Some people feel really comfortable behind a microphone or a camera. Facebook lives, Youtube channels, and podcasts have given people a voice in recent years and made it easier for brands to connect with their audiences.
This is particularly useful for small business owners who are often the face of their business. It helps to build the know, like, and trust factor when the audience can see or here you.
But what happens afterwards? Too often, some really good content just disappears into the void because there is nowhere for it to go. It gets forgotten about. New visitors to the site or social media page don’t find out about it, even though it might have helped them.
That’s why it’s good to think about repurposing some of this content, particularly if it contains a message that you think will help other people in the future. Here are 10 ways in which repurposing your audio or video content can help your business.
1. It stops valuable information from being lost
Some things are just for the moment – you really need to be there to get the benefit, or they’re about a specific thing that is happening/local event/day of the year. But other things are evergreen – they’re useful whenever you happen to see them, and someone in the future could find them as useful as someone who saw your video. As I’ve already mentioned, it’s good to make sure that this kind of information doesn’t get lost – after all, you’ve already put the work in. Why not allow it to help more people?
2. It can save you time if you don’t enjoy writing
I’m happy to write blog posts. As long as I have an idea, I don’t find it particularly difficult.
The same goes for making podcast episodes. As long as I know what I’m going to talk about and feel I have something of value to add, I don’t find that particularly hard either.
I’ve tried making some video content, but I hated it. I don’t do it now. People aren’t stupid – they know when your heart is in something and when you’re just doing it to play the Facebook algorithms that happen to be promoting video content at the time.
It’s good to play to your strengths. However, if your strength is speaking about a topic, as long as it’s your content, it doesn’t need to be you that writes it for you to get the benefit of written content on your website.
3. You can repurpose content for all kinds of things
The most common use I’ve come across is repurposing video content for blog posts, but it doesn’t have to stop there. You can make factsheets, that could then be used as a downloadable resource. If you have enough content on one topic, it could be an e-book. Maybe you’re creating a course, and you want to have written texts to go alongside your videos. There are lots of options if you get a bit creative!
4. You can reach new audiences
On my site for teaching English to adults, my podcast listeners are generally not the same as my blog readers. People generally have a preference about how they like to consume content – whether that’s reading it, or listening to it in the car/when they’re taking the dog for a walk.
It might feel like a cop-out putting the same information out twice, but if you’re reaching different people, it’s a way to get your content in front of new audiences too and won’t feel like repetition. It also gives people an element of choice. When I send out my newsletter for language learners, I often introduce the topic and then say something like “You can read more about this on my blog or listen to the podcast episode”, adding the relevant links.
5. There are people who can’t hear your spoken content
With video content, it’s possible that your words can be lip read, but that doesn’t work with audio-only content, and it wouldn’t help a deaf-blind person who can’t lip-read. Ploughing through word-for-word, automated transcripts can be hard work because there’s a lot of unnecessary words, and some things just aren’t transcribed well.
6. Automatic transcription services can be unreliable
This brings me on to my next point. I have seen automatic transcriptions of things that I have said that had errors in them and really didn’t come across well. Key information can be lost. It can be extra work to decipher. At worst it can look quite unprofessional. Yeah, it’s cheap, or even free, but it can come at a price if it detracts from the quality of your content.
7. It helps people who want to make notes
I’m the kind of person who needs to write things down if I want to learn them. I take notes when I’m watching online training, and I’m pretty fast. But not everyone can touch type, and sometimes it’s easier for people to go through the main points in their own time, highlighting or taking notes of the points that are important to them. If they have a written copy, you might make this process faster for them.
8. You can have a more succinct, permanent record of what you said
Presenting live information is different, especially if you want to spend time building rapport with your audience and helping people to relax. This content isn’t relevant to future visitors. If you have the main points of a talk in written form, stripped down to only the things that are relevant to everyone, it’s easier for people to get to the good stuff quickly.
I’ve stopped watching recordings of Facebook lives because people spent so much time chatting to those who were watching. I’m not saying they shouldn’t have done that, but if I could have accessed the main learning in some other way, I would have done that rather than just clicking away.
9. It can help your search engine optimisation (SEO)
There’s no magic formula for SEO, but if you have quality content on your site that uses the kind of keywords that you want to be known for, it could help you to rank better for those keywords and therefore increase your site’s visibility.
10. It helps on those days when you have no ideas!
Everyone has them – days where you want to create content for your site, but your mind just goes blank. I generally find going for a walk helps, but sometimes even that doesn’t work. If you can repurpose your existing content and get it out to a different audience or use it in a different way, you are technically still creating content for your site!
How I can help
Cara is a teacher who makes videos for her learners. I work with her to produce blog posts from her videos. It’s all Cara’s content, but I tidy it up, take out anything that would make the text harder to read or not flow as well. I add in some headings, so it breaks up the text and looks more like a blog post. All Cara needs to do is check that she’s happy with it, add any images, and it’s good to go online.
You can read what Cara thinks about this and also find out more about my audio/video to blog service on my transcription page.
Whether or not this is something that you need my help with, I hope this has given you some ideas about how you can get extra mileage out of your existing audio or video content.
Find out more
If you’d like to know more about my transcription service, you can click the link above, or ask me any questions using my contact form. You can also use the form to sign up for my monthly newsletter.