Content repurposing is the practice of reusing all or parts of your existing content. This usually involves changing up the format, e.g., from a blog post to a video.
In this post, you’ll learn how to repurpose your existing content in different ways.
Repurposing content allows you to reach more people without having to create new content from scratch.
For example, our SEO checklist currently gets an estimated 800 monthly search visits:
But we repurposed it into a video several years ago, and it has since generated over 230,000 views on YouTube:
Content repurposing requires work. It’s not a one-to-one conversion—you’ll likely have to do some rewriting or editing so that the content fits the new format and platform.
So when you see someone like Gary Vaynerchuk expertly repurposing his content across all platforms, remember that he has a team. If you’re doing it alone, you won’t be able to repurpose every single piece of content.
You need to prioritize.
The best way to do this is to repurpose content that targets evergreen topics.
Evergreen topics are topics with consistent interest and search demand over time. Here are some examples of evergreen topics:
- How to lose weight – Since time immemorial, people have always been interested in losing weight.
- How to tie a tie – So long as remote work is not the norm and formal attire is required, people will want to know how to tie a tie.
- Football scores – Fans will always be interested in knowing the scores of the latest game.
How do you know if your content is targeting a topic that’s evergreen? To find out, enter the topic into Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer and check the trends graph.
For example, you can see that “digital marketing” is on the rise:
Whereas, due to the crypto winter, the topic “nft” is on the steep decline:
Try out these repurposing ideas for your existing content:
1. Turn your videos into blog posts
Our video on affiliate marketing for beginners has received >290,000 views:
We then turned it into a blog post, and it currently receives an estimated 38,000 monthly search visits:
Here’s how to find topics you should repurpose:
- Go to Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer
- Enter one or a few relevant keywords
- Go to the Matching terms report
Eyeball the report and see if there are any topics that match an existing blog post you have.
2. Turn your blog posts into videos
We do this often at Ahrefs. SEO checklist is one example. We also repurposed our blog post on influencer marketing into a video:
To find out what you should repurpose, search for your topic on YouTube and see if the top-ranking videos have views. For example, if we search for “build backlinks,” we can see that they get tons of views:
If we have an existing post on this topic, we can repurpose it into a video.
3. Repurpose your videos into a course
Your content is likely published chronologically. Unfortunately, that’s not an ideal way to consume content.
So why not organize content pieces in a logical order and turn them into a course?
For example, 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:
- Go to Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer
- Enter a few relevant keywords (e.g., SEO, marketing, etc)
- Go to the Matching terms report
- In the Include box, enter terms like “course,” “academy,” “training,” etc
- Choose Any word
Look through the report and see if there are any courses you can create by repurposing your content.
4. Stitch the individual course videos into one long video
A few years ago, we released each lesson from our SEO training course one by one.
Later on, we stitched all of the videos into a long (~two hours) video:
As you can see, not only did we receive views for each individual video, but the combined video has also received ~1.8 million views!
We’ve since done that for multiple other courses, and they’ve all done well.
5. Turn your blog posts into a book
What’s the written version of an online course? A book!
You can compile and organize your blog posts and turn them into a book. This can live on your site as an ebook or you can go big and publish it as a hardback/paperback.
This is exactly what we did. We turned the content from our beginner’s guide to SEO into a hardcover book:
Publishing a book means you’ll have to promote it. One way is to run a giveaway, like what we did:
You can also find sites that collate lists of the best books in your niche and get your book mentioned. Here’s how to find these sites:
- Go to Ahrefs’ Content Explorer
- Search for “best [topic] books”
- Set the Live/Broken filter to Live only
- Check One page per domain
- Sort the results by Page traffic to prioritize your efforts
Go through the list and see if your book is a good fit for any of these pages.
6. Turn your videos into multiple short-form videos
Short-form videos are an in-demand format. So if you have an existing video, it makes sense to divide and turn it into multiple shorter ones.
You can then republish them on many different platforms: TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, Twitter, and more.
For example, this 1½ minute video on Twitter was originally part of a YouTube video:
7. Turn your blog posts into guest posts
Some of our blog posts are so comprehensive that they each span a few chapters:
And each chapter can be a post on its own.
So here’s an idea: Why not turn each of these chapters into a guest post? It’s efficient, plus you can get additional exposure, referral traffic, and a link back to your own site.
We call this the “Splintering Technique”:
- Write an incredible, detailed piece of content for your blog
- Break it into “splinters” and submit each one as a guest article to another blog
When you’ve “splintered” your content, here’s how you can find sites to pitch to:
- Go to Ahrefs’ Content Explorer
- Search for terms relevant to your niche (e.g., keto)
- Set Language filter to English (or language you write in)
- Set Live/Broken filter to Only live
- Toggle Filter explicit results on
- Check One page per domain, Exclude subdomains, Exclude homepages
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.
8. Turn your blog post or newsletter into Twitter threads
Every time we publish a post, we encourage each individual author to repurpose their content into a Twitter thread.
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 website structure:
9. Turn existing content into Quora answers
A few years ago, I started actively answering questions on Quora. In the process, I’ve gained over 2 million views.
Most of my answers weren’t generated from scratch. Instead, I repurposed them from our existing content.
How do you find the right questions to answer? Here’s how:
- Go to Quora
- Click your profile and go to Ads Manager
- Click New campaign
- Ignore everything and click Continue
- Under Contextual, click the Questions tab
- Click Bulk Add
Then, add your topic of choice (e.g., SEO) and click “Continue.” You’ll see a bunch of questions and their weekly views:
Pick out those that you can repurpose content for and answer them.
10. Turn your content into Reddit posts
Marketers tend to skip out on Reddit because of the community’s hatred for anything promotional.
But Reddit needs content to thrive. Which means marketers are welcome, so long as the content they post is helpful and valuable.
One way to do this is to publish a tl;dr version of your content and strip away all internal and external links. Only at the end of your post do you leave a link back to your original piece of content.
This is what Tim Soulo, our chief marketing officer, does:
With 77 upvotes and positive feedback, it was well received.
11. Reuse bits and pieces of your existing content as social media posts
At Ahrefs, we create custom images to illustrate concepts for our written content. Not surprisingly, we also repurpose them on our social media accounts:
Go through your content. Each tip, idea, solution, lesson, custom image, or takeaway in your content can be extracted and reused as a standalone post on social media.
12. Turn your conference slide decks into SlideShare decks
Creating slides for a conference is no walk in the park. So it’d be a pity if no one else could view your presentation anymore once your session was over.
That’s why we upload all our slide decks on SlideShare:
Besides the conference attendees, we can get hundreds (or even thousands) more views on our conference slide decks.
13. Upload podcast episodes as YouTube videos
Your podcast may be in audio format, but that doesn’t mean it can’t work on YouTube. In fact, before he moved to video podcasts, Tim Ferriss used to upload his audio-only podcast episodes on YouTube:
It got him thousands of additional listens.
Looking for successful examples of how companies have done content repurposing? Here are three to be inspired by:
1. Ahrefs
Throughout the post, I’ve included plenty of examples of how we’ve approached content repurposing at Ahrefs. And the reason why I shared so many examples is that content repurposing is part of our modus operandi.
We walk the talk.
So even though we have separate content teams for our blog, YouTube channel, and socials, content repurposing is part of our process:
- When Sam Oh, our head of video content, needs to write a script for a video, he checks our blog to see if there is content he can reuse.
- When the blog team creates outlines, we check the YouTube channel for content to repurpose (for example, I created my post on holiday SEO based on Sam’s video).
- Every Twitter thread or long-form LinkedIn post is repurposed from our videos and blog posts (read this post on our Twitter strategy to see how we do it).
2. Sahil Bloom
Sahil Bloom is a content creator and investor. Here’s an example of how he repurposes his content:
- He creates a podcast episode for his chosen topic (“How to Get Out of a Rut”). This is distributed to the major podcast platforms (e.g., Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify).
- He then turns the script into a newsletter for his subscribers, and that’s also published on his website as a blog post.
- This is later on turned into a Twitter thread.
- He then turns it into a long-form LinkedIn post.
Another example: Sahil first got a lot of attention from his thread on the Feynman Technique.
Look at how he has made the most of that piece of content:
- He republished the thread on his Substack.
- He turned it into multiple new tweets and threads, approaching them from slightly different angles.
- He also republished them on his LinkedIn and his newsletter.
- He then added visual elements and turned that into a new thread.
- This is then republished on Instagram.
With just one piece of content, he has likely got 6X–7X of the value.
3. Red Bull
Red Bull sells energy drinks. But it’s also a content marketing machine. It has an entire media arm—Red Bull Media House—dedicated to producing content for TV, YouTube, music, films, print, and more.
These media properties are shared across all Red Bull verticals—Red Bull itself, Red Bull [Country], Red Bull BC One (breakdancing), Red Bull Skateboarding, Red Bull Gaming, Red Bull Racing, etc.
Because it owns the content and has teams behind it, its repurposing strategy is highly sophisticated. It’s not simply doing one-to-one reposting and republishing, like the examples above. Rather, it’s mixing footage in and out of different videos, compilations, reels, TikToks, and more.
For example, the event footage for Red Bull BC One—a prestigious event for breaking—culminates in multiple compilation videos like this, this, and that.
Final thoughts
Repurposing should not be an afterthought—instead, it should be baked into the creation process. That means thinking about how you want to repurpose your content before you create it.
In that way, your repurposed content can be launched together with your published content and help distribute it further.
Any questions or comments about content repurposing? Let me know on Twitter.
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