Create effective content with these simple techniques

Everyone talks about how content is king, but everyone is wrong. Content isn't king -- only really engaging and information is.

So, you keep putting out great content like a never-stopping machine. You're always looking for new ideas to make your content interesting, useful and engaging, and probably growing frustrated with an ever-growing to-do list.

Why repurpose content?
Content marketing and storytelling is a full-time job in its own right, but repurposing preexisting materials alleviates a lot of the work. Plus, an effectively repurposed piece engages your audience again and again. Another huge benefit of recycling content is that it has the potential to give your old blog posts new life, making your marketing arsenal much richer and much more immersive.

We all like to consume information on our own terms. Some people prefer to read long-format articles, while others like listicles. Some like videos or podcasts. Other types of media like infographics, whitepapers and ebooks make for great presentational materials for both business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) companies.

What content should you repurpose?
The best place to start is by looking at your analytics and identifying the best-performing content. What materials get the most traffic, likes and social shares? This is a great indicator of relevant, useful information that grabs attention. Chances are it will be even more popular in a variety of formats.

There is a good chance you have written at least a few tutorials or how-to guides. Give these posts a new life on Pinterest by repurposing them into images and checklists that are both engaging and useful.

Creating infographics becomes very easy with a few amazing tools. I recommend Piktochart and its pre-loaded templates. Piktochart offers freemium services, so you may start from scratch or customize their free and premium themes.

Turn written content into video
Video content has been rising as a medium of choice. YouTube is still the second largest search engine in the world. Facebook gives a special attention to native videos. Do you need any more reasons to start utilizing the power of video in your content marketing mix?

Give your most popular blog posts a makeover by converting the information into a video. The best part is that you now have content you can upload to Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo and Instagram. If you're not on those platforms yet, this is a perfect opportunity to add another network to your arsenal and reach new audiences.

Make podcasts -- you're not too late
Podcasting is another growing category of content marketing. While there are lots of great podcasters, there is a still lot of opportunity in the field. Compared to other forms of content, a lot of niches are still underserved with podcasts.

This medium is great because people are able to consume information on the go, whether it's while working out in the gym or commuting to work. Your podcasts don't have to be long, either; some podcasters choose to create 5- to 10-minute episodes, enabling them to create more episodes in relatively the same amount of time.

If you choose to use video as a sort of replacement for traditional blogging, you could also easily convert videos to audio-only formats and upload them to iTunes or SoundCloud as well.

Turn reports into whitepapers and ebooks
If you have a long and in-depth industry report, cut it down to its most important parts and conclusions and create a whitepaper or an ebook. Once you have it ready, promote it on all the social channels you have and drive traffic to your website. Better yet, create special conversion-driven ads on Facebook and Twitter, where people can share their email address without leaving the social sites.

You can even design a pictorial ebook with lots of photo examples using tools like Canva -- or, if you're short on time, by creating a PDF file from a Word document and including a few charts might suffice.
Slideshows are a good idea, too

People love statistics and data that will help them make better business decisions. If there is a PowerPoint presentation you are proud of, upload it to SlideShare. If you are in a B2B company, you've got to try SlideShare.

SlideShare is a great platform for sharing whitepapers, presentations and other related things, so you can easily champion one more social platform. It is easy to use, easy to share and can be embedded just about anywhere. It's also integrated with LinkedIn.

Are you making the most of your content?
Content marketing doesn't have to be daunting. Remember, it's not always about the volume of unique content you're producing. It's about engaging your audience with the content you already developed. There is only so much you can cover in every industry, but if you're being creative about it, your knowledge can really shine in a variety of formats.

Source:- www.entrepreneur.com