How to Repurpose Blog Content for Your Email Marketing — Yes, It’s Possible!

It’s called repurposing content.

And it’s a gold mine for establishing your blog and email newsletter as the go-to resource for information in your industry!

Related: How to Welcome and Nurture New Email Subscribers to Your Blog

If You’re a Blogger, You Need to Be Repurposing Your Content

As a blogger, have you ever felt like you’re on a hamster wheel of content creation? That’s completely understandable because, well, you probably are! 

Here’s some great news I love to give to bloggers any chance I get — by repurposing your blog content you can save time while building out a rich content ecosystem. 

Not convinced just yet? Here are a few more benefits to repurposing your content: 

• You’ll maximize that return on investment (ROI). Meaning, you’ll make a greater, deeper impact with each piece of content you spend time creating. Bonus: it will absolutely deepen the impact for your subscribers, too. 
• It will help you reach a broader audience. Different people consume content in different ways, and many people like to learn about the same topic in different ways as well. Repurposing helps tap into a broader audience and get the same message out with greater impact. 
• It reinforces your brand voice and expertise. Reusing your content emphases your brand message and further solidifies you as a content creator with a rich library of content to dive into! (While you might feel like you sound like a broken record, you’re not — you’re simply deepening how people know, connect and understand your content, trust me.)
• Repurposing content can help boost your blog traffic. Yes, it really can! Redirecting your audience from one platform to another (like, when you send an email that echos or builds off of a great blog post), you can leverage that audience and drive traffic to the source content over on your site. 
• It gives you a chance to continually improve your content. Repurposing gives us a great opportunity to refine and strengthen content. Bonus — this helps your SEO, too! Google loves to see you deepen and add more value to the same content over time. 

So, what exactly is repurposing? It means leveraging existing content for different purposes or platforms so you can increase the lifespan and impact of a single piece of content. For example, you can take a great blog post and expand it into an e-course, record a podcast episode about it, create an Instagram reel, create an email newsletter expanding on it, and so much more.

Why repurposing your content just works

Every content creator knows the effort that goes into creating original content. When you repurpose, you’re essentially amplifying the reach of that content without doubling your workload. It’s a brilliant way to enhance trust with your audience using familiar content, and it’s a strategic way to drive traffic back to older yet valuable content pieces.

Whether it’s for social media, your blog or YouTube channel, there’s no reason why you can’t also repurpose that content for your email sequences and broadcasts (aka campaigns or newsletters).

Repurposing content works best when you listen to your audience

What content should you include? Easy. Look at what your audience has already “told” you they like the most.

It’s true. Your readers have already told you what they’re interested in through their traffic and engagement.

It’s in the site pages your audience has been visiting, the videos they’re watching and where they’re engaging with you — through video or blog comments, DMing you on Facebook or Instagram, the number of downloads for a podcast episode — is a big giveaway to what new subscribers would LOVE to hear about.

By doing a little research and seeing where your people are finding and engaging with you, you can share what’s been most interesting or helpful to your audience as a whole with your newest subscribers through email — making it a pretty good bet they’ll enjoy that content too.

Alright, alright, but what does repurposing blog content for email look like in action?

Repurposing your content is simply taking the heart of what you created to begin with and building off of it in a different way. It’s not copy-and-pasting the same content onto a different platform.

I repeat — it’s not copy-and-pasting! Okay, okay, but what is it then?

Condensed Blog Summaries

Take the main points of your blog post and condense them into a digestible format for email. Include an enticing lead-in to pique interest on the blog post topic, and provide a clear call-to-action (CTA) at the end of the email — making it clear WHY they should click through to learn more — that points readers to the full blog post!

Your blog post will solve your subscribers’ problems, but you have to make it clear what their interest is and why this blog post is worth clicking through to read.

Create a Series or Sequence

If you have a series of related blog posts or a long-form post, break it down into smaller pieces and create an email sequence or mini-course. 

Like in this case, Jar Of Lemons packaged up lots of valuable existing blog posts into a free mini email course on meal planning:

This dripped content approach keeps readers engaged over time and can lead them deeper into your content ecosystem (aka, your library of amazing content) while teaching them a particular topic.

Behind-The-Scenes Content

Share the backstory of why or how you wrote the blog post — give people a BTS look at how you approach a topic and piece of content. Readers really love insights into the thought process, challenges you might have faced, or any interesting anecdotes related to the post or content.

Curated Content Roundups

You can combine snippets from various blog posts into a themed email. For example, if you have multiple articles on gluten-free baking, create a “Best of Gluten-Free Baking” roundup!

Like this email, “16 tried-and-true dessert recipes to add to your repertoire” from Alexandra Cooks:

Content Refresh Reminders

If an older but still relevant blog post gets updated, let your subscribers know about it. It’s probably been a while since they’ve read the content anyway! Give them a fresh perspective and emphasize what’s new.

Testimonials or Case Studies

If a blog post has received a lot of positive feedback or a reader has applied your advice with success, share this story in an email!! It builds credibility and showcases the real-world impact of your content (hello, social proof!)

Related: How to Use Audience Research to Fuel an Effective Email Marketing Strategy

How to Pick Which High-Value Content to Repurpose

By repurposing your most popular content within your mail marketing, you’re making sure new subscribers are getting “the best of the best,” right when they need it most.

It’s a balance of giving them more of what they’re looking for (which I explain here) and giving them what they don’t even KNOW to look for (more on that next).

Here are a few ways to find what your audience wants more of:

Audience Engagement

Keep track of video views, blog comments, DMs on social platforms, podcast downloads, etc. For example, maybe you notice that your gluten-free baking topics get the most reads and shares, but gluten-free cooking topics are a bit slower to gain traction. Feel free to lean into that feedback and create more cooking content, if that lights you up!

Analytics

Tools like Google Analytics can highlight popular content. Look at top-visited pages, engagement metrics, and more. Here’s how to do it: 

• Open your Google Analytics
• Look under Behavior > Site Content > All Pages
• Adjust the date range to 30+ days (or even a year)
• Review the top-visited pages

Audience Surveys

Direct feedback from your subscribers is priceless. Ask your audience what they love or want more of with a simple audience survey — I do one every year!

How to interpret what your audience is telling you

After you go through and find your most popular content, it’s time to take a look at what you found.

Focus on:

• Which YouTube or social media videos are people drawn to?
• Where are conversations happening?
• What are your most popular blog posts, regardless of where the site visitor came from?
• Which opt-in is getting a lot of activity on your site?
• What themes of content are people drawn to most?

Remember, You Are the Managing Editor of Your Content!

Your audience tells you what they love by how they act and engage with your content. 

But remember, you are the “managing editor” of your own content. While analytics provide valuable insights, you have the final say on what’s shared. You know what your audience needs and what content you have to help solve their biggest problems.

That’s right, be the Boss. A nice one, but a boss.

And remember —

Just because you created something two years ago doesn’t mean it isn’t still valuable today.

In fact, you may be doing a disservice to new subscribers by holding back on some of your most popular, helpful and insightful content. They may not be searching for it on Google, but you know that it’ll help make their lives easier, better, more profitable, more tasty… and it’s up to YOU to make sure they know about it.

What is one resource — a blog post, video or PDF — that you think each new subscriber should get when they join your email list? If you’re ready to attract and nurture dream email subscribers, here’s a 5-part framework to make a meaningful & lasting first impression.