When it comes to content marketing, the landscape is ever-changing. And, of course, content marketing doesn’t work if you aren’t creating good content. Once you’ve taken the time to create something truly stellar, a piece of content that attracts leads and proves to them that your company is an industry leader, you want to make sure you get the most value from it. Repurposing your content is the best way to do increase your content marketing ROI.

Wait, can that damage my SEO?

If you’ve done research into SEO, you may be wary of creating duplicate content. A longstanding SEO “fact” is that duplicate content can get you seriously dinged by Google’s algorithms, moving your site further and further down the search engine rankings (or getting it blacklisted entirely).

There are two sides to the answer to that question:

First off, duplicate content doesn’t make as much of a difference as you think it does. Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, has gone on record saying that it’s not something to worry about–unless it’s spammy or keyword stuffed content. Backing up this point, a post at KISSmetrics catalogues the authors only firsthand experience of duplicate content causing search engine metrics. The culprit? Taking the exact same text–a press release–and having it distributed across hundreds of sites at the same time as being posted on the company’s website. That’s extreme enough to set off spammy alarm bells at Google, and the site was penalized according. Nothing we’re suggesting here would create anywhere near as much of an effect.

Second, a lot of the techniques we’re going to talk about below won’t necessarily have the full “text” of the content indexed by search engines. Because the content will be in a different format than text. So even if you are still wary of duplicate content (which you shouldn’t be, see above), you can still try these techniques out.

Without further ado…

How to repurpose your content and get more out of it:

Videos

Video is a great way to repurpose content. Screencasting is ideal for app reviews or product demonstrations, and videos of you discussing industry practices or demonstrating techniques make potential customers feel as though they know you. Best of all, these days your average smartphone has a good enough camera to record decent-looking video. You’ll just want to make sure you record in decent lighting and in a room with no echoes or background noise.

The catch here is that the average video-watcher’s attention span is pretty short. For maximum watchability, keep your video length at 3-5 minutes. To keep your videos that short, you’ll probably either be pulling out the key takeaways from a longer piece of content or creating a series of videos based on a longer piece of content. Try using a question in the title of your YouTube video (“How do I…?”), as questions are a popular way to frame search queries.

Ebooks (of all kinds)

When I say “ebook,” you may be thinking a downloadable PDF. That’s one route, but the idea behind several of the items on the list is to meet the people where they’re at–and they’re probably not browsing around your site just dying for a PDF to download. Instead, you can take a popular series of blog posts that naturally go together, or create an anthology book that collects popular blog posts from all categories, then publish it on Kindle or iBooks for a small price.

You probably won’t get rich that way, but people who are browsing on Amazon are looking for something to download and read (unlike your average website viewer). If you create a useful read, it can send new customers your way. For bonus points, set up a landing page with bonus resources for the book readers and direct them to it in the book; that way, people are actually winding up on your website after reading.

Not quite under the same category as ebooks, but another way to repurpose written content, is LinkedIn’s long-form content platform. If you’ve got older posts in your archives that are still relevant and useful, re-posting them on LinkedIn gets them in front of new eyes.

Audio/podcasts

The hit show “Serial” has dragged podcasting into the mainstream, and though it has some flaws as a platform (namely, it’s difficult to effectively integrate calls to action), podcasting is catching on. It’s also so easy to dip your toe into (sign up for a SoundCloud account, pull out your most popular posts, and start recording) that there’s no excuse not to give it a try.

What podcasting lacks in CTAs, it makes up for in reaching people where written content can’t–in the car, on the bus, while they’re grocery shopping…you name it. And you can create a more effective CTA by pulling together show notes and publishing them on your site, then directing listeners back to them. Since you’re working off content you’ve already created, that shouldn’t take long.

Slideshows

If you’re in a B2B industry–especially towards the enterprise end of the spectrum–and your company doesn’t have an account on Slideshare, you’re missing out. Slideshare not only gets great traffic (hundreds of millions of pageviews a month), it also receives 500 percent more traffic from business owners, compared to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Youtube. It also integrates with LinkedIn and allows for embedded links, making it easy to use to drive traffic back to your site (or to a landing page to get more content or more information about your services).

For extra bang for your repurposing buck, you can take the slides that you create for the slideshow and then record a video of them to upload to YouTube. Two birds, one stone, and your content on two huge sites in front of new people.

Images

Images are becoming more and more important for engagement on social media. If you’ve got a blog post that did particularly well, consider turning the key points of it into an infographic and posting it on Twitter/Facebook/Pinterest. (Here’s a handy post with image guidelines for each network.) Of course, make sure to link back to your site in the image description, so that it still drives traffic to you.

Email

Did you create a post series that did particularly well? With a little extra work, you can take that blog post series and turn it into an email autoresponder series, with a call to action at the end of the series (or at the end of each email) to buy your product/talk to a sales rep/etc. Then, create a landing page for your autoresponder series and link to it on social media/throughout your site. This can give your leads list a huge boost.

If you’ve been stuck for new content ideas, you’ve now got six places to start. Do a quick Google Analytics report and see what your most popular posts have been from the last year, and then set about repurposing them; it’s a great way to start 2015!