10 Different Ways to Repurpose Your Content

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As I sit here in my home office, I can look out my window and see two vehicles in our driveway. The first is a red 2014 Mazda CX-5, which we just bought a few days ago. We got an amazing deal on it from a local car dealership, and it replaced my wife’s 2006 Honda Accord, which had around 160,000 miles on it.

I can also see my 2002 silver Ford Ranger. Yes, I said “2002,” so the truck is coming up on being almost 20 years old. It has a little over 200,000 miles on it, and it’s been an amazingly reliable truck, despite what a lot of people say about Fords.

After we bought my wife’s Mazda the other day, we took a drive and she was talking about how much she loved the Mazda, and how she would probably be driving it for years. We tend to keep our cars for many years—basically, until we have a really good reason to replace them.

In other words, we love to get as much mileage out of our cars as possible. And that’s exactly the same way I want you to think about the content you create. Specifically, I want you to think about repurposing your material in a bunch of different ways. I’ll give you ten different ways you can do this.

But first, why? Why would you want to do this? It all comes down to this: you have LIMITED time, but you have an UNLIMITED audience. And the best way to get the most bang for your buck from the limited time you have is to put your content a bunch of different places to reach as many people as possible.

So let’s dive in: ten different ways to repurpose your content.

1. Blog post

This is where it usually starts for me. I think in terms of a 500-750 word blog posts. You can read it within 5-10 minutes, and it’s a good self-contained piece of content.

If you want to learn how to plan out a great blog post, go back and listen to Episode 125: The #1 Writing Lesson from Disney’s Star Wars Trilogy.

2. Podcast episode

That’s exactly what I’m doing here. This podcast episode will double as a blog post. I’m reading from a script right now, but I improvise along the way to make it more conversational. In fact, you might think of the teaching episodes of this podcast as an audio blog.

3. Email newsletter

This is similar to a blog post, but you send it out to your email subscribers. The advantage is that it goes right to their inbox, rather than them having to go to your blog or website to read it.

It’s best to keep emails short and sweet. I have started to send a summary of the blog post or podcast episode over email instead of the whole post.

By the way, for email marketing I use ConvertKit. You can get a 30-day trial if you go to kentsanders.net/convertkit.

4. Social media post

I don’t recommend sharing a full blog post on social media unless you are using something like LinkedIn Publishing, which is designed for that purpose. Instead, I think it’s better to share a quote, an image, or a short summary of the content.

The idea is that you want to engage the reader, not just blast your ideas at them. So a story, a quote, a question, or picture helps do the trick.

5. Course

This can be a live or online course. In my day job, I’m a college professor. I teach writing, communication, and media, so I re-use a lot of content between my courses, blog, books, and podcast.

But you don’t need to be a college professor to do this. You can create a simple online course using a tool like Teachable. Each piece of content, such as a blog post, can be a lesson or a module within an online course.

However, make sure you don’t just slap random content together to create a course. You want to make sure the course material is coherent and connects together to form a real course.

6. Guest post

You can use your same material to write a guest post on someone else’s website. Some bloggers are OK with you re-using material, and some are not. So make sure you aren’t violating any rules before you re-use your material on someone else’s blog.

7. Book chapter

A blog post makes an excellent chapter in a book because it’s going to be short and easy to read. In fact, my last book, The Artist’s Suitcase, had 26 chapters, and about half of those chapters started out as blog posts.

Similar to what I said about repurposing material for a course, you want to make sure that the material fits together cohesively into a whole book. Don’t just slap blog posts together and call it a book. Often times, blog posts need to be substantially reworked to create a great book chapter.

But something cool you can actually do is reverse-engineer the whole thing. If you want to write a book on a topic, then you can create blog posts knowing they will become book chapters. If you plan everything out in advance, you can create a steady stream of books based on your blog posts.

And to take things even further, you can create many forms of the same book — print book (hardcover or paperback), audio, ebook, or workbook. (Writer and entrepreneur Joanna Penn often does this).

8. Speech, workshop, or presentation

In the last couple of years, I have given a number of talks that I have then repurposed into some kind of written form. These talks include speaking at a graduation service, preaching in churches and college Chapel, a talk at a business luncheon, and speaking at a writer’s workshop.

The really wonderful thing about speaking is that you get immediate feedback. You also build great connections with people. I highly encourage you to pursue speaking opportunities.

9. Syndication on large websites

For example, you can re-use your blog posts on sites such as Medium, Thrive Global, The Good Men Project, LinkedIn Publishing, and others. In fact, I used to be a lead editor at The Good Men Project, and I repurposed quite a few of my blog posts there.

My good friend Jim Woods, whom I interviewed on my podcast recently, is very active on Medium. It’s a great platform, and you have the potential of a much bigger audience than just your own blog.

10. Video

This can be video on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, and other places. I don’t do a lot of video but need to get a lot more active with it.

Final thoughts

So those are ten different ways to repurpose your content. The key is not to do all ten of these at once. Choose two or three and start repurposing content between them, and see what happens and how people respond.

And don’t be afraid to experiment. I do this all the time. Take a strategy, try it for a few weeks, and see what happens. Then you can adjust as needed.

One thing people often worry about is that others might see the same content multiple times and get irritated because you are sharing the same thing so much. But that’s not true. First of all, your audiences for these different formats are not all the same. The people on LinkedIn are not going to be all the same people on Facebook, or the same people who get your emails, or who listen to your podcast, and so on.

But also, we have so much content coming at us all the time that we need to hear it more than once. Do you know how many times I’ve seen Citizen Kane or the Godfather? I have no idea. A couple of dozen times each, at least. Because I love them. If your material is good and helpful, people will be grateful to encounter it more than once.

How do you repurpose content? What ways are you to try doing it?