Repurposing content is the art of maximizing the value of a single piece of content by transforming it into multiple formats and sharing it across different platforms. This lesson will teach you how to efficiently recycle your content to save time, expand your reach, and increase engagement.
Just like you know it
Content repurposing, or what we like to call it, content recycling, works very similarly to what you're used to in the real world. The idea is to take something that was already made and use it as many times as possible by creating new instances of a given piece of content. You don't want to throw into waste something that can still bring a lot of value. In the case of content, the recycling process is very simple and quick, especially compared to creating new content.
The simple rule
The main principle of content recycling is cutting and repackaging parts of longer content as new content. So, the longer your source content is, the better. The best content for recycling is long-form video interviews—we'll cover them in more detail in the following lesson.
These parts (whether they're text, audio, or video) that you'll clip should cover a single topic that is sufficiently explored or addressed and provides value without further context (i.e., without reading, listening to, or watching the whole source content). When publishing this standalone piece, you're free to brand it in whatever way you believe will reach and bring the biggest audience - don't worry about its relation to the source content at all. It's not unusual for one of these pieces to have more views than the source content with all other pieces combined. Splitting and publishing them as new content is like buying lottery tickets.
💡 Keep in mind
People click on a video based on its title and thumbnail - make sure you give them what they expect.
Looking for an outlier
Recycling your content also gives you a better chance of hitting the jackpot. Every successful creator would tell you that there was one piece of content that "made" them. YouTube's feature to rank videos of each creator by most popular is very handy here. When you check out a few successful creators and have their videos ranked by popularity, you'll see one or two videos with disproportionately more views than average videos. For example, the most popular video of creators who usually have 10-20k views per video can easily have 400k views. When you think about your favorite YouTube content creators, it's likely you first discovered them via their most popular video. This principle works across all other social networks.
💡 Keep in mind
Having some piece of content blow up and reach tens or hundreds of thousands of people is usually a moment in a creator's career that puts him on the map. That's why it's important to be very diligent about recycling - you don't know which piece of content will do this for you.
Scripted content
If you're producing scripted content, do it with clipping it in mind. Structure it in a way that will allow you to produce the most clips of the highest quality. As mentioned before, keep in mind that clipped content can't miss a context. When you know you'll clip a certain part, make sure its main topic is clear and not referred to as "it" or something that makes it unclear what it's about.
When doing a scripted video, you can plan a couple of sections that you'll put special emphasis on with more dynamism and passion or perhaps a witty way of articulating your point. It can be just 10-30 seconds, which is enough for a short clip.
Example
Now, let's look at how exactly you can repurpose the content. For our example, we'll use an 18-minute scripted video monologue of you addressing some topic.
Source content:
[video] 18-minute monologue
Recycled content:
[video] Clip 1 from the monologue (3 min)
[video] Clip 2 from the monologue (5 min)
[video] Clip 3 from the monologue (6 min)
[video - vertical] Clip 4 from the monologue (20s)
[video - vertical] Clip 5 from the monologue (30s)
[video - vertical] Clip 6 from the monologue (25s)
[video - vertical] Clip 7 from the monologue (15s)
[podcast] Audio version of the monologue
[blog] Transcript of the monologue as a blog post
[text post] Clip 1 edited into a social media post
[text post] Clip 2 edited into a social media post
[text post] Clip 3 edited into a social media post
Recycling 1 source content can make you 12 content clips. Share these on every social network relevant for a given content type.
Don't be afraid
Some beginners are worried that publishing recycled content will annoy their audience and make them unfollow them. The worry lies in the assumption that their audience would have watched the source content if they were interested in it. If they weren't, they're not going to watch the clips anyway and will consider it as being offered something they already rejected. That’s not how it works. Many people simply don't watch anything above 10 minutes, others do so only very sporadically. In fact, most don't even bother to watch or read the full thing and simply wait for the most popular clips to surface, and they'll watch those. When they want to share some part of the content with their friends, it's much easier to share the clip addressing the desired topic instead of the whole video and timestamping it.
Remember
👉 Recycling content allows you to extract maximum value from each piece of content.
👉 Clipped content has to make sense without requiring the full context of the original content.
👉 Script your content with clipping in mind. Make the key sections you’ll later clip clear and engaging.
👉 Some audiences only watch the clips and never the longer source content.
👉 You never know which piece of content will blow up. It’s like a lottery, but make sure your tickets can actually win.
👉 If your source content is quality, your clips will be too. Don’t be afraid to aggressively post them.
Homework
1️⃣ Identify one long-form piece of content that you've previously created and want to recycle. If you have no content of your own yet, pick something from your favorite creator.
2️⃣ List at least five potential clips or highlights you could make from the source content. If it's a video, consider how you'd name it and what you would put into the thumbnail.
3️⃣ Think about how a given piece could be transformed into another type of content (video to text, text to audio, etc.)
👏 Keep thriving strong!
Next lesson
Long-form interviews →
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