She used Etsy as an example in her article on empathy in email marketing, then made that example the focus of a LinkedIn post that linked to the article. Her LinkedIn post ended up being her most successful so far and received a feature in LinkedIn News. “Think of repurposing as a way to distill insights from your article into a format that works for different platforms and gets your audience to consume your content where it’s easiest for them,” Nneka advises.

Create your primary content

Time to create your piece of primary content, whether it’s a blog post, video, podcast, or another type of media. I’ll share some guides on creating content later in this post. But you can find tips for the specific type of content you’re working on in our content and blogging category.

Repurpose your primary content

With your primary content complete, you have the basis for your repurposed content. So, get to repurposing!

Set up your repurposing plan using your preferred organizational method. Create separate entries for each piece of content, including your primary content, and include these details:

A link to the content or the content text itself
The publishing date and time for the content
Who’s responsible for creating and publishing the content

Feel free to tweak your repurposing tool to fit your workflow. At Conklin Media, Sara Bodner uses this spreadsheet to turn a blog article into social media posts:

By keeping multiple primary blog posts with repurposed social media posts, the Conklin Media team can visit the same spreadsheet for every round of repurposing.

Measure your impact

The main goal of repurposing isn’t to create more content, but instead to make more impact with less effort. So, you’ll get better results when you make sure your repurposed content gets attention and leads. Go back to your organizational tool and add space to note each piece of content’s most important metrics.

The best metrics for your content will depend on your channel and your company’s goals. Let’s say you want to get more social media followers. The number of followers you earn soon after posting a repurposed social media post will indicate your progress toward that goal.

If you’re tracking a blog post or another type of content hosted on a website, you can check out our guide to website metrics to get some ideas.

An example content repurposing process with WordPress.com

Now, let’s put this process into action with WordPress.com. If you don’t have a WordPress.com account yet, visit our account creation page to get started. Enter your email, username, and password, then choose a domain and plan.

Follow this example process to see how you can repurpose content using our platform.

Create a blog post

Let’s make a blog post as our primary piece of content to repurpose. Remember to make an outline in your favorite word processing app before you write anything up. I recommend writing your blog post draft in that program, too, so you have a backup copy on hand.

Go to your WordPress.com dashboard by visiting wordpress.com while logged in. Then, hover over Posts in the left-hand menu and choose the Add New option.

Here, you can use WordPress’s block editor to format your text and add media. Press the Publish button in the top-right corner of the editor to publish the post when you’re done.

For this example process, we’ll work with a blog post about guinea pigs.

Every WordPress.com site has a built-in newsletter function that you can use to automatically repurpose your content when it comes out. WordPress.com Newsletter sends new blog posts to people who subscribe.

No need to fiddle around with settings to activate WordPress.com Newsletter. Add a Subscribe Block to your website, and you’re good to go. Some good places to place this block include your header, your footer, or a dedicated page to advertise your newsletter.

Applying this knowledge to our example post, we’ll create a newsletter subscription page. Now, everyone who subscribes will get new blog posts in their inbox without extra effort on our part.

WordPress.com can also automate another type of repurposing — sharing your blog post on social media. You can turn your blog posts into social media posts in a few clicks. There are quite a few social media integrations to choose from, but I would like to highlight two specifically.

Publicize automatically sends a link to your post on social media when you publish it. Go to Tools > Marketing in your dashboard menu and click on the Connections tab to link WordPress.com to your social media accounts. When you’re ready to publish a blog post, click the Publish button in the top-left corner of the block editor. Then, review the Share this post section and make any desired changes before you finalize publishing.

You can also turn your readers into repurposers by setting up social sharing buttons on your blog. Go back to the Tools > Marketing option in your dashboard menu, then navigate to the Sharing Buttons tab. Check the box next to Posts to add a series of buttons readers can click to share your posts on social media platforms.

For our guinea pig blog post, we can set up both of these features, then integrate more posts into our social media calendar. We can highlight tips or facts from the guide and direct readers to the blog post to learn more.

Turn your post into a video

With WordPress.com’s multimedia blocks, you can repurpose your blog content into different formats that you can bring back to your website. Take videos, for example.

We’ll make a video about guinea pigs based on our blog post and embed it into the original post. If you decide to make a video from a blog post, take elements from your original outline and post and find ways to visually illustrate them. For example, if we covered guinea pig breeds in our blog post, we could show clips of each breed in the corresponding video.

Once you finish creating your video, upload it to your favorite service to share it online. YouTube is the most popular platform for uploading and sharing videos, but you can also try platforms like Vimeo and Wistia. Jetpack has a WordPress-specific video hosting service called VideoPress if you want to keep your video completely native to your site. WordPress.com plans from Premium or higher all get VideoPress for free.

Use WordPress.com’s video block to add your new video to your blog post. You’ll bring more views to your video, and your blog post will have a video to illustrate it. Add it near the beginning of your blog post with a lead-in like this:

Then, turn that video into a podcast episode

Using the audio from the video we just created, we can create a podcast to share on our website and social media. We could take the audio and edit it to make it understandable and insightful without the video element. If we’re feeling fancy, we can record a discussion with someone about the topics explored in the audio and edit that in, too.

After we complete the podcast, we’ll upload it to a hosting platform so we can share it wherever we’d like. Some podcast platforms with basic free plans are Podbean, Spotify for Podcasters (formerly Anchor), and RedCircle.

With the podcast episode ready to go, we can share it on our blog using the podcast block. We just need to create a new blog post, add a header image and lead-in, and embed the episode, like so.

Ever think about repurposing your repurposed content? We can get even more use out of our new video and audio assets by turning them into snippets on social media. Let’s find the most insightful and interesting clips from each, then post them on our social accounts.

With the video, we can just take clips and share them directly. If our podcast was audio-only, we could turn clips into videos using subtitles as the visuals.

Create and repurpose content with WordPress.com

If you need a headquarters for your primary content, WordPress.com gives you space to share blog posts, web pages, videos, podcasts, and any other content you can think of. Its native features and thousands of plugins make it simple to repurpose that content however you’d like. Sign up today to try it for yourself.

Integrate repurposing into the rest of your content strategy

Once you get a hang of the repurposing process, look for ways to make it a regular habit. Adding content repurposing to your regular workflow will lighten your overall workload and give you more time to focus on your content priorities.

One way to turn repurposing into a habit is to integrate it into your content strategy. Include repurposed content in your schedule’s usual rotation to keep getting value from your primary content. When reporting time comes around, factor your repurposed content’s metrics into your overall analytics strategy, too.

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How to Repurpose Content and Make More Impact With Less Effort

What is content repurposing?

What are the benefits of repurposing content?

A repurposing process that works

Decide what kind of primary content to make