In order to rank your business highly, Google expects quality content; quality as judged by your audience through shares and interaction. But creating good content takes time, time many business owners simply don’t have. Here are a few ideas on how you can use existing content to increase your content offerings with a minimal amount of time.

Before you re-purpose your existing materials, know that Google will penalize your business for duplicate content, even if what you’re duplicating is yours. Please don’t copy a blog post and make it your web copy verbatim. Google will notice.

Transcribing Video and Podcasts

If you use videos or podcasts, each one should have an accompanying transcription posted on your site. This does not count as duplicate content because it’s in a different form/media.

Also, go through each video or podcast and pull quotes or tips. These one-liner gems can be used in social media either as direct quotes typed as posts with a link back to the original or through creating image quotes.

Blogs Become Articles

When Hollywood has a successful TV show or movie, it creates a spin-off or sequel/prequel.  You can do the same of your popular blog posts. Chances are your posts are only 300-500 words. If that’s the case, pull an old post and add more information to it until it’s about 1,000-1,200 words. Change the tone, if you need to, as many blog posts are written in a more familiar tone than that used in articles. Add real world examples (and corresponding links, where appropriate) and you have a full-length article.

Blogs Become Checklists

If you’ve written a “tips” blog post, many of those convert well to a checklist. For instance, “10 Tips to a Better Blog” can easily become “Better Blog Checklist: 10 Things to Do Before Hitting Publish.” Design it as a checklist and cut away a lot of the extra words. You can create this piece in seconds.

If you want to make more of an impression, create a PDF out of it, add a button to your website, or a call-to-action, inviting your audience to download the checklist. Then share it everywhere.

Get More Traction on Your Existing Content

If you don’t have the time for re-purposing, here are a few things you can do in between meetings to get more traction for blog posts:

Scan old posts that resonated with the audience. Update the information contained in them and repost them.

Use an evergreen content plug-in. There are many WordPress plug-ins that can give new life to old posts, like Evergreen Post Tweeter. Connect your social media profiles to your blog through one of the evergreen content plug-ins, set the frequency with which you’d like it to post, and it will automatically share your older content. You can customize the posts to read “ICYMI” (in case you missed it) or “Classic Post.” These designations make your reader aware that it’s something from your content vault.

You can also do this through a scheduler like Buffer or Hootsuite during a time where you are out of the office, so that your social media streams don’t sit fallow.

Create title images for blog posts to post to social media. Over the past few years social media profiles have become more visual. Creating title images for your posts will get them clicked on more often. Use an intriguing image, add the title of the post, and start getting your content more attention when you post it on social. Canva offers a blog post title template that is easy to use and free as long as you own the design components/images.

Use a related post plug-in on your blog. There are a number of these types of plug-ins in WordPress (such as Yet Another Related Post plug-in). They use your designated tags and content to recognize posts with similar themes and present three additional posts to the reader at the end of the blog post. It’s a similar idea to “You might also like” suggestions in e-commerce.

Some bloggers get fancy by using pop-ups when the reader gets to the end of the post or some save the suggestions for additional reads for when someone shares a post. Either way they get more eyes on your content and cause your audience to spend more time on page.

Google relies on your audience to tell it if you’re producing quality content. Every piece of content you create should exist in multiple mediums for two reasons, it expands your content offerings and increases the possibilities of shares and it means no matter what type of media preference each member of your audience has, you have them covered. Give your audience helpful content and they’ll share it and interact with it.

If they share it, Google will take notice.

Christina R. Green teaches small businesses, chambers and associations how to connect through content. Her articles have appeared in the Midwest Society of Association Executives’ Magazine, NTEN.org, AssociationTech, and Socialfish. She is a regular blogger at Frankjkenny.com y Event Manager Blog.

She’s a bookish writer on a quest to bring great storytelling to organizations everywhere.