When you or someone on your team writes a blog for your website, how many places do you publish it? If you say, “Just the blog”, I’ve got good news and bad news for you.
The good news is that you have a massive opportunity to generate more leads from your content.
The bad news is that you’ve been wasting high-value content by only publishing it to your blog.
I’d like to introduce you to the concept of repurposing your website content: finding new ways to leverage existing content in various forms and sharing it to your social and online platforms.
Repurposing content falls in line with a popular content marketing mantra: write less, promote more.
If you can spend more time creating high-quality content and then identify strategic ways to repurpose that content, you’ll see better results from your efforts.
Much like recycling, repurposing content allows you to take a piece of content and transform it into something else that provides just as much value and utility as the original content.
It allows you to breathe new life into that blog post that’s been sitting in the archives of your website, which puts it back in front of your target audience and drives additional traffic to your website.
Before we address a few ways to repurpose your website’s content, I’d like to address any fears you have about getting hit with a Google SEO penalty for duplicate content. Worry not – Google doesn’t see repurposed content as duplicate content, as you aren’t directly copying the original blog post. Rather, you’re trying to drive more awareness to your firm, so it isn’t considered a violation of Google guidelines.
Here are a few ways you can repurpose a blog post to drive additional traffic to your site and generate leads:
1. Create an infographic from the post
To put this in perspective, let’s imagine you wrote a blog post titled, “The 10 Things You Need to Know After a Car Accident.” You could pull each of the 10 facts and create an infographic which summarizes the blog, which you could then share on social media, re-post on your website or share in an email newsletter.
2. Break up the content and share in a social media post
You could create a series of social media posts from a blog topic or create one longer post that summarizes the topics from the blog, just as you could with an infographic. At the end of the post, you can link to the original blog, which drives more traffic back to your site.
Make sure to design an eye-catching graphic to go with the post, such as a quote graphic that includes one of your topics.
Let’s say you publish your blog post on things to know after a car accident, and in the post, you include a powerful statistic on how many car accidents happen every day. That kind of short “snackable” content is the perfect content to share on social media.
3. Create a video about the content
Many of you know video is important to an effective marketing strategy but may not know where to start. Rather than agonizing over what to create videos about, turn back to the content on your site that’s generated the most traffic.
Almost 60% of people would rather watch a video than read text, so if you create a video covering the same information you published in your blog, you’ve now got a powerful engagement tool. You can share it on social media or even embed it at the top of the original blog post to offer your audience two ways to consume the information.
4. Craft an email blast around the blog
This suggestion is more of a promotion strategy than a repurposing strategy, but still accomplishes the goal of driving traffic to your website.
When you’ve published a blog you’re particularly proud of, send out an eBlast that links to the new content with an overview of what your audience can expect to learn from the content.
If you’ve got a few new blogs, feel free to share all of them in a “blog digest” style eBlast.
Make sure to use unique tracking links in the eBlast so you can properly attribute the traffic you drive to the blog from your email.
5. Upgrade your blog and promote it as gated content
If you invest some extra time in taking your blog content to the next level, you can repurpose it as a whitepaper or ebook and push it out on your site as gated content (content that requires contact information in exchange for a download). That way you can collect your site visitors’ contact information in exchange for a free download, so you can begin nurturing them and potentially convert them into clients.
Don’t just turn your blog into a PDF and require a download form, though – make sure you add additional value to the post that merits getting someone’s email address. Try looking for additional supporting evidence, adding in graphics, and actionable ways your audience can apply that information to their situation.
We’d also recommend including a call-to-action at the end of the white paper that promotes your firm as an authority in that field, with an interactive hyperlink so they can click straight to your firm’s contact page.
6. Republish your existing content
No, we don’t mean republishing an old blog with a new title and calling it a day. Let’s say you put together a comprehensive guide in the last year covering everything a person would need to know about hiring an attorney.
That kind of evergreen content can still be applicable to your audience but may require some updating. You can run a site analysis that identifies which blog posts on your site receive the most traffic, and then you can select a handful to update and republish.
Make sure to indicate that you’ve updated the content – you can even keep the original publication date and include a line that says, “This post was updated on X date, X year.”
Don’t forget to share the content again on all of your social platforms to encourage your audience to revisit the page and view your refreshed content!
Repurposing your evergreen website content allows you to continue to drive content to your website without investing additional hours in creating a surplus of content. If you focus more time on identifying creative ways to get your content in front of more people (in whatever form it may take) you’ll see better results from the content you publish and you’ll enhance your firm’s perceived authority.
If your audience sees that you take the time to create videos, white papers, infographics, social media posts, and blogs, it will show that you’re more invested in providing value to them than your competitors (regardless of whether or not all of the content focuses on the same topic).
Ready to go ahead and get started? Download our free eBook, “10 Ways to Leverage Legal Video to Grow Your Law Firm” here!
