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Each content idea shouldn’t be used just once. Rather, repurpose your content so that one idea spawns not only a blog post, but a video, and a podcast, and e-book, too. Then use that to connect with a different segment of your audience.
There’s a secret every good writer and creative person knows, and it will change the way you market your business:
You don’t need a new idea every time you create new content.
To illustrate the point, let’s take a look at one of Ad Age’s top advertising campaigns of all time: Dos Equis’ “Most Interesting Man in the World.” It was a single idea that spawned multiple commercials, birthed countless memes, and turned Dos Equis into America’s fastest growing beer import.
If you don’t recognize the campaign from its name, you’ve seen it in your Facebook feed: 
It’s a real-world example of how one great content strategy can launch countless pieces of content. Successfully repurposing content helps improve exposure among your target audience, while also offering the chance that a different segment of your audience notices and shares the content.
Start With a Great Idea
You don’t have to be as creative as someone who works for an ad agency, and your product doesn’t have to be as widely appealing as beer. You just have to start seeing ideas as kindling for multiple pieces of content instead of feeling constant pressure to generate new ideas for your content marketing strategy.
Imagine you work for an accounting firm. A new state tax law goes into effect, so you write a blog post about the law. Then, you decide to create a PowerPoint about the new law and do a presentation for your local chamber of commerce. Someone shoots a video of your presentation, and you upload it on YouTube, share it on your social networks, and send it to your email subscribers.
You then use the content to create a podcast episode, and you design an infographic showing how the law affects your clients. All of your thinking, writing, and discussion about the issue inspires you to write an e-book about the law.
One great idea for a blog post, first repurposed as a PowerPoint presentation, transforms into a wave of great content. You don’t have to brainstorm new ideas or come up with more research. You do the work once and multiply it.
Get More From What You Already Have
If creating all of the different types of content mentioned above sounds intimidating, don’t worry — you don’t have to be a creative genius. Start by repurposing one piece of existing content into another format. Here are some ideas to get you started:
- Turn a series of blog posts into an e-book.
- Turn a video or podcast transcription into a blog post.
- Turn a presentation into a video.
- Turn an e-book into a series of shorter blog posts.
- Turn a case study with lots of data into an infographic.
- Turn a slideshow into a detailed blog post.
After transforming your first existing piece of content into something new, ask yourself if you could express it another way… and then another. This process takes ideas from the past and reworks them into something fresh and new with minimal effort.
Once you’ve gone through the repurposing process with content you already have, you’ll think about new ideas in a different way. You won’t just think, “I should write a blog post about that.” You’ll think, “I could make that into a blog post, a video, and an e-book.”
If that all still sounds like too much to handle, hire an SEO agency to create your content marketing strategy for you.
Now, Share It With the World
Content seen by no one accomplishes nothing. You must promote every piece of content you create.
Optimize It for Search Engines
The quickest way to help your content do well in search results is to include a good keyword phrase within the title for the piece of content. Whether it’s in the page’s SEO title, blog post title, video title, podcast title, infographic title (and filename), etc., be sure that you find one great keyword phrase for that piece of content and include it.
To further optimize your content for search, include that keyword phrase within the content’s text/description, tags (such as YouTube video tags), image alt text, and more. Make sure your keyword fits smoothly into your content; don’t stuff your text with keywords or make the copy sound unnatural.
Share It on Social Media
Start by sharing your content on the top social media networks: Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. Include social sharing buttons for those networks on each piece of content you create.
In addition to organically sharing your content, use social advertising to extend the reach of your content. Networks like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn have great ad targeting options, so you can put your content in front of the kinds of people most likely to become customers.
Send It in an Email
If you have an email list, send a message whenever you create a great piece of content. If you don’t have an email list, start building one now to promote your business, products, services, and content. One way to help boost your subscriber list is to offer some of your newly created repurposed content as a content upgrade free to anyone who signs up.
Blast It Through Your RSS Feed
Within 48 hours of Google Reader’s demise, Feedly, an alternative RSS reader, gained 500,000 new users. This stat tells you RSS is still a popular means of subscribing to blog content, and you should offer it to your blog visitors and readers.
Whenever you create a new profile on a forum, social network, or other space, include your blog URL or RSS link. On sites like Amazon, you can plug your blog’s RSS feed into your author page to keep it active with links to new content.
Try a Content Recommendation Engine
When you really want to push a piece of content out to a larger audience, amplification services such as Outbrain and Taboola will place your content on major online publications like CNN, Time, USA Today, ESPN, and Inc. And it’s not as expensive as you might expect — Outbrain, for example, allows you to set your daily budget as low as $10.
Dig Deeper and Save Time
Creating a lot of content from one concept means spending more time with your initial idea. Your original concept changes and grows deeper as you rework it for different formats.
In the future, you won’t need separate ideas for a blog post, a slideshow, a podcast episode, and a YouTube video. Instead, you’ll come up with one great idea — or revisit an older great idea — and make more from what you’ve already created.
