16 Ways to Reuse and Repurpose Your WordPress Content
Your website traffic most likely comes from fans of your content: people who’ve heard of your website, visited it, liked the kind of content you are hosting, and keep turning up for more. All you need to do is provide them with more to keep them coming.
But you don’t need to keep creating content from scratch to keep your blog fresh. You could invest in repurposing some of your old content, and this is what this article is all about. But why repurpose your content? And what is reusable content in the first place? We will be answering these questions before we get into the meat of the matter. If you feel you already know all you need to know about reusable content in general, please scroll right down to the section which piques your interest.
Here’s what we’ll be talking about:
The first reason why you should repurpose your content is time: while content drives people to your website, content creation takes time, and repurposing some of your older material means you’ve done part of the job in advance.
However, saving time is not the only advantage of repurposing your older content. You can improve your website’s SEO by optimizing older content for different keywords, you can reach more people by packaging, presenting and distributing your content differently, and, finally, you will be reinforcing your website’s authority with search engines and your brand authority with visitors.
Not all of your old content is fit for a new purpose, though, so the first step towards repurposing your content is to find the content you can use. This will likely be your evergreen content – the content which stays relevant for a long time – and your most popular content – the kind of content which keeps attracting visitors long after it had been published, or which had a large number of visitors when it was published.
And while there is a lot to be said about creating evergreen content (which you can learn from the article linked above), determining which of your content is the most popular is easy in comparison: simply use an analytics tool and get your stats.
The most obvious thing you can do to repurpose your reusable content is to organize it into lists. As you create content, you will need to organize it better in order to access it, and the way to do it is using categories and tags. Use these to bring some of your older content to your visitors’ attention.
While you can display your most popular tags or your most popular posts as a widget, you could also make use of your well-organized content to create a particular kind of article: the listicle. With or without the use of tags, you can sort your content into related topics, write about them, and link to the articles themselves.
Are you running a food blog, for instance? Why not create list articles based around a theme or an ingredient or season? A good example would be something like Top 10 Vegetarian Barbecue Recipes, or 5 One-Pot Dishes to Keep You Warm. For a fashion blog, you could be directing your visitors to Top 10 Summer Dresses of 2021, or maybe 5 Worst Fashion Don’ts We Actually Used to Like. A film review website could present a list of best films of the previous decade, a shop blog might compile a list of top sellers. The list of potential lists goes on.
Rereading some of your earlier content may spark ideas for new posts. Maybe you have changed your mind about an important topic and want to debate the past you, or maybe the circumstances have changed and new technological or political realities (for instance) require a fresh look. This way, your old content can be seen in a new light, while also providing you with the opportunity to reuse old research, saving time and effort.
Text posts are all well and good, but perhaps there are ways of presenting some of them in a different, more visual way. If you have already conducted quantitative research before writing an article, why not present the data itself as part of an infographic? The infographic can become its own post, and also more likely to be shared on social media.
The same goes for their more boring cousins, the instructographics, only they do more than just present data using colourful and striking visualization techniques: they offer visual aids to how-tos. You can use these visuals to accompany your tutorials or posts, or you can use them as special posts or images to share on social media.
You should also bear in mind that social media are more than just Facebook, Instagram and Twitter (though these are perhaps the most influential): for best results, optimize your graphics for Pinterest, and consider creating slideshows and posting them on Slideshare.
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As we have already mentioned, there is an advantage to having done a lot of research beforehand: you can update one of your older posts with new data, if such data has been published, or bring it up to date by introducing more or newer images and changing the layout of the article, perhaps by splitting a longer post into multiple pages or making improvements to its structure.
The fact that your post has been online for some time does not mean that all of its potential readers are aware of it. So long as it is relevant or topical you can bring it to the attention of your social following by reposting it. Your social following changes from time to time, after all: you may have gained new social followers who might appreciate an older post. Just figure out a good time to post on social media.
You can also use a large blog post to break it up into more social media-friendly chunks and repost the best bits of your older content that way.
The content you post does not even need to come from you or your contributors: your visitors may have already provided you with some. You can use visitor testimonials to set up a testimonials widget for your website or you can use your visitors’ comments as testimonials on your social media accounts.
This way, your social followers will see what your frequent readers have found interesting, useful or funny about a post of yours they read – testimonials make for great peer recommendations.
Just as described above, your visitors may have provided you with some useful content, even if they didn’t find your website completely to their liking. You can use their inquiries, comments, and reviews to address and inform your website design and content creation strategy, but if you see a problem or issue persists, you could use it to create an FAQ section for your website. This way, you can use what at first appears to be a problem to your advantage.
If you have created an email newsletter, you can use your older posts as part of its content, and even include links to related posts or the original post itself. One significant advantage of feeding your older, but relevant content to your newsletter subscribers is that you give them an additional opportunity to read your post without negatively affecting your SEO through duplicate content.
One of the ways you can increase the time your visitors spend on your website and improve their user experience is to introduce an interactive feature. Using a WordPress Quiz Plugin, you can create a simple (or complex) interactive quiz to entertain and engage your visitors – and all the information they need for a top score is already contained within your older posts. Accompany a link to each on the answers page, and interested readers will have an easy time learning more.
Not all your visitors might be interested in accessing your content in blog form, especially if they have issues with poor internet connections. You can furnish them with an ebook of your best content, or even content selected according to a theme or topic.
We understand it is easy to suggest you create a whole different avenue of distributing your content, but, to be fair, creating a podcast or shooting and producing video is probably more accessible now than it had ever been. There is a lot of work that needs to be done to make a podcast or a video series look and sound professional, and professional software isn’t cheap (though free podcasting plugins and free video editing software do exist), but you have one thing going for you: a selection of well-researched topics.
Looking at the previous section in reverse, there is a way to reuse your podcasts or video as text posts. Whether you do your transcription yourself or you employ a transcription service, there is a wealth of quality textual content to be gained. Your podcast transcript posts can then form part of years’ best lists, ebooks and other forms of repurposed content.
In case you have ventured into video production, you may end up with a lot of long-form content. Sure, that’s great for YouTube, but many online video consumers stick to short-form content on Instagram and TikTok. Sure, it’s very hard to provide comprehensive information on complex issues within the timeframes TikTok and Instagram video-watchers are used to, but that makes them great for trailers and soundbites. If you can provide your TikTok and Instagram followers with interesting and exciting short videos, you improve our brand’s presence and authority, and some of them are bound to find their way to your website for the full versions of your content.
Finally, if you have established yourself as an authority on a topic, you may be asked to write a guest post – or you may even reach out to another website offering cooperation. Your name alone and the author description of “Editor of So-And-So.com”, for instance, may drive visitors to your website, but, with permission of your new host, you can also link to some choice pieces in your guest posts yourself.
In Conclusion
As you can see, there is a broad gamut of ways your existing content may be reusable. Some of them require only a little effort, others, such as podcasting and video, may even require material investment. Either way, you should not neglect a way of making the most of your content if you can make it work for you.
