AI for Content Repurposing: How to Maximize Your Existing Content

What if the content you've already created could work harder for you? If you're like most small business owners and creatives, you've spent hours crafting blog posts, emails, and social content—only to use them once and move on. 

But here's the thing: you're sitting on a goldmine of material that could be repurposed to extend your reach, fill your content calendar, and actually get a return on all that time you invested. 

In this episode of Talk Copy to Me, I'm showing you how AI can make content repurposing faster and more strategic than ever before. 

I'll walk you through bi-directional repurposing (yes, you can go from short-form to long-form content too), share specific workflows you can use right away, and give you the exact prompts and context you need to get quality results from AI tools.

 You'll learn how to choose which content is worth repurposing, how to maintain your voice across different formats, and—most importantly—what mistakes to avoid so you're not just churning out mediocre content. 

This isn't about letting AI run wild with your messaging; it's about using it strategically to maximize the ROI on content you've already validated.

You in? Great! Let's start talking copy.

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EPISODE 162.
Read the show notes and view the full transcript here: Coming Soon

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Here's info on your host, Erin Ollila
Erin Ollila believes in the power of words and how a message can inform – and even transform – its intended audience. She graduated from Fairfield University with an M.F.A. in Creative Writing, and went on to co-found Spry, an award-winning online literary journal.

When Erin’s not helping her clients understand their website data or improve their website copy, you can catch her hosting the Talk Copy to Me podcast and guesting on shows such as Profit is a Choice, Mindful Marketing, The Power in Purpose, and Business-First Creatives.

Stay in touch with Erin Ollila, SEO website copywriter:
• Learn more about my VIP intensive options or just book a strategy session to get started right away
• Visit Erin's website to learn more about her business, services, and products

Transcript

0:00

You are creating content from scratch every single time when you could be repurposing content that you've already made. And with a well-trained AI repurposing becomes way easier than starting from zero. This week we're talking about content repurposing, and I'm gonna be honest with you, we are skipping content creation. Why? Because creating content from scratch with AI is. Honestly, quite complex. It deserves its own deep dive, and it's not honestly something I recommend to the average small business owner or creative right away because there's a lot of fact checking and editing and proofreading that needs to go on to get a decent output. And decents not good enough for you. So we're gonna talk about the. Best way that you can get a return on your time investment by using AI as part of your content creation. And that's with repurposing. Repurposing offers quicker wins than starting from scratch because, I mean, this is obvious friends, but you are working with content that you already have and that you've likely already validated. Think about it, you probably have content that's just sitting around that's completely unused. Old blog post email sequences, webinar transcripts, case studies, most people. Myself included. Sometimes I don't. I'll be honest, I could also use this reminder about the importance of repurposing, but most people create once and then they move on, which completely misses the opportunity to extend that one individual piece of content's life. Now, think about all of the pieces of content you have. If you could extend the ROI that they're bringing into your business. Why wouldn't you? Repurposing is maximizing the ROI on the time or the money you've already invested into this content and with a well-trained ai. I don't know if you noticed this, but I said well-trained twice because I'm really trying to get the point that you need to have done the work that we've talked about in the past few episodes in order to have a well-trained ai, but using it. Can make repurposing much easier'cause you've already done the strategic thinking and you've already created the original content, and now your job is just to adapt. But before I begin and tell you how to do these things, I really want to make the point that repurposing still requires strategy. Just like in, we talked about the past couple episodes, your job is to lead the ai. You do not want to let it run wild with your content and do whatever it wants. You can't just plop an entire blog post into an AI tool and say, create some social media posts from this. Create an email campaign about around this, turn this into a sales page. No, that's not gonna work. You need to be the one to make the strategic decisions about things like format, audience messaging. Yet again, AI is just there to help with the adaptation. I am also going to cover bi-directional repurposing today, which may or may not be a new concept for some of you, but I promised to finish the epi episode by talking about some actual practical workflows. Let's start with what most people think repurposing actually means. What they think is that it's taking long content and making it shorter. For example, blog posts becomes social post podcast becomes quote, graphics or, show notes. One direction only long to short, but that's actually quite limiting. The better approach to content repurposing is bi-directional repurposing. This means quite simply, it's going both ways. Long to short and short to long. Each direction serves different purposes, and each direction might be more preferable to one person over another. So long form to short form what I mentioned is what people are most familiar with. You take a blog post to create social posts, email newsletter snippets, quote graphics, carousel posts. You take a podcast episode and make audiograms video grams key takeaways, even discussion questions. You take a video and you create clips from that. Captions a blog post outline. This direction, long to shore is best for extending reach, filling a content calendar and maintaining presence without creating, creating everything from scratch. But short form to long form is where things actually get pretty interesting, and most people completely miss this opportunity. In this direction, you can take a series of social posts that have done well and performed well and expand them into their own blog post or an email newsletter. You can take an email sequence and create a comprehensive guide from that, or take one email that has, again, given you the proof that it has performed well and create a sequence around that one email you can. Take customer testimonials, for example, and use them to create larger case studies. So the short to long direction is best for creating depth, for building authority, and for getting SEO benefits from content that you've already tested in shorter formats. It's also really great if you're just not feeling inspired by starting from scratch, let's say, and you know that can build upon something else. A while back I actually did an episode about, , all the forms of copy that businesses have that they don't actually think of as copy or content and I will link to that episode. I believe it was with Melissa Morris. The point of the episode was that we need to onboard and provide great customer experience with well chosen words. So maybe you have an email sequence that walks your new customers through, like your client onboarding. That sequence or the entire workflow could become a blog post about your specific process. This blog post then shows authority. It moves people a lot quicker to conversions when they see that you actually do have a process, and it helps with SEO. You're not creating new ideas here. You are just giving existing content more depth in a different format. The key to bidirectional repurposing is recognizing that content can move in both directions. That you don't necessarily just have to condense content that you've already created. Sometimes it's more valuable to expand on it. But I will say this before we move forward. Both directions are extremely valuable and you know, like I I said when I was describing them both directions help with different business goals. I would highly suggest that you try them both to see what feels good. But I bet you wanna know how to actually do this. So let's move into the part where we actually talk about workflows, for example, because this is where theory actually becomes useful. I will walk you through specific processes for both directions, including. The exact context that you should be giving AI while you're using it, and most importantly, what you need to watch out for while using AI to help you with content repurposing. Let's start with the foundation. AI does not know why you have created the original content or what you even want from the repurposed version. I know that sounds obvious, but I'm, I'm gonna state that one more time. AI doesn't know why you created it, and it doesn't know what you want. So when you create, excuse me, when you share a blog post and say, please help me repurpose this into additional pieces, it doesn't know what to do. It will literally just chop it up. Maybe if you've trained your ai, okay, you'll get decent output, but you need to provide context here and not just the content. Think of it as if you were briefing a copywriter, not giving a task to a tool. If you were working with me, let's say, and you wanted me to edit your content or your copy. Or specifically you wanted me to repurpose it for you, you would explain why you wrote this, whether you think anything maybe is missing, whether you think you have overwritten in a certain area. You'd explain why you were asking me to repurpose it, like whether you wanted to use it in a specific way. You know what, what I'm hinting at here is just the same approach that we talked about in the past two episodes. Give context to get better results. Okay. How should I break this, break this up. Should I do? Well, let's just start with long form, just short form and, and creating a workflow in, in using that direction. The first step is choosing your source of content strategically. Don't just grab any old blog post. Pick something that you like. Pick something that has performed well, or ideally pick something that's evergreen in its own right. Then make sure it is still relevant one, content-wise, like is the information correct and relevant? But two, is it still relevant to your current messaging? I worry that if you've had any brand adjustments and you're grabbing an old blog post that you might like, you're not necessarily aware that, you know, maybe the client ideal client has changed, maybe the offer that you have for them has changed. So pick something that is still relevant to your business, your goals to the current timeline we're in and. If your thinking has evolved in any way, just make sure to provide that context as well when you use your AI tool. But before you actually talk to the AI tool, I want you to think about how you will use it. For example, what platforms are you adapting to for who's the audience using that platform, because I know even as an example, some people on my email list are not interacting with me the same way that they would if they were on threads, so. Where are you using this? What does the audience prefer on that type of platform? Do they differ the audiences in any way? And then what's the goal? Is it awareness? Is it engagement? Are you hoping to drive traffic back to the original? All of those are okay. And then finally, because we're going long to shore, I need you to remember to think about format constraints. For example, threads has a character limit. There may be visual requirements for if you're taking a blog post that doesn't really have a lot of images or, or any images in it, and you're adapting that to Instagram, you might need to create new content or call new images to use with the pieces of content that you have repurposed from the original. The third step is when you actually take action, and that is when you are creating a prompt that is full of context. And I'm gonna be specific here. This is what it actually looks like. Let's say I want to repurpose a blog post about, just the episodes we've had lately, a AI training. My prompt would be take this blog post about AI training. I would then paste in the full content or attach it depending on the type of tool you're using. I would then say something like, create five LinkedIn posts for small business owners and service providers who are frustrated with the generic out AI output that they've gotten while using AI tools themself. Make sure to maintain my. And you can enter the type of tone you have. Let's say positive, conversational. Do not use any corporate speak or any superlatives at all. I don't like superlatives personally in my writing. Each post that you create for LinkedIn needs to highlight one specific takeaway. And include one concrete example. These posts must end with a thought provoking question. Make sure to keep the post under 150 words. Now this is just an example. To be honest, I have not used that exact, prompt with my AI tools, but I do want you to look at what I have included there. One source content, obviously, two. Target audience specific context about their own pain points. The platform, the format, voice guidelines, and the voice guidelines both include what to avoid and not just what to aim for., Structure, requirements and specific goals. The goals were the takeaways, the examples, and the type of engagement, through the questions. That is a way more direction than just turn this into LinkedIn post. Do you see? And it doesn't have to be written in the same format, I think, where. People might educate on ai prompt engineering incorrectly for the average business owner is that things have to be written in a very specific format. You can be con conversational with your AI tools. Use the microphone if it's easier for you. It will absolutely save you so much time to use the microphone and just talk these things out. But.. Once you've done this though, you're, it's not over because now you have to review. You really have to check the content that they create against your standards. Does it sound like you, is the core message intact? Are the examples that they may be e either pulled or created on its own relevant to your audience? Is the formatting appropriate for the platform? Are there, like, were the instructions actually followed? Like. In this instance of having that engagement hook question at the end, and then don't stop there because now you have to refine. You cannot just accept any content from an AI tool, and I'm saying that very seriously for you because you might think. In repurposing your own content, you don't have to worry about things such as plagiarism or you don't have to worry about things such as your AI tool creating incorrect stats or, you know, just changing context for you. But you do. Sorry you do because you know it's AI is trained on an immense amount of information. You are just giving it a very small piece of information. So quite often AI output includes additional content. Then what you've shared with it. Not always. I'm not trying to stress you out on this episode. But sometimes, so now you have to refine if something is off, and then use the example. What I mean by off could be voice. Don't just accept it because you're tired of tweaking. Let's say the post sounds too formal. Say no, thank you. This is too formal. Make this sound like an actual conversation. I know it's going on LinkedIn, but I would still like to make it talk like I'm speaking to a friend or a trusted colleague. If the example that they give you if they're creating them is too generic, say, this is too vague. Use the specific examples from the original blog post. Like, or you could even say like, you know, please, before you, you recreate this, social media post, I would like you to share with me five options from the original blog post so that I can help you choose what examples to use. Because your teaching ai, what better looks like, that's gonna pay off in your future prompts and it's gonna pay off in what you're doing right now. All right? I talked about long form to short form a long form and how we can create a workflow for that because you. The same time period that can get complicated. If five to seven pieces of short content is stressing you out, do two to three, whatever is the easiest for you to get a quick win here, but make them. Make them share a similar theme or tell a cohesive story. Be, and also like we did for the the last workflow example, I want you to make sure that they're representing your current thinking because you don't want to expand upon any outdated content just because it exists. Let's move. Now we need to identify the strategic angle. What is the through line connecting these pieces? Is there one big idea that they're all supporting? What is missing that would make this complete? And critically, who needs this information and why do they need it? Everything I said here, all those questions are almost exactly what we're doing in long form content. And I'm repeating these things because I want you to understand it's not. That different, it's just a different approach or a different angle. Because step three now is briefing your ai, like you,, would brief a, a, a copywriter. Again, what is the context? Who is the audience? You know? Let's jump to an example, because this is similar to, as we did before, I am sharing, let's say eight Instagram posts about. Let's take content repurposing. Here are eight Instagram posts I've written about content repurposing. They all touch on one, how repurposing saves time, but they're scattered in messages. Can you help me create an 800 word newsletter or blog post, whatever that weaves these ideas together into a cohesive guide for overwhelmed business owners. Use my conversational tone like in the social media posts that I already created. Think helpful friend, trusted colleague, and start the email or blog post around the pain point that they're probably already creating too much from scratch, and then walk them through a mindset shift needed for repurposing. Make sure that you include two to three specific starting points for them and leave room for me to add my own client story into this somewhere like I did last time. Let's look at what's included here. One, the source content collection, but also the strategic. Time saving angle for overwhelmed owners. So again, we have audience and we have the audience pain point here. They are owners, business owners, they're solopreneurs and they want to save time. They're tired of consistently creating content and not seeing it get anywhere. We're going to, , include, well, like in what I just said, the target length, the format, which would be like the how many, , word newsletter or how many word blog post the audience, again, the voice direction that is descriptive. I'm not just throwing adjectives in there. We're including structure guidance, so it flows logically. And the key to this is I'm leaving a placeholder for content to the AI cannot create. I might need to adjust that placeholder. In truth, when I see the end result, I might be like, yeah, no, no story fits there. That doesn't make sense. But there are definitely points we can include personalized content in content that AI is helping us create. And that, that moves us to step four, filling the gaps. The AI can't provide your client stories or examples. It cannot give you data or statistics. It can, but it might not always be right. It doesn't have your unique perspective on why this matters, and the transitions themselves may not naturally sound like you. But after AI gives you a draft back, you can go in and you can add all of those pieces. Remember, having blanks in a long form content that AI produces is not a bad thing. It is an opportunity, it's a chance for you to go back in and add all of the human elements that make content actually valuable instead of just being informative. And just for just like the long form to short form content. When we are taking short form content and creating a long form piece out of it, we need to make sure we review, we're reviewing for cohesion. Does the piece flow logically or does it just feel like it's stitched together? Post, are the transition smooth? Does the depth match the format, or is it just expanded on post without real substance? Is there a clear takeaway that's worth someone's time? And similar to how we checked for the long form content, we need to check and make sure it's relevant. It is not plagiarized. It includes the correct information, and sometimes that's just the manual editing job that you have to do. You might be thinking. Now, is Erin gonna talk about cross format repurposing at all? No, not necessarily in this episode. We're already kind of getting too long here because the strategy that I want you to understand, especially if this is new to you or if you already know what to do, but you're just not doing it, the strategy is not to try to jump formats in one steps. So I'm not asking you to go from podcast to into Instagram to email in one prompt. Each adaptation needs its own strategic context and instructions. I do wanna talk about a few repurposing mistakes that I see very often, , for the people that do actually repurpose their, their forms of content. One, don't just tell AI to make it shorter with no other direction. AI will just cut content out randomly and you'll lose strategic points. The fix is specifying what matters. For example, take the three main points from this blog post and use them to create social posts that explore one point for one specific example. Cut out the background information, but keep the actionable advice. Second mistake, trying to repurpose everything you've ever created because not all content is worth repurposing. You might think you've evolved and that old content might not represent you, or it might just be that you have like all the heart eyes for things that you've pour your time and energy and heart into writing that just aren't as good as they could be. Quality beats quantity every single time. The fix here is being selective to choose content that's relevant, that has performed well, or maybe to choose something that fills a gap in your content strategy. Just because you wrote it once does not mean that it needs five more formats. The third mistake is adapting for is not adapting. Excuse me, for audience differences. I mentioned this for the first, the first mistake we talked about, or actually right before that. Your LinkedIn audience is different from your Instagram audience. Newsletter subscribers have a different expectations than a blog reader would. So each format needs an appropriate depth and tone for that audience. The fix here is redefining your audience for each adaptation, so you can continuously kind of build on prompts, but you need to give audience context in every single re repurposing prompt, even if it feels repetitive. And I think the final biggest mistake I see, or at least the one that I'll mention today, is accepting AI's first output. Y'all, it rarely is perfect on the first try. Anything I write is absolutely not perfect On the first try, I am sure anything you write is not perfect on the first try. What makes you think that AI will be perfect on the first try? Mm-hmm. If you're accepting mediocre results, what you're doing is you're teaching AI that you'll settle for anything that it gives you. You are missing the opportunity to improve the current content and future output, so. The fix here is just being specific with your feedback. This works, but it's a little bit too casual for this audience. Or please maintain a conversational tone, but add a more professional framing with examples. Whatever it is, give your AI the direction to improve, not just an acceptance or a rejection. There's one thing I think I should point out, and that's maintaining voice across formats or in either a, a bi-directional approach to repurposing, but how do you maintain consistency? Well. It might seem repetitive, but it's really by always including voice guidelines in your repurposing prompts. E, even if you feel like you've said it a hundred times at this point, reference your original content's purpose, so AI understands what the strategic intent is. Then like, you know, as I mentioned, refine based on voice and tone. It might help to review multiple outputs to see where the AI starts to drift in tone. But also you could create a swipe file. You know, if there's any really good repurposed content for AI to learn from. Show it examples of what success looks like, because. Context. This, I feel like I'm getting silly in this episode, but again, we need to on giving better context to the AI tools so it can improve its output for us. And you know, and to wrap this up, I will say that. You can do content repurposing on your own, but there are reasons you might want to work with a copy coach on repurposing. You know, one of the biggest reasons that it could save you some time and energy is that you can create sustainable processes with a copy coach who can do some prompt engineering with you. Creating, um, let's say platform specific voice guidelines. If you've done this all on your own and you know, kudos to you. If you have brand guidelines that you have created yourself, that is awesome, but you might want to build upon them. And to create specific voice guidelines for a podcast or for a coaching community, or for speaking on stage or for LinkedIn, whatever, right? You need to be able to adapt your voice, and a copy coach can help you do that. Additionally, we can save you some time to identify what type of content is worth repurposing, you know, because. It might be a lot quicker for me to scan through social media posts and pull out some of those gold nuggets or scan through blog posts and easily identify where I can take pieces of that to create additional forms of content, even if I'm not the one creating the content, but I can call it for you. So I can curate like a content library of sorts that you can take and use with your AI tools. And. You know, when you work with a, a copy coach for repurposing, you start to then learn how to spot AI drifts. You develop better judgment about what to keep versus what to adapt, let's say., And you can build sustainable systems instead of just constantly reinventing your process. But most important, you'll start to get the strategy behind things like format, choices, um, voice guidelines,, strategic content, you know, marketable content, search engine optimized content, or now AI optimized content. And all of that's gonna make you better in the long term. But to sum this up, this bidirectional form of repurposing maintains your voice across formats as best as possible, and the workflows that we covered will give you a great starting place to do this on your own. Just remember that this is a skill that improves upon with practice. And I actually think they can get a lot better if you come back, to listen to the episode about editing and fact checking, because the next episode I'm gonna talk about the importance of refining with the AI output, because quality control is vastly important and it will help with things like content repurposing. So thanks for listening. I'll see you next week where we keep talking copy.