13 Ways to Repurpose Your Content Like a Pro All Year Long

You’ve got all this fantastic, engaging content on your blog now, so you’re reworking it and also sending a regular newsletter, too, right? Right?

A common repurposing practice that I’m surprised people often overlook is turning their blog posts into an email. 

And turning their email newsletters into blog posts. 

And turning social posts into blog posts, newsletters, or podcast episodes. 

You’ve heard this time and time again — content is queen.

That’s why I’m such a big fan of repurposing. Repurposing your writing is a great way to write less and stretch every word to the max. It’s also a great way to make it into content that hits your audiences in the places where they prefer to consume content the most.

Repurposing content is all about starting your creation from a place that comes easy to you.

First, ask yourself where writing comes easy for you — whether that’s your podcast, blog, videos, newsletters, social media, or teaching in your community and then working backward. 

Let’s start with an example. You love talking stuff out, so you have a podcast. You hop on the mic and enjoy a recording session, whether you’re recording solo or you have a guest. 

You’ll publish your podcast episode, but what else can you do with that content? This is where the magic of repurposing comes in. 

Here are some great ways to repurpose a few types of common pieces of content you might already be producing.

Repurposing Podcasts:

1. Turn it into a blog: using the podcast transcript: edit it into a blog post for people who prefer to read (blogs are also great for SEO). As you dig into the transcript, you might notice that you have multiple blog posts in there.

2. Pull from the lessons: look at your written content. Go deeper into the lessons and turn them into a downloadable PDF, workbook, or opt-in

3. Social media posts: take up to a dozen nuggets from your episode and turn them into social media posts

4. Newsletter for your subscribers: take the show notes and tweak it into a newsletter that hits the inboxes of your subscribers

5. Take the transcripts and turn it into a book

Repurposing Blog Posts:

1. You can record an audio version of your blog post using it as a guide for talking points

2. Take that blog post and make b-roll videos (I don’t recommend video in your business)

3. Turn the highlights into social media posts

4. Take the quotable lines and create graphics in Canva

5. What podcast would be a great place to share your blog? Share your blog post as inspiration to a few podcast hosts in a pitch — I’ve had some great success with this because it gives the host a framework to use to guide our conversation

6. Turn your outline into a workshop and teach it to your audience, inside other communities, or in your town

7. Turn your blog into a newsletter, and don’t forget about all your older content — revisit your older content and turn them into newsletters

8. Gather a bunch of blogs and use these to draft your book

Stay relevant when you repurpose your content. 

Repurposing your content isn’t a one-and-done exercise. It’s key to revisit your content, especially if your goals, purpose, message, or offerings have changed. It needs a regular scrub to keep it relevant. Take a look across all your content to see how you can re-deliver it in a new and purposeful way.

Sample Content Repurposing Schedule

Here’s when and how to take your content and make it a bit shinier after you’ve put it out there.

Once a year and/or quarterly:

• As part of your annual content planning process, review your top articles for the quarter or year and note which ones you could update. Take those articles and commit to a plan to rework them. I create a 12-week plan at the start of each quarter, where those tasks live. Get my free 12-week planning template for creative businesses.

• Notice which topics you’ve created volumes on — see how you could create a roundup blog post or newsletter

• Curate audience favorites into your email nurture sequence for new subscribers

Monthly:

• Review your google analytics for your blog and whichever pieces of content have been performing best, and go back in and make some updates. Consider adding a free download — this blog post has been #1 on my site for years, and I’m constantly making upgrades to it.

• When you’re pushing out new blogs, link to other blogs you’ve released. Include these calls to action to read other content drives more traffic to your other relevant content. If you’re hosting a complementary workshop or class, add an opt-in to that blog page inviting readers to join — just remember to remove or update it later to keep the links fresh

• Add links to your newer content throughout the article

Here’s my intuitive way of making old content new again:

Right now, I publish a new blog two to three times each month — when I’m finalizing those blogs, I link to other content (I use a handy content management Google Sheet — writing community members have access to this too).

This way, I slowly work through updating older content as I create new articles. 

If you want to make your repurposing plan ahead of time, choose a particular time of the year to guide you. Mercury Retrograde (when Mercury appears to go backward in the sky) is an excellent time to revisit the past. Look at Mercury Retrograde dates for the coming year and block time on your calendar to review old blog posts.

Been creating content for years and want to go a step further? 

Great! You probably have enough content to repurpose and tweak into a book. My books, Unfussy Life, and Intuitive Writing, all started from blog content. Yes, you’ll do some heavy edits on those pieces, but the bones are there for a larger body of work. 

Once you have a book, could you turn it into a course?

The opposite is true too, could you turn your course into a book?

What content do you have that you could turn into a course — whether you deliver it live or it’ll be evergreen?

Maybe you’re saying to yourself…

I have this big body of content now, so my readers have seen it all and are expecting me to create new stuff all the time!

Take a step back and think about when your readers found you. They maybe only signed up to get newsletters from you last week. Or, if they’ve been around for years, they don’t necessarily know about or read everything you’ve ever written, so you can always reshare older pieces. You can do this a few times a year with your marquee pieces.

If you’ve been cranking out new content and you’re taking a break from content creation for a while, reshare your older content. 

Leave Room for Inspiration

As you’re repurposing and revisiting older pieces of content, you’re going to get new ideas and inspiration. Make sure you have a place to capture these ideas too. I keep an intuitive content plan for the quarter and a Google Doc with a list of potential topics to write about. I revisit my big list of ideas when I sit down to do my quarterly and annual content plans.

Repurposing content to your advantage means you can extend the life of your work and keep delivering value to your readers. It can help inspire you and refresh your thinking as you create even more from what’s old, making it new again. 

Try planning just the next 12 weeks of your content to stay consistent:

If you found this advice on repurposing helpful, you might like these articles about content too:

• 52 Writing Tasks To Tackle During Mercury Retrograde

• the easy way to create consistent content for Instagram

• 28 crave-worthy blog posts to kick up your creativity

• Is Blogging Making a Comeback? Who Cares? Do this instead.

• Fear of Writing: It Might Not Be What You Think. 10 Powerful Writing Prompts.