As a small business owner, I understand the feeling that you need to be everywhere at once. There are so many people telling us where we need to be creating content and engaging with our audience that it’s tough to keep up. How am I supposed to create content for so many different platforms while still actually running my business? You may already be struggling to create content on a consistent basis. The answer is that you should repurpose and reuse your content.I’m not saying that you should repost the exact same content on every platform. After all, content that is created for YouTube might not be a good fit for Insta Stories. Twitter posts don’t necessarily work for Reddit, and so on. The best thing you can do for your content marketing, your business, and your sanity is to create content that can easily be repurposed and reused across multiple channels.

You may still need to make small changes to the structure or length of the content which I've talked about a little bit before, but the amount of time you’ll save is worth it. Just make a plan of action for how you will repurpose content in the future and while you are creating content, keep that plan in mind.

Here is how you can repurpose and reuse content across multiple channels:

Make a list of all the channels you want to be on.

Are you on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram? Do you have a blog? Are you going to be creating longer form video for YouTube or IGTV? What about Reddit? Do you have a podcast? Make a list of all of the channels on which you are going to post your content. Then you can make a roadmap for how you will repurpose it.

Figure out the best homebase content for you.

You will need to decide which platform is the starting base for all of your other content. For example, it’s easy to transcribe a podcast or video into a blog post or long-form Instagram caption. But it would not save you any time to write a blog post then record a podcast on the same topic. You can easily edit a YouTube or IGTV video into a shorter clip for Instagram or Facebook but a 30-second video wouldn’t perform very well on YouTube. You want to start with the longest form of the content or the most time consuming to produce first then the repurposed content will span out from that.

Sketch out your content repurposing roadmap.

Literally, draw out how all of your content will be repurposed for each of your platforms. This might look like a video that is posted on YouTube, where the audio only is posted as a podcast, and the audio is also transcribed into a blog post. You might create a short trailer or clip for Insta Stories or Facebook. Then, you could take the intro and use that as a long-form caption on your Instagram post. You can pull out a couple of great one-liners for Twitter, etc etc etc. This completely depends on the content you’re creating and what channels you want to be actively posting on.

Don’t try to reinvent the wheel.

The whole point of this exercise is to save you time during content creation. While you do want to make some tweaks so that the content works for each of the platforms you are posting it on, don’t completely re-write the transcript for the blog post. Try to use stills from the video (if that’s your homebase content) or take a few photos that work with the content that you can use on social media and in the blog post.That’s it! I hope this helps you to continue creating great content and posting it on multiple platforms while also saving you time on your content creation process.Do you repurpose or reuse your content?