You Ask, I Answer: Re-Using Blog Content For Other Channels?

In today's episode, Danielle asks, I have started writing blog posts on our company website. Should I use the same content for email marketing? Should I just reuse the content or link back to the site? What about social media? So content reuse is a fine strategy to get the most out of high value content.

Look, the reality is we're not gonna create the best content all the time. We're gonna create uh you know, YouTube's model, I think is probably the one that makes the most sense. Hero Hub Help. You're gonna make a lot of help content. How do I do this?

How do I do that? Is it going to be award-winning and groundbreaking? No. It's it's very tactical content, it's it's good, it's not amazing. You're gonna have hub content, monthly campaigns, major promotions, and then a couple times, you know, maybe once a quarter, uh, you're gonna have hero content, that big piece of thought leadership that you put out, that uh that massive uh groundbreaking research.

And the more you invest in a piece of content, the more you should be looking at reusing it. Um my friend Todd Defren created a concept back in 2008 called content atomization, where you take a piece of content and you break it up into as many pieces as possible. You take individual quotes, turn them into graphics, you turn you take uh images uh and you make photos that go out on photo sharing services, you record a webinar and you extract you know one-minute snippets of video for uh the Instagrams of the world, uh the TikToks if you want to. Um but fundamentally you're taking a piece of content and you're breaking it up into as many pieces as possible, distributing it to as many places as possible in formats that are appropriate for each channel. So when you talk about blog posts for a company website, yes, absolutely.

Those or pieces of those should go in an email newsletter. If you're blogging at a high frequency, you may want to do a a summary of each of the the posts that uh goes into the newsletter. So like a one paragraph for each post if you're doing a daily post. Uh that's a great email newsletter because it helps people encapsulate and and see everything you've published and uh it doesn't overwhelm them. They can read the the teaser, the trailer if you will and go, well I'm not gonna read that one that doesn't sound interesting or that actually is worth paying attention to.

Um in doing so you're gonna make it a lot easier for them to figure out what's worth reading what's not should you do the whole thing in the newsletter? It depends. If your newsletter is powered by a service that publishes um your newsletter on the web for the sort of view and browser functionality and it's publicly accessible, no. Don't put the whole content of the blog post in the newsletter because you're gonna create duplicate content, right? Create excerpts instead and put those in the newsletter.

If on the other hand you have a newsletter where there is no public uh publicly available web page version then yes you can if you want to make that the entire newsletter. Another option depending on your blogging service is uh services like WordPress can email a blog post to people who subscribe to it. So you may want to look into that. Uh other services like FeedPress do the same thing. Whatever the case is you're gonna want to make sure that the content is optimized for each particular medium that it's on.

So if your blog post is three thousand words, you may not want to put that in an email. That's just a that's a really long email. Um and unless you write for mobile device screens, uh there's a very real possibility that it will uh it will not interest people. Um blog posts also typically uh uh depending on how you structure them, may not be as visually appealing in an email. Um the shorter excerpts may do better.

For social media, look into multimedia, look into uh even something as simple as reading your blog post out loud, uh turning that into a podcast or using a text-to-speech uh generator. Uh Amazon has a fantastic one called Poly that allows you to create very natural sounding audio from text. So if you don't feel like reading something aloud, you can feed your posts to that, um turn them into MP3s, and now you've got a podcast. May not be the world's best podcast, but it's not bad. So yeah, absolutely repurpose your content.

Now the one other thing that I would suggest you you think about is don't necessarily immediately go and put every blog post into a newsletter. If you can, if it makes sense to do so, give yourself a little bit of lag time, maybe a few days, maybe a week, you know, maybe put the previous week's blog post in the newsletter, because what you want to do is you want to look at the analytics. If you're blogging at a high frequency and you put out you know one post a day, what would happen if you ignored if you stacked up all five days, looked at the analytics on them, and said, I'm only gonna put the top two or the top three uh posts by traffic into the newsletter to um to reinforce the fact that not every post is a great one. That's a really good way of handling a situation where you've got a lot of content. When I do content curation, I will look at the analytics for different pieces of content that other people have written and share only the ones that rank most highly because I don't want to put things in an email newsletter that aren't of interest to other people.

By having filtering, by having uh scoring, uh you can create sort of a newsletter that is the best of the best. And that's that's really what you want to give people. You want to give people your best. Email is still a great way to get the attention of others. So those are some suggestions for reusing content.

It's absolutely a good idea. Make sure that you do it well. Uh make sure that you make content for each channel as it's appropriate to that content, and focus on the analytics so that you're only sharing the best stuff to people in any medium, in any format. If you have follow up questions about this topic, please leave them in the comments box below. Subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter.

I'll talk to you soon. Take care. Want help solving your company's data analytics and digital marketing problems? Visit TrustInsights.ai today and let us know how we can help you.