Content Splintering: Repurpose Your Content Effectively!
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You’re putting a lot of effort into writing content, right?
However, sometimes it seems that the piece of content you wrote is simply not working as hard for you... Which really is a shame after all the work you put in!
Wouldn’t it be great if every article worked a lot harder for you?
And that’s where content splintering and repurposing come in. This is where you turn 1 piece of content into many different ones that you can share on social media, online communities, guest posts, and more!
Implement this and you’ll become a content creation machine!
Prefer watching over reading:
What is Content Splintering?
Let’s begin with the basics, what is content splintering?
The idea comes from an actual splinter. You’ve got this big piece of wood and then you have the splinter, which is a smaller piece of that same wood that has been broken off, now separate from the rest.
It works the same for content:
Let’s say you have written an ultimate guide on a certain topic.
In order to create an epic piece of content, you need to write about many different aspects of the topic. You can splinter each one of these off into a separate piece of content and perhaps go even further in-depth in that article.
For example:
This is one of my traffic generation articles. I could easily take any 1 of the methods and create a full blog post on that, for example as a guest post for another blog.
It will be much faster than starting from scratch on another topic, since I’ve written about it before.
But there’s more, look at the screenshot below:
The screenshot is part of the very same article. As you can see, I created a video on a small part of the topic I was writing about. The video is now a new piece of content that lives on YouTube and that I can share on social media.
And that’s the key part of it, you can change formats.
Below we will be going into repurposing blog content into various formats and new pieces, and some specific cases where this would be applicable.
How to Repurpose Content in Various Formats
There are various ways you can use your old blog posts:
- Create an infographic about it
- Turn it into a video
- Take the audio and turn it into a podcast
- Create a PowerPoint for sites like Slideshare
- Take subtopics and write a new (guest) blog post about them
- Create content for social media (more on that later)
There are plenty of things you can do!
You might ask yourself: “Why?” though.
Many of these different formats can get you in front of a completely new audience (YouTube, iTunes, other blogs, turn it into social media content, and more). The idea is that you want more content that you can share all around the internet!
It’s one of the reasons I love video too.
Repurposing Video Content
I go both ways (content-wise, get your mind out of the gutter!).
As you might have noticed, in pretty much every blog post I offer you the opportunity to watch the same content in video format (for these reasons). Sometimes I start with the video, then turn it into a blog post and sometimes I work the other way around.
Using video gives you so many options!
Here’s a standard repurposing workflow you can use:
- Do keyword research
- Create video
- Write out the content in a blog post
- Take the audio for a podcast
- Take clips (video) and quotes (article) to turn into social media content
- Promote everything
Sometimes I change around step 2 and 3.
Do you see the power here?
Instead of having just 1 article, I turn that article into 5–7 different pieces of content that I can use to help promote my blog. And that’s how you get your content to work so much harder for you!
You could also have your video transcribed as well.
How to Repurpose Content for Social Media
Moving on to social media.
You know you need to continue sharing content on your social media profiles to engage your audience. Which is where splintering your content can help you do easily.
A master of this is Gary Vaynerchuk ( Gary V for short).
He creates a TON of content. Oftentimes the videos he posts on YouTube are quite long, think keynotes or recordings of an hour long Q&A session. And here’s how he uses splintering to repurpose his videos for social media:
The video above is a clip from a larger video. He took some of his long-form content and splintered a small piece of it to be used on social media. Notice how he added captions and a headline to match the platform (since the Instagram app has sound disabled by default).
You can do the same with your content (even if you don’t use video).
For example, for Twitter, you can take 3–7 tips from your article and write a tweet about it. Instead of sharing the same tweet each time, you’re bringing more value, and have an opportunity to get people to your blog post.
The same thing with Facebook, Instagram or Pinterest.
You can take the same tips or quotes from the article and create an image for it. Visual content usually does better than just written content on social media. You should be able to make at least a couple from each article.
Here’s another great way to promote your content:
If you’re part of online communities you will want to share it there, right? The problem is that if you just drop a link, the response it gets usually isn’t that great.
This is where you can use content splintering as well:
You have created your long, detailed piece of content already. It shouldn’t take you too long to write a shorter piece (say 100–300 words) to use in these online communities. This way you provide value upfront, before people even click on your link.
Because you’re bringing value, you will see more clicks, likes and comments.
If you’re in Facebook groups, you can check out this content promotion guide.
In Conclusion
It’s time to get your content to work harder!
By using the 2 techniques of content splintering and repurposing, you can turn 1 piece of content into multiple pieces and formats that you can use everywhere. This way you can drive traffic from multiple sources.
Need a place to start?
Check your analytics to find your most popular articles. Then create the images, excerpts, videos, and more from them. Then use the new content to engage your audience and drive people back to your blog.
You can do it!
Originally published at https://thebloggersacademy.com on October 18, 2020.
