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Here’s more Traci!

Repurposing blog posts makes sense

-by Traci Hayner Vanover

With millions of blogs on the web, the competition to gain readers’ attention is fierce. Blog owners are tasked with creating new and interesting content in order to gain new readers, and keep the loyal readers coming back.

With so much focus placed on content creation, it’s easy to overlook the assets that are readily available to you. Leveraging your existing blog posts can help you get more mileage out of your content, and bring new readers to your blog.

Share

One of the most important ways to extend the mileage on your content is something you learned in preschool – it’s important to share. Blog plugins like Sexy Bookmarks and Digg Digg have made it easy to allow your readers to share your content across the most popular social networking sites. Drop in strategically-placed sharing links above or below your blog posts so that your readers are reminded to share the content before they click away from your site.

But you don’t have to stop there.

Make a habit of putting sharing links into your newsletters, whitepapers and ebooks. This practice takes just moments to do, and makes it easy for readers to promote your content for you. One of the easiest ways to do this is to embed the sharing links right into the footer of your document. You may also want to consider adding a short note at the end of your report or ebook that specifically invites your readers to share your content. Finally, if you have an affiliate program, consider designing brandable reports that your affiliates can customize with their own links.

Syndicate

Syndicating your content to the social networks introduces your content to a new audience – and once you put the necessary tools into place, the process can be completely automated. Plugins such as Twitter Tools enable sharing of your blog posts with your Twitter followers, and applications exist to bring in your blog feed to your profiles at Facebook and LinkedIn as well. There are also a number of third-party services such as Amplify and Ping.fm that allow you to post your content once, and send it out to a number of sites automatically. Lastly, don’t forget that you can take some of your best blog posts and submit them to sites such as Scribd.com. Scribd enables you to set your preferences to allow the documents to be shared, embedded, or read-only.

Create Multiple Modalities

Individuals’ learning styles vary – some prefer to read content, while others may prefer a more visual learning style. By offering your content in multiple modalities, you are able to appeal to a wide variety of users and extend your reach at the same time. Consider turning your blog posts into audio posts by simply recording them through a service such as CinchCast. The service is free to use, and the MP3 files you create are available within moments of recording them. You can offer these audio files on the same page as the original blog post, embed an audio feed, upload them to iTunes, or even combine the recordings into a product to offer for sale. If you really wanted to get fancy, you can take the newly-created audio files and pair them with slide presentations to create videos that can be shared on sites such as YouTube and Vimeo.

You may also want to consider taking some of your most popular blog posts and using them as the basis for creating slide presentations that can be uploaded to sites such as SlideShare and Prezi. You can even drop one of these presentations directly into your LinkedIn profile and use it as a promotional or portfolio piece.

Content creation is paramount to the ultimate success of your blog. With a bit of creativity and a small time investment, you can share and employ that content, extend its reach, and introduce it to a new audience.

Traci Hayner Vanover, aka The Promo Diva(R), is a brand burgeoner and business consultant with over twenty years experience in market research, sales and promotion. Traci specializes in working with entrepreneurs and authors. Traci's Propabranda blog focuses on the conception, implementation and promotion of great brands in a way that is relatable, memorable and fun. Traci also founded and publishes Entrepreneur & Self-Employed Business Journal, a daily business magazine.