On today’s episode we are going to talk about several different ways that we can repurpose our blog content Right here on Website Engineer Podcast episode number 311.

Hello everybody! Welcome back to another episode of Your Website Engineer Podcast! My name is Dustin Hartzler and today I am excited to share with you different tips and tricks and strategies and things that we can do to repurpose our content. This came to me when I was thinking about just what to talk about this week and just coming back from a word camp. Word Camp Louisville. I realized that I repurposed some content back from August when I created a presentation working for Columbus. I used that presentation for Word Camp Cincinnati. I used the same presentation for Word Camp Louisville and I also used part of that presentation in a podcast episode back in the summer time.

So, I just really wanted to share some different ideas and some different ways that we can repurpose content we’ve already created because it’s hard to create content especially – I’m thinking like 311 shows into this podcast episode it’s really hard to come up with new ideas and spins on things and ways we can talk about different content and how we can improve our websites and use them the best of our abilities and what not. So that’s what we are going to talk about.

But first I have some announcements I want to share with you today. The very first one is about the WordPress survey. You want to make sure you fill out the WordPress survey for 2016 if you are using WordPress and I am guessing if you are a listener of this program you are a WordPress user. It will take a maximum of five to eight minutes. It is a maximum of 15 questions depending on the way that you answer them you may get more or you may get less. Well, you won’t get more but you will get a maximum of 15 questions. So be sure to take that sometime when you get the chance. They want to poll in all that data to talk about at Word Camp US which is happening the weekend of December 3rd through the 5th or around those dates.

The next article that I want to share with you is one that I found over on Matt Report and the Matt Report is a podcast about WordPress. This one really caught my eye when it said, “Does Jet Pack really slow down a WordPress website?” It was just really interesting because I know that in the past we have talked about how some people think that Jet Pack is a bloated plug in, it will slow your website, and this is just a really neat article.

I am not going to go through the entire thing. Basically what Matt did is he set up a base installation of WordPress, he’s using a blog – regular theme, he using it as a kinda control environment, the site is dedicated – on Site Ground with a dedicated server, and he used GTmetrix to run all four tests at the same time. So, what he did is run four different test scenarios. He did a base plugin, – or a base test with no plugins active. He did a base plugin with Jet Pack active and no features enabled, he did base line plus Jet Pack active and all features enabled, so all 33 modules, and then he did base line with three popular plugins for galleries, web stats, and share buttons.

So, that’s the set up. The very first time he ran it; it took .5 seconds to load all five requests so that’s no plugins active that’s just WordPress and its theme. The next test he turned on Jet Pack and he didn’t enable anything and then that loaded in .6 seconds. It almost doubled the amount of requests that came from the server that had to be processed before the page would load but it was still just one tenth of a second longer. When he turned on jet pack and all 33 modules which nobody ever uses all of the modules it took .8 seconds to load and it double in sizes. So, it went from the very first test did 74 KB worth of data and now we’re up to 263 KB worth of data when all of the features of everything are turned on.

Then he went and added three brand new plugins turned Jet Pack off and removed Jet Pack completely and just did the three plugins for galleries, the stats, and the share buttons. When he turned those on it took 1.3 seconds to load! It was 30 requests which was up from 16 requests on the previous version with Jet Pack all enabled anyways 614 KB so that’s again like three times what it was with all of the features enabled and Jet Pack turned on. So the Jet Pack speed it does look like in quotes, “it slows down your website” but it’s not a bandwidth hog.

The plugin does a lot, it is very stream lined, and when he added those three separated plugins to do the same thing as Jet Pack can do it was much a dramatic increase that the load times over using all of Jet Pack. So, Jet Pack doesn’t do everything perfectly but it is a great all purpose plugin and I have a link to this in the show notes so you can go ahead and check this out and just see some of the details. I just thought this was really great! I’m gonna send people to this when they say, “Oh, Jet Pack is slow! Jet Pack this, Jet Pack that!” These tests clearly show that Jet Pack really does a good job taking up minimal resources and minimal speed to load as absolutely possible. So that’s a great article if you want to read all about that in the show notes for episode number 311.

Alright, as you might also guess WordPress Beta 7 – WordPress 4.7 Beta 3 is now available and it looks like they are coming out about every Monday or Tuesday-ish. Actually this was posted on November 11th which was Friday. So they are coming out very, very regularly. We are really, really close to getting that release candidate. They’re fixing a bunch of bugs!

This one basically has a lot of Rest API stuff. They’ve changed some things with roles and capabilities. We’ve got some stuff for international users. We’ve got a few changes for the custom CSS area and now there are some edit short cuts. So all computers can now update and take advantage of some of the short cuts that are built in. And there were over 50 bug fixes since the last week and that’s it! If you are interested in running that you will need a plugin. It’s called the WordPress Beta plugin and you can download that. Then you can download the latest and greatest version of WordPress including these Beta versions. So definitely check that out!

If you are a plugin or theme developer you wanna make sure that your plugins and themes are working properly with this current version. And if you’re like me you probably are running and updating your change log to see that it works with the latest version, which I never updated to see that it works with 4.6, so I might as well put it on my to do list to go to WordPress 4.7. So that’s all a wrap for the news!

The plugin that I want to share with you in the is there a plugin for that section is called WP Clean Fix and this is an all in one tool that will check, repair, fix, and optimize your WordPress blog. It basically goes in and keeps your data base clean with ease. It’s a perfect fit for anybody who wants to get rid of any annoying data base management things that regularly arise and for someone who wants to literally clean their WordPress up from missing categories, users, metas, and that kind of stuff. There’s tons and tons of features!

You can go in and remove and check expired transients, you can check and remove post revisions, you can get the post in the trash, you can use auto draft to get rid of those, you can check and repair posts without a valid user link. You can get rid of orphaned terms or generic terms, or taxonomies and relationships. You can get rid of a whole bunch of stuff! It is a plugin that’s got more than 3,000 installs – active installs. So, I highly recommend checking this out and running through it if a database management is something on your to do list today.

Alright, today like I said we are going to talk about how to repurpose our content and like I said it’s really hard to create content that’s great content and then once we’ve spent all these hours and time and resources and energy in creating these blogs posts then it’s like, “Oh, it’s done now we have to create another one!” And I have to say that I am not the best at this and I have to say that I need to get better at repurposing content because I do this show every single week but I don’t take the time to do any of the things we’ve talked about. So, this is one of those episodes that here are some great recommendations and “Hey Dustin you need to do these things as well to repurpose some of your blog content.”

So, let’s go ahead and just dive right into some of these! We’re gonna take into consideration that what we’ve created is a blog post. You can also reframe these if you have created an audio blog post like myself or if the main content on your website is videos like a YouTube video or something along those lines. So, we can kind of think along those areas as we go – continue to move through this.

So, the first thing we can do is simply take your blog post and you can read it word for word and you can create an audio file out of that. What you could do with that is you could create a simple podcast episode that you could put in your RSS feed so people could subscribe and they could hear all of your podcasts and they could get all of your blog posts in audio form if they don’t have time to read it and catch them on the go. You could do an audio bonus file for your subscribers. So that’s something else you could do if you wanted to.

You could – if somebody has subscribed to your list you can send them an email with the audio content. You could create a brand new content on sound cloud or other platforms that are out there. You could add it to facebook. You can upload the MP3 or the RSS feed into facebook or whatever so it can play from you facebook page. You can also use this audio content as a lead magnet or an opt-in bonus to grow your list. So, you could put at the bottom of your blog post – you could say, “Hey, if you want to get all of my blog posts via audio you could sign up for my email newsletter. Subscribe here and I will send you a special URL where you can access all this content.” So, you could do something like that!

Jeremy and Jason from internet business mastery they had a podcast and a blog and they each had exclusive content until one day they started reading their blog posts as audio blogs on their own podcast feed. Then their download numbers increased as they provided unique content to people that didn’t read the blog now got to hear via the podcasts and a lot of people said they didn’t even know it was blog posts that they had read in the first place. So, that’s the first thing you could do. You could just create an audio file and start using that as different things.

Another thing you could do is take you blog posts and it kind of depends on what type of blog post it is but you could highlight your major points and call outs and use visual representation and create an info graphic. If you are visually unartistic like myself you could hire somebody to do this or find somebody on fiber.com or if you have somebody with in your team that could do these like – create a some sort of info graphic. Again you can use this as a bonus or a lead magnet for subscribing to your list. You could also use this as a shareable image for social media.

So, what you could do is you could post this on facebook and Twitter and you’ve seen the ones out there on WordPress and how many plugins and how many themes and all this kind of stuff like those are shared and sharable because they’re interesting. They are interesting for people who are interested in WordPress.

Another thing you could do is you could share those info graphics with other people in hopes of being displayed on their website. I get a ton of these that people have an info graphic, they send me a link to it, and then they want me to post it on my website for certain things. So, that’s just another way you can use content you’ve already created and now you’re contacting somebody else and you’re putting it out there on the social channels where other people can see and have visibility and then link back to your blog post and then they can read the entire blog post. So, that’s another option that you could do!

Another thing that you can do and I see this a lot by quote unquote “Big Guys” or big people in the blogging space but it doesn’t have to be! The next one is called Create Social Media Cards with Direct Quotes from Your Posts. So, you can find two or three little snip its or quote-able phrases and then you could use a tool like Canva, you could use photo shop, or you could use any of those tools to create a graphic that has your quote on it. With the text right on it you could post to facebook or twitter, instagram, different social media platforms, and then link back to your website in the bio or whatever that looks like.

So, that’s just another way that people may be engaged with a visual! They see your quote and they’re like, “Oh yeah, that’s a good quote!” and they could share it or they could come back and read your content. So, that’s another thing. Michael Hiatt does this very, very well. You see this a lot he’ll have some sort of quote inside of his blog post itself and then he shares that on facebook and Twitter and Instagram, Pinterest, and all that good stuff.

Another thing you could do is a slide share presentation. I think this is the perfect one that I should be doing! If I had enough time in the day where I could you know make more time I would defiantly do this! So, what I would do is I would take my audio content and I could create slides based on the show notes that I’ve created and then all I have to do is take my audio and I have to overlay slides on top of it that would say create a slide show presentation and then that would be visual enough that we could mainly create like a slide deck and those slide decks could go out there to SlideShare and then SlideShare could get a lot of shares and a lot of different traffic.

There’s presentations that are out there where people are just using SlideShare for information. I could search through slide deck after slide deck after slide deck and you may have 10,000 people that view some sort of content that you have as a quick slide show that has all the information on the slide. You have to make sure it’s not video content and what not but you want to go ahead and you could do that.

Speaking of video another thing you could do is you could take your blog posts and turn it in to a video. Or you could turn it into something similar to the SlideShare. For example we take this audio from my podcast and create a slide deck with all of the information and now we overlay the audio right onto it and upload it to YouTube and boom! You’ve got an entire episode a short little video that you can share on YouTube that could drive traffic back to my website! It’s searchable on YouTube and people could find and whatnot. So, that’s another great tip!

Or what you could do is keep this blog content as kind of starter content to do a live stream of some sort. Like right now people love free webinars! You know share your ten greatest tips for whatever and record those in a live webinar. You could use live webinar to sell more product or promote a course or whatever you want or like what I did. I used to use free webinars and then just got to interact with people on a live basis which was a lot of fun! Now with technology out there like Snapchat and facebook live and Periscope or Blab.

Blab is not a thing but Periscope I don’t even know if people are even using it anymore but you could do that sort of thing you could have these live presentations where people are watching and you’ve got content all ready to go and you can just read off the bullet points. You can make them short and concise and you don’t have to read the entire post. So, that’s another thing that you could do when it comes to repurposing content.

Another thing about doing that is now we’ve got a blog post! Now we can actually use those blog posts as jumping off points for live presentation at a conference. So, for example maybe you want to speak at the expo or blog world or a word camp or a podcast movement or some other industry type level conference. Then you could take these blog posts and then you could kind of outline those as kind of the starting point for speaker submission and that’s just another great way to repurpose your content.

Now maybe you have content that’s kind of a mini-series. You could take those mini-series and turn them into an ebook! For example there’s one from Pro Blogger that created a post called 31 Days to Build a Better Blog and this was 31 posts in a row that he did over the course of a month, one every day, and then he ended up turning it into an ebook that can download. And that ebook now is a traffic magnet, people have to sign up via email to get this ebook for 31 Days to Build a Better Blog, and now they can read it and go through it step by step by step from an ebook which is really nice!

Another thing that you could do with series of content is you could create a free webinar and promote a brand new course! You could package up seven blog posts and you could make it a small little mini course whether you give it away for free or you sell it. That’s just another way you could repurpose content. I’m sure that there’s hundreds and hundreds of other ways that you could take your content and repurpose it and do something with it, make it better, reuse it on another platform, and whatever the case may be. Those are some of the ideas that I came up with while brainstorming and it’s like, “Wow! I am really not doing a very good job!”

There was a presentation a few years ago that I saw with Derik Hepburn and he was basically emphasizing that fact that writing your blog posts or creating your podcasts or creating your video should be about 20 percent of your time. Then you should spend the next 80 percent of your time promoting it like crazy! Trying to get it out there and trying to share the content because if you want to create really, really high quality content you’re not going to be able to create brand new stuff of high, high quality every single day. So take the time to create really great posts or pages or video or whatever type of content is best for you and your audience.

Spend the time to creating really awesome products and awesome content and then package it up in different ways and share them on social media and share them with SlideShare. Create presentations on – do live webinars. Add them as lead magnets or whatever it looks like. There’s just tons of options to repurpose that content to give it a fresh look and you can even do this to old content! You can go back into your old blogs and you can find these blog posts that maybe had a lot of attraction back then and do an update to them or create a new one. Whatever that looks like there are so many different ways we can go out there an repurpose our WordPress content.

So that’s what I really wanted to share with you today! This is kind of a message. Sometimes I go to church and the pastor is like, “Well, you know I’m preaching as much to me as I am preaching to you.” And that’s kind of the way that I feel today. I’m really preaching to myself, “Hey, I really need to repurpose some of this content that I already created and use it in other ways and make sure it reaches a broader audience to just help more people with WordPress.” And that’s my ultimate mission is to help you understand and learn how to use WordPress better and help you to become a successful website owner and create your first website.

Those are kind of my driving forces for me creating this podcast for you each week! So that’s all I want to share with you this week! I will again be back next week with brand new content! I won’t be repurposing anything for next week but that’s what I wanted to share with you this week. Take care I will talk to you again soon, bye-bye!