In an effort to attract new clients and build up their professional reputation, there are many small business owners who pour a tremendous amount of time, effort, and money into the content they have on their blogs. But, once they hit the publish button on a new piece and promote the content they worked so hard on (or paid a lot of money for), they move on to the next article, video, or graphic.

Simply forgetting about this older content in favor of new stuff, means they are throwing all that time, money, and energy down the drain. Moreover, if the content is evergreen (meaning, that is focused on a topic that is continually relevant to your targeted readers and viewers) and it struck a cord with customers, community members, and potential clients when it was first published, then it is an untapped resource for future lead generation and reputation management.

Put another way, if you are maintaining a blog for your business and you are not making an effort to re-use or repurpose some or all of its content, then you might as well spend your time and money elsewhere!

Repurposing Content is an Essential Part of Blogging in 2016 and Beyond

So what are savvy business bloggers doing differently? They aren’t just creating more and more content. Instead, they know how to reuse their current content in order to reach the greatest amount of potential customers and fans.

Think about it for a moment. How many people or business professionals in your target audience spend a significant amount of time on other platforms or sites online? If they are not getting to your blog, then it makes sense to go where they are in order to catch their attention. This is the goal. If your content consistently provides these people with real solutions to their problems or useful insights into the things they are interested in, then you would almost be doing them a dis-service by not reaching out to them in the places where they are.

While creating content on your blog is an important tool to start building a relationship with prospects, it shouldn’t end there. Next comes the repurposing of that content. Repurposing means repackaging one piece of content across various media channels. In each occasion, the content is added to, or sometimes a section or a topic is taken out and highlighted, expanded upon, or tackled from a different angle.

The goal is to get the most amount of exposure and value from the original piece by reaching the maximum amount of prospects and driving more traffic back to your own website.

The other side benefit to this is that all this content floating around the web will create a kind of organic link wheel to your website. This will help your site’s SEO, since the number and quality of links are still an important ranking factor for organic search. This means, repurposing content will also make it easier to rank for relevant keywords.

5 Simple Ways to Repurpose Content

Now that we are on the same page about why repurposing content is so important, here are five simple things you can do to a current article to extend its reach:

1. Create slides that offer a summarized version of your article

2. Turn your article into a PDF with embedded links and upload it on to document sharing sites

3. Take one aspect of the article and expand on it in a new post on sites, such as LinkedIn publishing, Medium, or Business 2 Community, and then where possible, link back to the original article on your site.

4. Find a interesting, quality image and attach it to the article. Then share this image with a summary of the post on platforms, such as Pinterest, Google+, and Facebook.

5. Create a short video that summarizes or builds upon one point brought up in the article.

Of course, these options are just suggestions. There are many, many ways to repurpose content, and you should use the strategies that work the best for you, your business, and your target audience. The bottom line is that you work so hard on creating on good content, that you want your content to also work for you. Repurposing is one of the best ways to do that.