It’s time to answer a question I get asked all the time — how much time should you spend repurposing your content?
My initial thoughts are that the question should be reframed because content repurposing is still a form of content creation.
Therefore, content creation and content repurposing shouldn’t really be seen as two separate things.
The question shouldn’t be how much time should I spend repurposing content, instead, it should be how much time should I spend creating content overall.
I have NO time for that!
I hear people say to me ALL the time, that they spend so much time writing for their blog, or creating videos, or podcasting, or on social media, that there simply aren’t enough hours in the day to repurpose their content as well. That would be literally impossible, they say!!
I think this is the wrong way to look at things.
In that situation what you’re doing in constantly putting out new content, but not necessarily doing anything to promote the content and drive traffic to it.
Expecting people to just stumble across your content without making any attempts to drive traffic to it, is an unrealistic expectation.
If you repurpose your content, you help drive traffic back to your website.
Here is a short video of me discussing this topic:
I would also argue that constantly putting out new content is not the best approach and the focus should be on quality of quantity.
I joined a digital marketing training academy when I first got started online. It was run by some very old-school internet marketers who achieved fortune marketing online in 2006/2007. They mostly hadn’t moved on from those times and would preach to their students to write a blog post every single day.
I soon found that this wasn’t the most effective strategy. The blog posts were hardly of the best quality and organic reach in 2018 is not what it was in 2007!
I truly believe that you should focus on creating high quality content, and then have a plan in place to repurpose your content.
The repurposed content that you create continues to be of a high quality as it feeds of the amazing first piece of content that you put time and effort into. It serves the purpose of driving more traffic to your content and reaching new audiences with your message.
The 80 / 20 rule
Experienced internet marketer, Derek Halpern, states that you should spend 20% creating of your time creating your content and 80% promoting your content. I think he makes a good point.
Who wants to create content that no-one sees?
Personally I would say 20–30% creating and 70–80% a mixture of content repurposing and promoting.
The time trade-off: New vs repurposed content
I recommend working out how much time you are going to spend creating content overall. Whether it’s fresh content, repurposed content…remove that distinction initially and just work out how many hours per week you’ll spend on content.
When you have that all worked out, next work out how you’ll allocate that time. Do this wisely. Think about how you’ll allocate the time in such a way that you create content people will actually find!
Perhaps calling the content ‘new’ vs ‘repurposed’ is not the right terminology. Your repurposed content is new as well, you have just created it. Simply, it’s based of the research, concepts and ideas that you put into your original source content.
Creating repurposed content will (hopefully) take less time because you have already put a lot of hard work in. For example, creating a video from scratch as opposed to creating a video based directly off a blog post.
Let’s look at these allocations of time…
10 hours per week
Option 1:
- 4 podcast episodes — 2 hours each
Option 2:
- 2 hours on your podcast — prep, the episode recording itself, post interview work
- 8 hours on repurposing:
- 2 hours writing an article
- 2 hours on creating a video
- 2 hours creating social media graphics
- 2 hours publishing content on social media, your blog, YouTube etc
This approach means lots of content, lots of links directly back to your website. Your content is more focused on one topic. More people can be reached in different places. You also use different content formats to reach people — we all consume content differently and we don’t all listen to podcasts.
I hope I’ve given you something to think about…what is your allocation of time when it comes to content creation?
Thanks for reading!
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Originally published at www.content10x.com.
