As good content continues to gain importance in the eyes of your customers and Google, it’s crucial to develop a process that optimizes your efforts and ensures that you reach the goals you have set for a campaign. I’d like to share just one step in my content marketing process that I have found to drive traffic and gain new customers. Even better, it is relatively easy to do.

What Is Content Repurposing?

Repurposing is the process of taking content and expanding its reach by modifying it to fit in as many targeted mediums as possible. No, I am not talking about article spinning. I am talking about taking a great piece of content and extending its reach by sharing it in other formats. You can start this process by doing market research to identify where your target audience goes to find information, and then adapt quality content to fit that medium.

For example, I consume most of my content in two primary forms of media: blogs and podcasts. During my commute each morning, I spend around 30 minutes listening to podcasts rather than music. Using me as the persona, it would be smart if marketers would take all of their quality PowerPoint presentations, webinars, white papers and/or ebooks, and repurpose them into quality podcast that I could listen to. It would greatly increase the chance of me consuming their content.

All too often we create a piece of content that is fantastic, but we limit its reach by only placing it in one medium. By producing only blogs or webinars, or some other form of content, you are missing out on great opportunities to reach new customers in the places that they like to hang out.

You can use content repurposing for the benefit of your own brand as well as a way to take advantage of client content that has already been created. If it’s difficult to generate brand new content on a regular basis, you cant often take your existing content and repurpose it for other channels.

So how do we repurpose content, and where can it be placed?

How to Repurpose Good Content

1. Research

Identify the piece of content you want to repurpose. Study your potential customers and identify where they are going for information. Make a game plan for how to get this content in front of as many qualified eyes as possible.

2. Repurpose

This is the fun part. Once you know what platform you are going to use, get creative on how you can repurpose this content. Blog posts can make great guides or, when combined, can also make ebooks. A presentation given at a conference can be repeated, this time in front of a camera, and the resulting video can be put on your YouTube channel or inserted into an email campaign.

Be creative and think outside the box. Does that whitepaper have information that may lend itself to an infographic? Can you take the juiciest bits of your recent webinar and turn them into a video series?

Once you’ve got the what and the how down, the next question is, how can you make a repurposed piece of content unique and not just a regurgitation of the past? Treat repurposing as an opportunity to expand your reach and add value to your original idea. Here are some ideas.

• Identify industry leaders who can be a part of the conversation who were not included in the initial content piece. Interview them and include their answers in video, audio, or written form. Invite them to join you in a webinar, Google+ hangout, or roundtable discussion, all of which can be shared in multiple mediums.
• Take the comments and feedback you received from the initial piece of content and address them, adding further insight and clarification.
• Use rich media to make it more engaging and more entertaining. For example if your original piece of content was a blog post, and many of your customers go to YouTube for how-to videos, create an interesting how-to video and put it on your YouTube channel.

3. Reshare

Share your newly created piece of content via social media channels again, but place an even greater focus on the best method of promotion for that specific platform. If you did your research properly and found the right medium to repurpose content for, chances are there are specific ways to promote content on that platform. Use best practices relative to that medium to reach your audience.

An example of repurposed content:

This blog post was repurposed into a PowerPoint presentation which we uploaded to Slideshare, and has several thousand views. Taking content within the actual post and repurposing it so that it fit in the format of a PowerPoint was easy and a great way to attract readers who like to consume content on Slideshare. It also gives us an additional medium to catch search traffic. You can find more examples on our Slideshare and YouTube accounts.

What Types of Content can be Repurposed?

Here are a few of my favorites, but I am sure you can think of more:

YouTube: Turn your how-to article into a step by step process with images, video, and voice over explaining each process. Creating high quality instructional videos creates reciprocity and builds brand recognition. You can use tools like Animoto to create montage videos in a few easy steps.

Instructables: Perfect for turning a how-to article into a step by step process with with pictures and instructions. Then make it into a YouTube video as well for 3 platforms out of 1 piece of content. The idea here is not to spam people with the same old content, but to contribute valuable information to new users and communities in the places they already like to visit.

http://www.instructables.com

PowerPoint Presentations: Repurpose content into a PowerPoint presentation and upload it to sites like Slideshare, Slideserve, and Docstoc. These often get hundreds of views and can rank for long tail keywords.

Podcasts: Interview experts on your team or within your industry. Record the interviews to help develop blog posts or other content down the line.

Webinar: If you have enough content to create an informative webinar, do it. Let potential clients download it for free. Webinars are great for building community and giving back to loyal followers, and they can also be great link bait.

Infographics: Do not limit a great graphic to one placement. Change the color and look of an infographic and find another website whose readers would like your content. Write a unique micro post to go along with the graphic and send it off.

Newsletters
Blog posts
Ebooks
Instructables
PDFs
Videos
White papers
Infographics
Micro posts
Guides
Case studies
Email marketing
…and more!

Tools to Make Repurposing Easier

Using tools that make the processes easier will enable your team to be more efficient and enhance the professional look and nature of your content. Here are a few tools I like to use:

Piktochart: If hiring a graphic designer for a particular piece of content is not an option, you can use Piktochart. This tool helps you create high quality, aesthetically pleasing graphics that can use either to enhance your content or as the content itself (as with a blog post-turned-infographic).

http://piktochart.com/

Animoto: This is a simple video editing application that turns static images into a great looking video montage. It is almost 100% dummy proof, and your clients will love it. If you have a client that has a lot of great images, take advantage of it.

http://animoto.com/

LSIkeywords: Add semantically related phrases and keywords into your repurposed content to help it gain the exposure that it deserves in the SERPs. This is a great way to attract long tail traffic with repurposed content.

http://lsikeywords.com/

Murally: Often described as a whiteboard on steroids, Murally is a great way to visualize your content and collaborate to make it better.

https://beta.mural.ly/

Capitalizing on great content and making it available to as many people as possible is what content marketing is all about. Internet marketers need to find scaling practices that offer VALUE to clients and company brand and drive qualified targeted traffic back to websites.

Resources:
http://www.e2msolutions.com/blog/content-marketing-is-not-rocket-science-the-ultimate-guide/

Get More Mileage From Your Content Through Repurposing is a post by SEO expert Jared Oldham. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Over the last few months, broken link building has become one of my favorite link building techniques. I credit Russ Jones’s Broken Link Building Bible for adding flames to my broken-link-building fire and for helping me fine-tune my approach.

“Broken link building may perhaps be the most effective, white-hat link building strategy in years,” Jones says. “In particular, broken link building is appealing because the success of the campaign is directly proportional to how much good you do for the web.”

So what is broken link building? In short, this technique consists of:

1. Finding links on the internet that are no longer working,
2. Offering the fixed URL to the webmaster, if possible, and
3. Requesting your site or content be added to the page as well.

As SEOs, it’s our goal to do as much good for the web as possible by optimizing our clients’ sites, content, and marketing strategies to provide value to visitors and “the web” in general. Broken link building does this—you’re making the internet a better place for the people who may otherwise be clicking on dead links.

The broken link notification is also a goodwill “ice breaker” to get the conversation started with webmasters, without just saying, “Hey can you add my link to your list please, please please?” It takes away link begging and replaces it with link collaborating.

So how can you implement broken link building into your current link building strategy?

First, define what you have to offer.

Unique Value Proposition

What is your unique value proposition (UVP) for the market? What sets your business or client’s business apart from the competition, and how can you leverage that information for linking opportunities?

Once you have identified your UVP, find (or, if you don’t have any, create) some linkable assets that highlight your UVP. These are the resources that you will then use when requesting links later. Think content.

Examples of linkable assets:

• Website landing pages
• Videos
• Blog posts
• Presentations
• Webinars
• Infographics
• Downloads
• and much more…

Having a list of linkable assets gives you something to offer the webmaster as a new resource to add to their list, post, or forum when you contact them about the broken link.

So, how do you find these broken links?

Finding Broken Link Opportunities

Finding relevant broken links is the most difficult part of the process, so it’s time to brush up on your advanced search queries and put them to work.

These are a few of my favorite searches when I’m looking for broken link building opportunities:

• KW intitle:resources
• KW “useful websites”
• KW “useful resources”
• KW “useful links”
• KW “favorite sites”
• KW intitle:“recommended links”

Using these advanced search operators will help you find web pages with lists of links to resources and sites within your niche or relevant industry. You can supplement any of these queries with “intitle,” “inurl,” “intext,” “list,” “sites,” “site:edu,” or “site:gov” to narrow your results.

Make sure that the sites that you find are relevant enough to warrant further research by quickly checking for categories or terms related to your industry, and add the ones that are relevant to a spreadsheet or open them in a new tab for further analysis. Once you have built a list of 10 or so, begin looking for broken links on each individual site. My favorite tool for this is the Check My Links extension for Chrome.

Using the Check My Links extension will highlight every link on a page and tell you what type of header response each one is. Here’s an example:

Now that you’ve identified some broken links on the page, look for a relevant broken link and target it as your broken link request icebreaker. Do the webmaster a favor and, if possible, find the correct URL for the broken link as well as a similar resource to send over in addition your own linkable asset. Then send your request.

It could go something like this:

If possible, I like to add one or two additional resources that the webmaster could use to enhance their resource list that are not just my clients’ URLs. This shows additional goodwill and makes the webmaster that much more likely to respond positively. This email approach has been very successful for me.

Utilize Known Broken Links

Now that you’ve found some broken URLs, you can use them for further link building. Make a list of URLs that you know are broken, take each individual URL and find every site that is currently linking to it by using Open Site Explorer. This is a fantastic way to find dozens of websites to work with in your link building strategy with minimal effort.

Quickly scanning an OSE report will reveal new opportunities within your niche. This is why finding a highly relevant broken link is so crucial—it increases the likelihood of sites in your industry linking to the broken URL. For example:

Each new site that you find with this method should also be mined for additional broken link opportunities until the web of prospects leaves your niche, or where your UVP can longer help you earn a link.

The process looks something like this:

Target Quality Link Opportunities

Getting your brand or your client’s brand in front of qualified viewers is essential to campaign success and broken link building can do just that.

One of our clients is involved in the information technology sector, and their blog offers loads of great information for IT professionals, students, and hobbyists alike. Because their site has a large focus on helping people learn valuable IT skills, their content and website are fantastic linkable assets. Individuals using these resources are qualified leads that can benefit from our client’s offerings, and this is why finding quality link opportunities is essential.

I have found that the more qualified (targeted niche) the resource page I am working with is, the more domain authority and potential link juice it generally has. Even more importantly, quality sites send quality traffic back to your own website. Broken link building can be a somewhat time-intensive approach, and attempting to fix links on pages that are not relevant or are clearly not moderated for quality content is not going to benefit the internet or your client.

Have a particular approach or technique to broken link building that works for you? Please share your ideas in the comments.

Post by Jared Oldham, Senior SEO Specialist at SEO.com.

A Practical Guide To Broken Link Building is a post by SEO expert Jared Oldham. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.