Re-purposing content has been a common practice for businesses for quite some time, but it’s usually more difficult to leverage your existing content for podcasts. Because podcasts rely only on audio and no visuals, you have to get creative. Your content isn’t always written in a way that makes sense when read over a microphone, so it takes a little bit of reworking to create that balance.
In other words, you don’t necessarily have to repurpose the content completely, just try to see how a podcast and your content can work together.
Tips to Using Your Existing Content for Podcasts
The term “existing content” can mean anything from blog posts to eooks to social media posts or comments (when finding existing content that you want to repurpose, remember you have to get resourceful). Visit this article to learn more about the benefits of podcasts. Below are a few tips to using your existing content for podcasts:
Turn Your Content Into an Interview
Interviews make excellent podcasts. Take a look at your existing content and see if you can use that topic and information and turn it into an interview. There are essentially four main ways to make this happen:
- Consider interviewing the writer who wrote the piece about some of the information. All you need to do here is take some of what the writer said and form questions where he/she could give those answers.
- Create an interview about the article. If you published a controversial or complicated article, consider interviewing the writer about the actual article in order to dig deeper on the subject.
- Use the content as an introduction to an interview you’ll do with an expert. You could create an interview with an expert and simply use a few paragraphs of your content as an introduction to the topic. You may need to slightly rework the content to make more sense or sound more natural.
- Create a question and answer session with several different experts. Podcasts work well when you have different voices chiming in, so see if this is something that could work with your content.
It’s also important to remember that not every piece of content will be able to be reworked into an interview. Try to pull a piece of content that lends itself to a lot of questions or has a confusing subject matter so you can create an interesting interview.
Can You Break the Content Up into Different Chapters or Sections?
Think of a category and then gather all of the content you have on that category or topic. See if you can find trends or a natural breakup between all of your different content and create something using all of the information. You can also use just one piece of content and break up the subsections into different chapters that you can expand upon.
For example, I just wrote a piece of content here about optimizing blog images and I structured it into three different sections with subsections in each:
- How to optimize an image for SEO. Points included: save the image file with a keyword name, use hyphens to separate words, use alt text, captions, and keep file sizes small.
- Places to find free legal images. Flickr, Creative Commons, Every Stock Photo.
- WordPress plugins for image optimization. CW Image Optimizer, EWWW Image Optimizer, PB Responsive Images.
If I were going to take this content and create a podcast, the content is naturally broken up into different chapters. I could then take this information and expand, creating an entire podcast series on that one topic: blog image optimization.
Expand a Piece of Content to Cover Details of That Topic
You don’t want to have an incredibly long podcast (5-20 minutes is usually a good rule of thumb), but oftentimes what you write in a quick blog post isn’t enough to create something meaningful for someone listening to your information. Try to branch off and create something more robust. This is very similar to the last point, except instead of breaking up a piece of content into chapters you attempt to cover everything in one podcasting session (or just discussing one “chapter”).
Simply Summarize; Consider Using Different Voices for Added Effect
Of course last, but not least, you can simply summarize your content to create content that would work well for a podcast. Try to change around some of the structure to make it sound like you’re teaching rather than just reading a piece of paper, and even consider having more than one person explaining the content for the podcast. The more personality you can give the better.
The Takeaway
As you can tell, leveraging your existing content for a podcast still takes a lot of work. It takes a lot of re-writing and a lot of extra research and information to create something that will really work, but it gives you an excellent foundation and outline to get started. I highly recommend checking out your Google Analytics to see which pieces of content have done well when looking for podcast content.
Remember, once you do create a podcast you can also publish the podcast on your blog; thus creating another type of content for your website. Check out this article for a list of great podcasts about SEO.
Do you have any more tips to leveraging your existing content for podcasts? Let us know what has worked for you in the comment section below.
Image Credits
Featured Image: astudio via Shutterstock
Image #1: Arina P Habich via Shutterstock
