The Complete Guide to Content Repurposing

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Your content is not “one and done” when published.

You’ve spent so much time creating that piece of content. So it makes sense to get as much mileage as you can out of each piece you create.

How do you do that? Content repurposing.

In this post, you’ll learn the following:

What is content repurposing?

Content repurposing is when you find a new use for all or parts of your existing content. It usually involves changing up the format of the content, e.g., from a video to a blog post.

Why should you repurpose content?

Here are three reasons why you should repurpose your content:

1. It’s efficient

You don’t always have to create every piece of content from scratch. Not only is it time-consuming, but it also makes it difficult to scale up your content creation.

Instead, take advantage of what you’ve already created. You’ve put in the hard work to create that piece of content, so make full use of it.

Remix and reformat it for different channels.

2. It allows you to reach audiences who prefer different formats

We all have different tastes.

There are some people who prefer reading. Others prefer watching, while the rest prefer listening.

Converting your content into different formats allows you to reach these different sets of audiences.

3. It gives your existing content a new lease of life

In 2017, we published this post on how long it takes to rank on Google. Two years later, we turned it into a Twitter thread:

We didn’t rerun the study. Neither did we update nor refresh the content. Nothing was changed. But it regained new life when it was turned into a Twitter thread.

Content discovery is a perpetual problem. If your posts are not ranking on Google, the chances of them being “rediscovered” are low. But they’re probably still good pieces of content. They’re just under-discovered.

So when you turn your content into new formats on other platforms, you help other people rediscover your older content.

Which content should you repurpose?

There is no “one piece of content” you must repurpose. It eventually depends on your goals and strategy.

However, content repurposing does require some work. It’s not a one-to-one conversion—you have to expect to do some rewriting or editing so that the content fits the new format and platform.

Expert “repurposers” like GaryVee have a team behind them. They’re not going about it alone. That also means that if you are doing it alone, you will not be able to repurpose every single piece of content.

Translation: You need to prioritize.

A good way to do this is to look at what the platform wants and repurpose content specifically for it. For example, suppose you want to repurpose one of your blog posts into a YouTube video.

Rather than choosing at will, find out what topics people are searching for on YouTube. Then find the best-fit blog post for that topic and repurpose it accordingly. We’ll go into more detail on how to do so shortly.

Alternatively, you can simply find your best-performing pieces and repurpose them. After all, if they’re doing well on one channel, there is a higher probability they’ll also do well on another.

This can be as simple as seeing which of your videos on YouTube have the most views:

Two rows of Ahrefs' YouTube videos in grid format

You can also enter your website into Ahrefs’ Site Explorer and go to the Top pages report to see which of your pages get the most search traffic:

List of URLs with corresponding data on traffic and value

Content repurposing ideas

Ready to repurpose your content? Here are a few ideas you can consider:

1. Turn your blog post into a video (and vice versa)

We often do this at Ahrefs. For example, our blog post on influencer marketing was repurposed into a video.

Excerpt of Ahrefs' YouTube video and Ahrefs' blog article on influencer marketing

This is bidirectional. We also turn our videos into blog posts. For example, this blog post on affiliate marketing was created using content in our video.

As mentioned earlier, this is not done randomly. To figure out which content we should repurpose, we first find out which topics people are searching for. Here’s how we do it for YouTube:

  1. Go to Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer
  2. Select YouTube
  3. Enter a few relevant keywords (e.g., SEO, marketing, etc)
  4. Go to the Matching terms report

List of keywords with corresponding data on volume and GV

Eyeball the report and see if there are any topics that match an existing blog post you have. For example, we can see that the term “influencer marketing” gets around 1,500 monthly searches on YouTube—exactly the reason why we repurposed the blog post into a video.

Excerpt of list of keywords showing the keyword "influencer marketing" gets quite a bit of monthly searches on YouTube

If you’re doing it the other way around—turning a video into a blog post—then follow the same steps but switch the search engine to Google.

Search engine changed to "Google" in search bar

Likewise, look through the report and see if there are any topics that match an existing video.

2. Repurpose your videos into a course

Most of your content is probably published chronologically. But chronology is not a great way to consume content.

So why not organize pieces of content in a logical manner and turn them into a course?

For example, our SEO training course is a series of YouTube videos neatly arranged into multiple modules.

Table of contents of the various modules and courses

Likewise, our “how to use Ahrefs” course is made up of in-app tutorials that already exist within our reports.

How do you know what courses to create? Here’s how:

  1. Go to Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer
  2. Enter a few relevant keywords (e.g., SEO, marketing, etc)
  3. Go to the Matching terms report
  4. In the Include box, enter terms like “course,” “academy,” “training,” etc
  5. Choose Any word
List of keywords with corresponding data like KD, volume, etc

Look through the report and see if there are any courses you can create by repurposing your content.

3. Turn your blog posts into a book

What’s the written version of a course? A book!

Likewise, you can compile and organize your blog posts and turn them into a book. This can live on your site simply as an ebook. Or you can even go big and publish it as an actual paperback.

This is what CoSchedule did.

Book cover of "How To Get Started With Agile Marketing And Do Better Work"

The issue, however, is that book discovery has not kept up with the times. So even after repurposing, you’ll need to promote your book.

One way to do this is to find sites that collate lists of the best books in your niche and get your book mentioned.

Here’s how to find these sites:

  1. Go to Ahrefs’ Content Explorer
  2. Search for “best [topic] books”
  3. Set the Live/Broken filter to Live only (you want to be included, so the page needs to be live)
  4. Check One page per domain (you don’t need to reach out to the same site more than once)
  5. Sort the results by Page traffic to prioritize your efforts
Content Explorer search results with filters applied

Go through the list and see if your book is a good fit for any of these pages.

4. Turn your videos into multiple short-form videos

With the popularity of TikTok, short-form videos are a rising format. Even YouTube is getting in on the game with #shorts.

One row of YouTube Shorts in grid format

If you have an existing video, it makes perfect sense to divide and turn it into multiple shorter videos. You can then republish them on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram Reels, or even as YouTube shorts or TikTok videos.

For example, this 1 ½ minute video on Twitter was originally part of a longer YouTube video we published.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7PzHO40bOU

5. Turn your blog posts into guest posts

We spend quite a bit of time researching each blog post. Some posts are so comprehensive that they span a few chapters:

List of chapters on link building

Each chapter can easily be a blog post on its own.

So here’s the idea: Why not turn each of these chapters into a guest post for other sites? Not only is it efficient—you’ve done the research after all—but you also get additional exposure, referral traffic and, better, a link back to your own site. (And links are an important ranking factor for ranking higher on Google.)

We call this concept the “Splintering Technique”:

  1. Write an incredible, detailed piece of content for your blog
  2. Break it into “splinters” and submit each one as a guest article to another blog
On left, long list of paper partially chopped up. In the middle, an axe. On right, three separate pieces of paper

You can even go further by changing the perspective for each topic. For example, Chapter 2 on “how to build links” can easily be transformed into multiple blog posts:

  • How to build links for startups
  • How to build links for nonprofits
  • How to build links for ecommerce businesses
  • How to build links for local businesses

And so on.

We term this the “Perspective Technique”:

Topic "future of link building for" branches out to five different entities

This concept is not “new.” It’s used extensively in the world of book publishing. See, for example, the books written by business guru Eliyahu Goldratt:

List of business novels on a Wiki page

It’s basically Eliyahu’s famous Theory of Constraints model applied to different perspectives.

With a bunch of content you can “splinter” off, how do you find sites you can pitch to? Here’s how:

  1. Go to Ahrefs’ Content Explorer
  2. Search for terms relevant to your niche (e.g., keto)

Then, set these filters:

  1. Check One page per domain 
  2. Check Exclude subdomains
  3. Check Exclude homepages
  4. Set Live/Broken filter to Only live
  5. Language filter to English (or language you write in)
Content Explorer search results with filters applied

If the list is still too large to manage, you can set more filters (e.g., Domain Rating) to narrow it down to the best sites.

Since these sites cover topics similar to yours, they’re likely to accept your guest post pitch. Find the website owner’s or editor’s email, reach out, and pitch them your topics.

Recommended reading: Guest Blogging for SEO: How to Build High-Quality Links at Scale

6. Turn your blog post into Twitter threads

Every time we publish a post, we encourage each individual author to repurpose their content into a Twitter thread.

As you can see, they get a ton of traction.

You can turn the entire blog post or parts of it into a thread. For example, this thread is from a section of our blog post on technical SEO:

Don’t limit yourself to blog posts. Videos, podcasts, etc.,—they’re all Twitter thread-worthy material.

How do you write a great thread? Let’s get meta and learn from creators on Twitter themselves:

7. Turn blog posts/videos/existing content into Quora answers

A few years ago, I started actively answering questions on Quora. In the process, I’ve gained over a million views.

Excerpt of SQ's Quora profile

But most of my answers were not generated from scratch. Instead, I repurposed them from our existing content.

How do you find the right questions to answer? Here’s how:

  1. Enter quora.com into Ahrefs’ Site Explorer
  2. Go to the Top pages report
  3. In the Include box, enter topics relevant to your content
List of page URLs with corresponding data on traffic, keywords, etc

You’ll see a list of questions that are actually ranking on Google. So by answering these questions, you can get traffic from both Google and Quora.

Pick out those that you can repurpose content for and answer them.

Recommended reading: Quora Marketing: ~1 Million Views Generated. Here’s How to Replicate Our…

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