A good pair of jeans is a great investment.

You can wear them over and over again. You can pair them with different tops and shoes to suit different occasions. And a decent pair of jeans will last for years without going out of fashion.

You buy wardrobe staples like jeans because you want longevity and versatility. You want clothing that you can dress up and down to suit different occasions, that you can wear multiple times, and that won’t go out of date.

Your best content should be like a good pair of jeans.

You should share it over and over, not just once. You should repurpose it for different platforms. And it should last – it should be relevant for months and years to come, not just be based on a passing fad.

Sure, you might have the odd bit of ‘throwaway fashion’ – content focused on current trends or industry updates. But when it comes to your long-form content, your value-adding content, your cornerstone content, this should be stuff you can get a lot of wear out of.

You might have created it for a specific purpose – your website, a presentation, a product launch. But that doesn’t mean you can’t dust it off, add a few accessories, and wear it somewhere else.

The biggest mistake you can make with your content is only sharing it in one place, one time.

Blogs are fantastic for resharing and repurposing. They are one of the most versatile and cost-effective types of content you can create.

They are easy to update, so you can make tweaks whenever you need to add new information or change any out-of-date statistics. 

But writing and publishing your blog post is only the first step. Nobody is going to find it if you don’t tell them it’s there. So once your post is live, you need to share, share, share and reshare.

When you share a link to a blog post, give it a bit of context rather than just sharing the link. Summarise the content – give readers a reason to click through and read your blog.

As well as social media, you can share your blog post in email newsletters, any private groups you run, and on your Google dashboard.

You might think you can’t do much with a video other than share it here, there and everywhere, but that’s not true.

Yes, you absolutely should be sharing it, but you can incorporate it in other places too.

Why not transcribe the video and turn it into a blog post or write a blog post that adds more context to the video?

Not everyone likes watching videos, so having a written version of your content can help you appeal to a wider audience. Plus, search engines find it easier to read written content than videos, so it can help with your SEO. And if any part of your video is out of date, you can amend the text version far more easily, so your content can continue working for you.

The other advantage is you can then reshare and repurpose your blog post version in exactly the same ways as I’ve mentioned in the above section on getting the best from your blogs.

You can also summarise your video in an infographic, carousel or PDF. Or cut small sections from your video to be used as social media posts or teasers.

I love social media, in particular, LinkedIn. But there’s a problem with social media – your content doesn’t last long.

You put out a post, and it appears in other people’s feeds for a couple of hours, days or weeks at most. Then it’s gone unless someone scrolls through your posting history.

That’s why I prefer to create long-form content like blog posts and then repurpose sections as social posts.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t repurpose content you’ve created for social.

Take the opening section of this blog post as an example. I originally wrote it as a LinkedIn post.

Coming up with original content every day is a tough ask for anyone and can quickly lead to overwhelm or burnout. It’s perfectly fine to reuse and reshare content over and over again. Most of your followers and connections won’t have seen it first time round, and even if they did, they might not have given it much attention.

We’re bombarded with hundreds of pieces of content every time we scroll through social media or search for something on Google. So even if someone has read your content before, they might not remember it. And if they do, they just won’t click on it the next time it appears in their feed.

Think about TV adverts – no advert is only shown once. We see the same adverts over and over for months on end. We’re used to it. And we can easily zone out if it’s an ad we don’t like.

As long as you aren’t sharing the same blog post on your feed every ten minutes, people are generally ok with seeing the same pieces of content more than once.

And it’s not just blogs, videos, podcasts or social posts that can be reshared and repurposed.

Look back through old presentations or webinars you’ve delivered. Can these be turned into blog post or are there some slides you can turn into social posts?

Go back through old email newsletters and pull out any useful tips you shared.

Even client testimonials can be turned into shareable content for social media.

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