Are unpredictable Google updates tanking your organic traffic? It’s time to build an online brand universe – and that starts with learning how to repurpose content.
Discover how to repurpose content in six simple steps, along with a selection of the AI prompts I use to make the whole process faster and easier.
Repurposing your best content ideas across powerful channels like YouTube and email newsletters protects your business by making it algorithm-proof.
These tactics have helped me grow a profitable blog to over 100,000 monthly visitors, plus a LinkedIn audience of over 21,000 – all as a solopreneur without a team. I want to help you do the same!
How To Repurpose Content Easily in 6 Steps (With AI Help)
This is the content repurposing framework I’ve developed to take a single idea and use it to create content across multiple platforms.
And this isn’t just copying and pasting from one platform to another. I always make sure each piece of content is optimized to work effectively with the core algorithm for whichever platform I’m targeting.
#1. Start with an Audience Pain Point
Your audience should always be the starting point in this process. To find the main idea that will inform your content, you need to understand the most important pain points your audience struggles with.
And the best way to do that is by talking to them. You could do that on social media, on client calls, or by sending a survey to your email list. Whichever way you choose, start by building a list of pain points and problems relevant to your audience.
#2. Map the Pain Point to a Viable Keyword
The next step in the process is to use a keyword research tool to find a keyword that makes sense for this particular pain point.
For example, let’s say you’re an email marketing consultant. You’ve researched your audience and discovered that one of their major pain points is not knowing how to create an effective lead magnet to build their email list.
Starting with that pain point, let’s dive into the keyword research tool and see what people are searching for around it. The easiest way is to start by searching for the broadest possible keyword, which in this case would be “lead magnet”.
The problem is – the keyword “lead magnet” is not only highly competitive, but it’s also not very specific. When someone types that term into Google, we can’t be sure exactly what they want to find. So we can’t use it on its own. We need to narrow things down further.
To do that, I’d filter the results by an informational term such as “how to”. Doing this immediately makes our job easier. It generates a list of long-tail keywords that people use when searching for information on how to achieve certain goals related to lead magnets.
Look at the below image. You could easily write a blog post answering any one of these queries.
Personally, I’d start with the first one on the list open “how to create a lead magnet”. Not only is this a clear and obvious choice, it also has a relatively manageable keyword difficulty (KD) score and a decent search volume.
If you’re an email marketing consultant with existing authority on your website – and you can write a genuinely high-quality piece of content for this topic – then you should have a decent chance of ranking for this long-tail keyword.
Of course, search rankings are never guaranteed. You may need other ingredients in order to reach the first page of Google, such as relevant backlinks or supporting content. But if this topic is directly relevant to your business and helps your target audience, then I’d definitely recommend creating a blog post about it.
#3. Create a Search-Optimized Blog Post
So at this point, we know which audience pain point we’re focusing on. We’ve mapped it to a viable target keyword and we know what we’re going to write the blog post about.
The important thing now is to make sure we write the blog post in a way that’s suitably optimized to rank in search, while avoiding anything that might cause over-optimization and damage its chances.
It’s a fine balance to strike, but I’m going to walk you through it now.
To start with, I always Google the target keyword and browse through the top 10 search results. My aim is to understand the most common content format, key aspects of the topic that each article includes, and any places where I could add unique value in my own article.
With that information in mind, I build an outline for my own article. I typically make sure to incorporate any aspects of the topic that are common to all the articles, while looking for new angles and places to add my own experience on top of that.
In terms of on-page optimization, I do the following:
- Main keyword in the title,
- In the meta description,
- Once in the first paragraph,
- In the URL slug,
- A couple of times throughout the text body.
I don’t do any more than that. Otherwise, I write naturally for the user, letting keyword density and semantic keywords largely take care of themselves.
Things I avoid doing: I avoid stuffing the main keyword into too many H2 headings. I no longer include an FAQ section, unless it specifically enhances the article. I keep the introduction short and answer the search intent of the target keyword as early as possible, without padding with any extra fluff.
I still write the majority of my blog posts manually (using voice typing to do it faster). But I also use AI writing tools to fill in gaps, if I’m feeling uninspired, or if the subject matter doesn’t necessarily require specific expertise (for example writing an introduction or conclusion section).
Once the blog post is drafted, I upload it into WordPress, add internal links to as many relevant existing articles as possible, add a featured image using Canva, and hit publish. Then, I find at least five related blog posts and I add an internal link in each of them pointing to the new one.
I then head over to Google Search Console and I manually submit the new blog post URL for indexing.
That’s most of the hard work done. Creating the blog post first allows it time to get indexed by Google, and start making its way up the rankings.
What’s more, because the blog post is the longest piece of content, it provides the perfect starting point for repurposing our initial idea into the other parts of our content strategy.
In the next steps, we’ll look at how to do that, using AI tools to make the process faster and more streamlined.
#4. Repurpose the Blog Post into a YouTube Script
Once you have a blog post, you also have the necessary ‘meat’ for a YouTube video. Blog posts are a great fit for easy repurposing into video scripts, which you can then read to the camera using a teleprompter app (this is what I do).
I use an AI tool (Claude) to take the full blog post text as input, then ask it to repurpose into a conversational video script suitable for YouTube. It can do a relatively decent job using a rough prompt like this.
But the real success of this process hinges on giving the AI tool a detailed prompt, in this case including a specific YouTube framework to structure your videos to appeal to the algorithm.
On a basic level, ask Claude to start the script with a compelling hook, such as asking a question or stating a surprising opinion, then present the ‘meat’ of the video in a structured way, then end with a concluding call to action (CTA).
Once you get that initial output, you can make further tweaks to add detail, change up the tone, or remove parts that don’t fit. Generally speaking, the AI tool (Claude) does a good job of generating a workable script.
For best results, I use the older Claude language model (Claude 2.1), rather than the latest Opus version. The older Claude has a more natural, human-sounding default voice, whereas Opus sounds more like ChatGPT (obviously AI). You can now only access the Claude 2.1 model via Poe (with a paid subscription).
Then, record the video, create a thumbnail, and publish to YouTube.
For help getting started with YouTube, my pal Salma Jafri has some excellent resources.
#5. Repurpose the Blog Post into an Email Newsletter
The next thing we can do with our original blog post is turn it into an issue of our email newsletter. Remember, this process works best with educational content that solves a problem for our target audience.
First off, I use ConvertKit for managing my email list. It’s fairly straightforward to get used to (not all email marketing tools are) and offers all the sequences and other automation features you’ll need.
A good email newsletter starts with a compelling subject line to encourage the recipient to open the email. I normally use Claude to generate a list of subject line ideas. First I provide input and context by feeding Claude the full text of my blog post and explaining that I want to turn it into an email newsletter.
So far, I haven’t used Claude to write my whole email newsletter, as I haven’t been sufficiently happy with the output. But I think it’s doable. It’s likely just a case of giving the tool more examples of my own manually written newsletters, plus tweaking the prompts.
But something about the email newsletter still feels too personal for AI. I normally like to open the email with a personal story or reflection, which has to come from my own brain.
I then segue from the story into the main educational takeaways of the email, which I will usually repurpose from the blog post (often in a shorter, paraphrased way, which AI tools are great for helping with).
#6. Repurpose the Blog Post into a LinkedIn Post
The last step in the process is to repurpose the blog post for LinkedIn.
For best results, this requires following a specific format. First, you have to make the whole thing more concise, ruthlessly cutting out any fluff and boiling it down to just the key points.
Second, a good LinkedIn post needs a hook to compel the reader to click “…show more” . That means being strategic not only with what you write in the hook, but also how you structure it in terms of line breaks (as you can see below).
I hopped on a recent trend of people debating whether Google has really killed SEO this time (after lots of damaging algorithm updates) and used it to build a simple yet effective hook. The LinkedIn example post I’m using here originated from this blog post.
Below you can see the expanded LinkedIn post, which people would see after clicking “show more”. You can see that I mainly use choppy short sentences, with the occasional longer one thrown in. This keeps the rhythm of the text interesting for the reader. I wrote this post manually, without any AI assistance.
Actionable Next Steps
Repurposing your content across the internet no longer has to be a hard slog. Using the methods I’ve outlined here, you can easily take one idea that matters to your audience, and tweak it to perform well on multiple platforms.
This process works best with intelligent use of AI tools as smart assistants. Note that I never use my AI tools with a ‘one-shot’ approach. My workflow with them is always an iterative process, going back and forth with a chain of prompts until I arrive at the results I want.
What’s more, I don’t use ChatGPT (unlike most people), as I dislike the tone and style of its default text output. I find Claude a much better AI assistant for human-sounding outputs that require less editing and tweaking.
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