How to Repurpose Content [Step-by-Step Guide]

Today, I’m going to show you (step-by-step) how to repurpose your content using free online tools.

This is the exact process I use for my service — Repurpose Your Content. So if you’re not ready to outsource this part of your business yet, then you can do it yourself.

Today we’re going to use Luisa Zhou’s Facebook live video as an example.

(Disclaimer: I’m not endorsed by Luisa Zhou; I simply love her content so I want to use one of her videos as an example. If you want to start a profitable online coaching business, I recommend you connect with her.)

This process also works for audio content.

Don’t have video or audio content? If you’re a blogger or produce content in written form, download a free voice recorder app on your phone and read your written content aloud. You now have an audio content and guess what? You just repurposed.

Things you need:

• Your content in audio or video format
• Sign in to Kapwing

(Note: I’m not sponsored by Kapwing. I use Adobe suite for my service and have been investing money and time to continue using and learning the software. For this guide, I was eager to find a free tool for you and found Kapwing. You can sign up for a free account using your Facebook or Google account. The best thing is that no watermarks are added to your videos. However, you’re limited to exporting up to 7-minute long videos. Upgrade to their Pro plan at $20 monthly to increase from 7 minutes to 1 hour, and to unlock other paid features.)

Step 1: Clean up video or audio

Clean up your video or audio by trimming and cutting unnecessary parts.

Real talk: Your audience is as busy as you are.

Keep them engaged from beginning until end by keeping your videos short as possible. If you can get your point across in 2 minutes, why would you stretch it to 10 minutes, right?

You’ll also end up with a shorter video so you’ll save time or money captioning your it in the next step.

Activity: Upload your file to Kapwing by either uploading it from your computer or pasting a link to where it lives online.

Click the “Trim” button to start trimming and cutting.

In our example (Luisa Zhou’s video): I trimmed and cut Luisa’s video from 9m56s long to 1m5s long.

(Tip: If you’re like Luisa, the juiciest part of your content might be the portion right before the end where you summarize what you’ve just talked about.)

Step 2: Caption your video

Transcribing is when an audio is turned into written format, and captioning is timing the transcription so that the correct words appear on the screen when the speaker is speaking on the video.

A study made by Verizon Media and Publicis Media revealed that people expect and want captioned videos:

Apart from making your content more inclusive and accessible, you’re also helping increase your video views especially when you upload it to YouTube. YouTube Creator Academy said that uploading captions to your videos enhances your channel’s search and discovery potential.

Activity: Click the “Subtitles” tab in Kapwing and click the “Auto-generate” button.

(The transcription will not be 100% accurate. If you want a more accurate transcription, Rev.com offers captioning at $1.25 with 99% accuracy.)

In our example (Luisa Zhou’s video): I corrected some of the misheard words, and adjusted the breaking of caption groups and timing.

Step 2: Edit video to different sizes

Each social media platform is built differently, so there’s a different optimal size for each one.

If you upload your video using the less optimal size, you’ll risk getting less views because the platform will not promote it as much.

Here are the optimal sizes of today’s major platforms:

• YouTube – 16:9 or landscape or horizontal
• Facebook feeds – 1:1 or square
• Instagram TV and Stories – 9:16 or portrait or vertical

Activity: If you working with an audio file, go to the “Elements” tab in Kapwing and click the “Add a waveform” button to turn your audio into a visual element. Insert an appropriate background image using the “Images” tab. Now you have a video.

One thing to remember when designing your videos is to keep brand elements to a minimum.

Here’s why:

Part 1: Create landscape video

Let’s take care of the easiest format — the landscape video format.

Make sure you’ve selected “16:9” under “Output size” found on the right side of Kapwing’s Studio.

Ideally, we want to “Download SRT” from the “Subtitles” tab. Because we don’t want our captioned to be burned on the video; we want to upload the SRT file on YouTube so your viewers have the option to switch the captions on or off.

For now, we’ll adjust how the subtitles looks visually using the options on the screen.

My default settings are:

• Arial (Helvetica if I want a narrower font), font size 10, not “B” (bold)
• white text, centered
• I move the text all the way down and move it up twice
• background is set to “Wrap” and color black (#00000)

Feel free to play around with the settings.

When you’re happy with how it looks, click “Done” and click the “Export video” button found on the top-right of the screen.

Our repurposed content #1 is ready:

Part 2: Create square video

Next, we’re going to create a square video.

But instead of creating from scratch, we’ll use Kapwing’s “Make a copy” feature.

Let’s click the “1:1” option under “Output size” found on the right sidebar.

Then, I resized the Luisa’s video so it’s still horizontal but it takes up the center of the square workspace:

I turned the background to black so I changed the subtitles’ font color to white and then added a catchy headline on top using the “Text” tab.

Our repurposed content #2 is ready:

Part 3: Create portrait video

Now it’s time to create the portrait video.

Same thing with the square, instead of creating it from scratch, we’ll use Kapwing’s “Make a copy” feature.

Set the “Output size” to “9:16.”

I’ll adjust the font sizes and the alignment of text to my liking.

Last but not least, I added a “Progress bar” found in the “Elements” tab and set the color to gold which is one of Luisa’s brand colors.

Our repurposed content #3 is ready:

Step 4: Turn to blog post

The video contents are done, now it’s time to create a blog post out of it.

Publishing blog posts can help you get highly-targeted visitors to your website organically. Meaning people finds your website without you actively promoting it or paying for advertising.

That’s the magic of search engine optimization (SEO).

However, among all the forms of marketing, SEO takes the longest to kick in (versus social media marketing where you get traction almost instantly).

But traffic from SEO is the one of the most (if not the most!) highly targeted and so it’s definitely worth the wait.

SEO is also very sustainable because you write your blog post once and forget about it. (Although updating your post when needed can improve your search rankings too.)

Activity: First, open a Google Doc or your favorite word processor, and copy the subtitles from Zapwing and paste to your document.

Next, let’s start formatting it by splitting the big lump of text into multiple paragraphs.

Next, let’s add headings for each main idea.

(Tip: Instead of increasing the font size of your headings, use the Formatting > Heading option of your word processor. “Heading 1” should be reserved for your blog title so start with “Heading 2” and so on. This helps with SEO. Also, this makes it easy to move your content from your word processor to your blogging platform. Simply copy and paste everything — except your title; you’ll have to paste your title wherever you set your blog title.)

Next, I’ll add an intro to the post. I’ll get it from the audio I cut from earlier.

(Note: I can also add more details into each subsection by using some of the audio I cut earlier but I’m not going to since this is just a rough example.)

Now it’s time to proofread and edit so it makes sense on when reading it, and it makes regardless when people find and read it.

And then I’ll embed the Facebook live video near the top of the post — just before the first subheading — saying:

This post was originally a Facebook live video: <!– Embed Facebook like here–>

Last but not least, I’ll add a call-to-action at the end. I’m going to encourage readers to comment on the blog post by asking a question.

In our example (Luisa Zhou’s video): Click here if you’re curious how the Google Doc turned out.

(Note: You’ll want to add images on the blog post whenever necessary and also link to relevant webpages from on your own website and/or others’.)

That’s our repurposed content #4.

Step 5: Make shareable quotes

Anything that is valuable is shareable.

And your content is a goldmine of value.

All you have to do is dig.

Now that we’ve put the video content into writing in the form of a blog post, it’s easier to take quotes from it.

Activity: For every 5-minute block from your video, try to find at least one shareable sentence or a very short paragraph.

How short?

It should fit a tweet so 280 characters including spaces and punctuation marks.

I’ll highlight quotes on the Google Doc made from the previous step.

Next, you can either post it directly on Twitter as a text update (a.k.a. a “tweet”) and screenshot your updates them.

Or, you can use a tool like Tweetgen.

In our example (Luisa Zhou’s video):

That’s 3 more content. Now we have a total of 7 pieces of content.

Conclusion

We’ve just turned 1 piece of content turned into 7 more using free online tools. Amazing, huh?

Imagine if you commit to taking 1 content every week…

You’ll have at least one content to share everyday.

How will that make you feel? I’d love to hear in the comments below.

This is the Part 3 of 3 of the content repurposing series.

I’m sure you’ll still hear me rave about repurposing.

Last but not least, if you’re ready to outsource this part of you business, then check out Repurpose Your Content. I will happily repurpose your content for you.

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