There’s a fantastic method to get more out of your digital marketing budget, repurposing your content. Since a great way to build links and increase your domain rating is to contribute to other blogs that are related and share a common audience, you can re-use existing content to leverage the opportunity. By including your website in the post or in the bio, you get to distribute content related to your product as well as provide a highly relevant link back to your site.
However, it’s hard enough writing for your own blog, right? Nevermind producing brand new, insightful content for someone else–especially if it’s a ghost writing arrangement and you don’t get credit for writing the piece.
Luckily there are a number of tools and tricks that can make this part of your content marketing service a bit easier. One technique for pumping out new guest posts to be featured on compatible blogs is to repurpose your existing marketing material into guest posts. This does not mean just copying and pasting an existing blog post for your collaborator to throw on her site. That…is not what we’re talking about.
We’re talking about taking a webinar, interview, case study, or white paper and taking the key findings, re-packaging them as a blog post to share with your partnering website.
What kind of content can be repurposed?
The great thing about content repurposing is that you can unlock a ton of compounding value from every single piece of content you produce. Whether it’s a white paper, case study, or interview with a subject matter expert, you can always find multiple ways to use that content for other formats and channels.
The most common approach to content repurposing is to generate shorter pieces of content from larger ones. However, it’s also possible to generate long form content from other types of long form content in a different format or for a different channel.
For example, take a look at how powerful repurposing content can be, this engineer applied their SEO journey into a helpful SEO optimization blog post. The author simultaneously applies their unique engineering insights by discussing how their blogs are built contribute to SEO as well.
Another example, your company’s new slick case study for a lead gen campaign featuring a new use case for your product can easily be repurposed into a post that outlines how that customer is finding success. Additionally, an interview on your company’s podcast with an internal subject matter expert can be transcribed and used as an insight-rich blog post.
When we’re talking about repurposing content to produce guest blog posts, the best types of content to repurpose are white papers, e-books, webinars, interviews, and collections of testimonials. Since blog posts generally have deep insights and clear takeaways, they are difficult to generate from shorter pieces of content like single Tweets or LinkedIn posts.
How do you find guest post opportunities?
It’s great to have a plan for repurposing your marketing material as guest blogs for other blogs, but how do you find these places to post? There are a few standard approaches to take, but the first step is to identify which audience you would like to reach, and who is reaching that same audience.
Identify Your Audience
If you’re selling enterprise software, contributing a guest post to a blog that primarily focuses on automobile maintenance won’t do much for you. First of all, the audience of this blog is not interested in what you have to say. Secondly, Google is smart. It knows that your link sitting in a paragraph about brake lines that points to your enterprise software landing page doesn’t make sense and lacks contextual relevance. The key is finding blogs that are talking to an audience that would also be interested in consuming content on your website.
Once you’ve identified your target audience, and which domains are creating content for that audience, there are a few ways to get your guest blog ideas in front of these outlets.
Analyze Competitor Backlinks
Another way to understand your audience is to understand your competitor’s audience. The great part of having a solid understanding of your competition is that they are talking to the same people. The same people who they are creating blog posts, videos, and Tweets for are the people you are trying to reach. It’s also likely that they are gaining backlinks and producing guest posts as well, so pay attention where their links are showing up to find those third party outlets that might be willing to host your guest post.
Tools like SparkToro and Automata can help marketers understand where their audience is spending time and where their competition is publishing the most content.
Cold Outreach
Good old fashioned cold emailing and LinkedIn DMs are probably still the most common ways to approach site owners to offer your guest posting services. However, the success rate, and even the open rate on these techniques is quite low. The only way to combat this is to have a huge volume of potential targets, which requires a large market for this approach to be viable.
If your content only makes sense on a very small number of niche sites and you can’t get the owners to open an email, you may need to try another approach. There are a few tools to help you automate your cold outreach to earn more backlinks. Postaga helps bloggers automate the cold outreach process with automated follow-up sequences and helps you identify promising guest posting opportunities.
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Slack Groups
Slack groups are the newest way to find great potential avenues for guest posting. Outside of the groups that are primarily marketers, there are a number of industry specific Slack Groups where you will find Founders, leaders, and others who are invested in the success of their company’s content marketing efforts who may help you place a blog post on their site.
Some good slack groups for content marketers are Superpath, Demand Curve, and Online Geniuses.
Tools to help repurpose content for your guest post
Canva: Quickly Create Graphics
Every guest blog post will likely require a few images to go along with your repurposed text. If you’re like most writers and business owners, your design skills are somewhat limited. Canva gives you a superpower of converting professionally designed templates for all formats and all channels into a custom graphic for your blog or post.
Descript: Automatically transcribe videos
Descript is a powerful platform that lets you automatically transcribe and edit video transcriptions to repurpose your webinars, interviews, and promotional videos into text-based content like social media posts and blog posts.
Automata: Use AI to generate repurposed content
Automata analyzes your content alongside your competitor’s to understand nuances of your specific industry to repurpose your marketing assets into material for other channels in a variety of formats.
Although it may seem like a daunting task to set off on a guest posting strategy since every piece of content takes time to research and write, content repurposing can help decrease the amount of time and keep your message and tone consistent across all of your posts. If you stick to the mindset of “repurpose, recycle, and re-use”, your content creation pipeline will start to output more great guest posts that help you build links and create strong relationships with other brands.