How to Repurpose Your Content Again and Again and Again

August 22nd, 2016 by Search Influence Alumni

National Simplify Your Life Week: easier said than done, right? There are so many balls to juggle every day, the idea of adding a complex online marketing campaign to a to-do list sounds unbearable. But online marketing doesn’t have to break the minute-bank. By maximizing your content, you can get more for less, and without much more effort.

LinkedIn calls this the big rock strategy. Or, sometimes the Thanksgiving turkey. The idea is that for every big, information-dense piece of content you create, you can have many smaller pieces of content. Like the leftovers that turn into sandwiches, casseroles, and soup, big rock content can last for a long time. But how do you do this?

Create Big Rock Content

Your “big rock” is your starting point. It needs to have enough information that it can get chopped up, broken down, and reused multiple times without getting repetitive. This is best achieved by focusing on what you’re already an expert in. While doing lots of research might produce a really fantastic piece of content, the time saved by writing what you know is invaluable. Pick a handful of topics about your business, industry, or professional experience, and write everything you know about each one. This will create focused, rich content you can base the rest of your campaign strategy on.

Your big rock can be a white paper, blog post, video, webinar presentation, or anything else that provides plenty of room for your expert opinions. But publishing your big rock is only the beginning.

Slice and Dice

Once you’ve created your big rock, it’s time to get it out into the world! Just posting to your blog or linking on your website is not going to inspire droves of people to read what you’ve written and start an industry revolution around your brilliant ideas. Far too many interesting pieces of content languish where no one can find them. This is where social media kicks in.

Link to your big rock on all of your social media accounts when it goes live. Then, pull out quotes, fun facts, or other smaller pieces of information and use them as new social media posts (still linking to the original piece so people can learn more).

Write a blog post about your new white paper or video, then, link to it on social media. You can also pull out stats and facts and turn them into an infographic, and, you guessed it, share that on social media, too. If you have a newsletter, summarize all your newest big rocks and blast it out to your interested followers. And get creative; the more ways you can get your content in front of interested parties, the better.

You should be able to stretch a piece of content across a few months. Creating a few big rock pieces of content at once and then staggering their publication and rotating through promotion will make each one last longer. If this is all still a bit overwhelming, remember, content calendars are your friend. And, if all else fails, the team at Search Influence can just do it for you. Now, that’s simple.

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