Extending the Life of Your Content

One of the most important factors of Search Engine Optimization is regularly posting good content on your website. But a list of your favorite TV shows or what you ate for breakfast isn’t exactly ideal. In a perfect world, you should be consistently creating compelling content that is relevant to your target audience and optimized for keywords you’d like to rank highly for.

But realistically, coming up with something brand-new to post to your blog every week can be a huge time burden, especially when your primary concern is to serve your customers.  So, why not extend the life of content you already have? These can be articles you’ve written for other publications, marketing materials your company uses or presentations from talks or seminars.

Here’s a recent example of some content repurposing we did for one of our clients we help with SEO, the Raleigh business and intellectual property law firm Whitmeyer Tuffin, PLLC., which produced some very successful results. 

1. It started with a lecture.

Randy Whitmeyer often lectures to classes at local universities on intellectual property law. Such was the case a few weeks ago, when Randy spoke to Dr. Ted Baker’s entrepreneurship students at N.C. State. Naturally, he put together a powerpoint presentation to accompany his talk covering intellectual property basics for entrepreneurs.

2. The presentation was uploaded to slideshare...

Rather than file it away for the next lecture, we added his presentation to the Whitmeyer Tuffin slideshare account so the information could be viewed and shared easily. The firm uses slideshare fairly frequently to publish presentations, which are then added to their website. Not only do these slides inform current and potential clients, it also establishes the Whitmeyer Tuffin attorneys as thought leaders in their industry. 

3. And repurposed into a blog post..

Extracting and tweaking the information from this particular presentation would create more SEO value for their website than just embedding the slideshare. So, we used the biggest takeaway points to write an optimized blog post, the Top 10 Intellectual Property Mistakes Made by Emerging Companies. Because Randy had already put thought in to the presentation, it wasn't difficult or time-consuming to recycle the information from the slides for the website. 

4. Which was submitted to directories and shared on Twitter.

To get the most out of any content you post, it should be promoted across the web to drive traffic back to the site and (hopefully) generate a few external links. This is usually pretty successful for an interesting, informative post such as this one, particularly when shared in the right places. The blog post became the subject of a Whitmeyer Tuffin tweet, and was submitted to several directories geared toward entrepreneurs.

5. The result?

The post was viewed hundreds of times in the first five days after being shared, and is now the second-most viewed page on the site (after the homepage.) The post’s link on the Startups subreddit drove 136 new visits alone. Overall, traffic to the Whitmeyer Tuffin site has more than doubled since last month, primarily due to directory referrals. The post is also ranking on the first page of Google for intellectual property mistakes. 

This is just one example of how content that's already been created can be recycled into a successful website post. Where are some other places you look for site content to repurpose?