Have you ever found the idea of repurposing content overwhelming? Maybe you just don’t know where to start when it comes to reaching new audiences with your existing content. In this episode of Whiteboard Friday, Caitlin walks us through how AI can help get you over that creative block and get started.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version!

Hello, everyone. Happy Friday, or as I like to say, Happy Friyay. My name is Caitlin Hathaway, and I'm excited to be here on this Whiteboard Friday today to bring you through content repurposing — but not just any repurposing. We'll be looking at it with the help of AI to make it a more efficient, easier process for you if you have a creative block to doing this. 

So, what is content repurposing? Let's just have a quick overview. It's about taking an existing piece of content you might have — whether it be an article, a video, an audio transcript, or anything, and looking for different ways to repackage it into different formats. 

So, for example, your article could turn into a visual carousel with informative case studies. It could be an infographic carousel. There's lots of potential in that. You could repurpose it into a podcast discussion, an informative long-form video and tutorial. The possibilities are endless.

So the reason why it's so helpful is that you can actually diversify onto different platforms. So, if you potentially were search engine only, you have chances to build on social, video, like all these new avenues in order to build your visibility and actually maximize your original content with the same content. So it's great. 

So, why might you want to think about repurposing now? So, if you're in the SEO world, like me, you might see that this traffic graph is not something you haven't seen before. So it could be a gradual decline of traffic over time. Or it could be an instant, overnight drop, and that means your traffic and your revenue is gone, and that's pretty scary.

So this is what happens when you rely on a single platform or a particular search engine, and I won't name names, for your traffic. Companies more so than ever are looking to diversify their content to not just be search engine only, but to build their presence on other channels. With this especially happening recently, it's been more focused on more than ever before just so you can safeguard your traffic and you can actually maximize your content and bring in new audiences that were possibly not accessible. So there's loads of potential here. 

So the reason I'm bringing AI into this process is not to completely offset it to AI. I'm not here to do that. So what we're going to do is if you feel like you're not a creative person, like me, the creativity, there's an error contact into my brain, it's really tedious.

So instead of just not doing this process together, I have found so much value from using AI as a partner and making the process way less overwhelming than it could be because I can brainstorm with it, I can just offset some of the tedious parts of it and some of the creative areas. It actually makes me more creative in turn because I can identify what looks good and what doesn't look good and plan accordingly. So, it just makes the task a lot better, in my experience.

So we're going to move on to the actionable part now, which is the step-by-step framework. 

The first couple of things I'm going to say before getting started are that I use text-based content throughout this. So, if you've got an article, that's a really good start. But if you've got a video or audio, what I recommend is transcribing it in a tool and then using that text output here. It will work really well either way.

The other thing is that there are lots of prompts in this, and I don't think you want me to say prompts to you. I don't want to say prompts to you. It's just going to be long. It's going to take too much time. So they're going to be in the description below, and it will be far easier for you to copy and paste that when you start this process.

So jumping right into it.

Choosing the right content to repurpose. So step number one, really important and the most human step in this. There is a bit of manual ditch-digging.

So we're going to look for evergreen, high-performing pieces. So I'd recommend jumping into analytics and looking for content within a 12- to 6-month radius, so quite long-term, looking for content with high traffic, highish traffic, and a high amount of meaningful conversions to you. So these could be like downloads or anything that's like tangibly very good. Even high backlinks is helpful. So you can use Moz to see if people are finding your content valuable. That's a really good indicator that that's a good repurposeful content platform.

Then the other type of content you want to look for, after doing all that, is making sure it's informational. So guides and how-tos are really good here because they've got lots of in-depth, practical knowledge that you can take and you can create and repackage into different things. 

So avoid timely, news-based content or commercial content because you're going to find that, with news-based content, like after next week, it might be irrelevant. This is a high-impact activity, and you want to make sure that you're focusing your efforts on that core evergreen content. 

So, I'll try and use an example throughout this. If you know me, I love dogs. Doggos are the best.

So, I have used an example of “The First-Time Dog Care Guide.” So, for anybody that's looking to adopt their first dog, this is full of practical information, how-tos, like specific situations, like really valuable information that is a good grounds for repurposing because it's just timeless. Like, people are adopting dogs all the time. One in three households have a dog. Had to get that fun fact in there. So everyone does need support, and the information doesn't really change very much. So we're going to start with that. 

Okay, moving on to step two. What we're going to do is we're going to break it down into themes, or you can call it subtopics or clusters. But just structurally breaking that down because if you try to adapt a whole piece of content at once, it's just going to be such a broad, like non-value. Like the low value you'll get out of breaking it down into themes, it will be really noticeable, and the outputs will be so much better if you have that specific sectioning down.

So what we would do is we'll get our content. We'll paste it in there, and then we'll ask the AI platform of choice. So you can use Claude, ChatGPT, or the new contender DeepSeek, and you can ask it to analyze your content, identify themes, subtopics, whatever you want to call it that could be its own standalone content. So it can actually be its own article. It could be a whole discussion in itself.

So that's what we're going to do, and the prompt is in the description below.

AI Prompt:

The output that you'll get, so for instance, with my dog care guide, I got back dog nutrition, exercise and socialization, and the first month essentials and equipment that you need to take care of your dog.

So I thought that those were really relevant because of the amount of depth you can go into each of those, there's so much you can write content on or create content about, so much actionable stuff, so many video opportunities, like tons there. So I thought that that was really good. But obviously, human review is really needed. Make sure that the theme that it outputs is aligned to your content. Make sure that it makes sense and it can be connected back and it's also aligned to those goals.

So that's the second step. 

The third step would be aligning themes with the audience and needs.

So this is actually one my favorite steps because it's the most qualitative, and I find that the information that you can get through this stuff is things that I would have never thought about before. So it might actually be interesting if you have done content repurposing and you just want another extra resource to be able to see what kind of new ideas you might not have come up with before.

So what we're going to do is we're going to grab each individual theme. So, for example, we'll take exercise and socialization, and we're going to put that into ChatGPT and we're going to ask it, for each theme, identify the audience who needs that theme, the pain points that they have. You can even ask it specific information, like what are the desired outcomes, like what takeaways are they looking for. You can go crazy on the creative here.

AI Prompt:

So you can ask as much you want, and it will output like a lot of information that it might have actually missed before. So in my case, it came up with senior dog owners, older people who have their first dog. It came up with like couples who are having their first dog.

The first one that really stood out to me, that I didn't think of, which is surprising because I live in London, is it came up with city dwellers who are looking after their first dog. They have a small apartment. They have like limited green space, and they don't have much opportunities in their day to socialize their dogs. They've got this tiny little apartment. So I was like, "Why didn't I think about it living in London?" It makes no sense. So I really appreciated it for that, and I think that there's so much you can do off of that.

So that was a really helpful step. 

The fourth one, which is like the more fun, the actual actionable stuff that you come here for, is you're going to map those themes to your platforms and also the content repurposing opportunities.

So now you've got the far more contextual, nuanced information from this step. So instead of having just themes and your content and plugging it in, you've got so much more rich information that you can plug in here, with those pain points, those challenges, and all of this extra information.

So putting that in there, analyzing that audience, theme, your content, and you're going to ask it to suggest ideal platforms, repurposing ideas based on your existing content, and ask it to structure it out. You can even say like, "How would that content would look? Like give me an example of like a script or a step-by-step of what can I include."

AI Prompt:

So, in this one, I used the city-dwelling dog owners, and I put it in here.

I really like the ideas it came up with because it suggested long-form video content of I think it was like walk my dog with me content. So you can go around the city finding routes. There are situations, like real life, where they might see another dog. Like how do you give actionable advice and how do you react in that situation? So that was cool.

Then the other one was ideas for exercising your dog in an apartment block. It was probably an antisocial idea, but you could play fetch in the apartment, like, hallway or something during the non-peak hours, which is a good way to tire out your dog, or do stairwell sprints, which probably is going to tire you out more than the dog. Don't sprint downwards. Sprint upwards. So I was like, yeah, I had a lot of fun in that process, and obviously, you can interact with it. 

You will just know what aligns to your brand and what does and what doesn't resonate back to your content. Make sure it always links back to your main content. It can give CTAs and suggestions on how would you link back effectively. So I thought it was really, really good.

That's the end of the process.

So final note, but basically, I hope that using AI to overcome that creative process and just getting started is just like the whole essence of this framework.

If you haven't gotten started, I hope it makes it easier for you to start now. If not, I've also got a custom GPT for a content repurposing GPT. So you put your content in there, just a glimpse of your audience, and it will come up with a table of outputs of all the ideas that you can do.

But yeah, thank you so much for tuning in. Really, really happy to be here, and have a wonderful Friday. Thank you.