Podcasters and video creators are under constant pressure to create more content, for more platforms, more frequently. The dizzying array of different algorithms, audiences, and video formats for various platforms just makes content creation more complicated. 

This sometimes pushes creators into the hamster wheel of content production, and even though they have a large backlog of content, they don’t use it to the fullest. 

The question is: How can you break the cycle of constant content creation and maximize the value of the content you already have?

The short answer is content repurposing. 

Repurposing content can help you scale content without the heavy lifting. Instead of keeping old content collecting digital dust, you can make the most out of it by repurposing the content for different platforms. 

But how to repurpose content? In this article, we’ll take a look at the what, why, and how of content repurposing, and we’ll share best practices and examples to get your creative gears turning.

What is content repurposing?

Content repurposing is the process of transforming existing content into different formats or contexts to maximize its reach, engagement, and value across various platforms and audiences.

Creators often misinterpret content repurposing as cross-posting the same content across channels. While that's possible, it's not the best solution—audiences (and algorithms) can tell when a piece of content wasn't made for them. Instead, content repurposing means tailoring the content into new formats to fit the purpose of different platforms. It’s like giving your old content a new life. 

Reasons to repurpose content

Now that we have defined content repurposing, it’s time to look at some of the benefits. 

• Save time: Repurposing content allows you to maximize the value of existing content and save time instead of creating entirely new pieces from scratch. 
• Give old content new life: Giving old content a fresh coat of digital paint helps extend its digital shelf life. By recycling content, you can make the most of your existing resources.
• Reach new audiences: Different audiences prefer different types of content. Here’s where content repurposing can help. By repurposing content across different formats (e.g., turning a podcast episode into a blog post or a social media carousel), you can reach a broader audience that prefers different types of content consumption.
• Improve SEO efforts: Social media platforms are transforming into powerful search engines, so repurposing content for different channels can positively impact your search engine rankings and help you get discovered by new audiences. 
• Optimize content for different channels and platforms: If you want your content to perform well across channels, you have to customize it to fit the purpose. This way, you can encourage good engagement across different channels without reinventing the wheel.

How to repurpose podcast content

If you have a podcast, you’re sitting on a content goldmine. The possibilities for repurposing podcast content are endless. From blog posts and YouTube videos to social carousels, infographics, and social videos, repackaging your podcast content will help you get more mileage out of it. 

1. Write a blog post

Turning your podcast episodes into blog posts is a great way to reach audience who prefer text to audio. And you don't need to write from scratch to do it— you can either post a simple transcription of your episodes, or turn that transcription into a blog post. Don’t worry—it’s not as scary as it seems.  

Thanks to automatic transcription software like Descript, you can use speech-to-text capabilities to transcribe audio with up to 95% accuracy to create transcripts, captions, subtitles, and text files. The best part? You can edit your audio by editing the text—just like a doc—to remove filler words and make cuts with just a few keystrokes.

Then, you can go the extra mile and turn your podcast episodes into blog posts. To do this, you need to transcribe the episode, pull out the key points and insights, structure them for readability, and complement them with visuals or links to enhance understanding and engagement. You can incorporate relevant quotes or excerpts from the conversation to maintain authenticity and credibility.

This is exactly what Emma Siemasko and I do with the podcast episodes of the Freelance Writing Coach podcast. This approach not only preserves the essence of the podcast but also makes the content accessible to a broader audience who may prefer reading over listening.

If you don't have that kind of time, there's also a secret weapon available: In Descript, just click Underlord, head to the Publish menu, and click Draft a blog post. The AI will use your podcast transcript to draft a scannable, readable blog post that, with a few tweaks, will be ready for publishing.

2. Create a YouTube video

To expand the reach of your podcast, turn your episodes into YouTube videos. YouTube is the world's most popular video platforms and the world's second-largest search engine, so giving your content new life on YouTube is a no brainer. Whether you want to offer your existing podcast listeners the chance to watch your videos on YouTube or reach new audiences on the platform, turning your podcast episodes into YouTube videos is another great way of repurposing content. 

You don't need video to do this, either. Use Descript to create sleek audiograms of your episodes with animated captions, add a visually appealing intro and outro, and optimize the video title, YouTube description, tags, and thumbnail to improve searchability and reach on YouTube. 

Off The Clock podcast is a talk show for marketers in which I, Allie Decker, and Krista Doyle talk about shared experiences and offer fresh perspectives on navigating a digital career in your 20s and 30s. In addition to Spotify, podcast listeners can enjoy watching the episodes on YouTube. 

3. Make a social carousel

A social media carousel is a type of post with multiple photos and/or videos that lets followers swipe through the content. Social carousels are very popular, especially on Instagram and LinkedIn. 

Since podcast episodes are usually packed with good quotes, stats, tips, and best practices, social carousels can be perfect for repurposing podcast content. You can choose 3 to 5 quotes from your podcast episode and share them in a carousel post to spark the interest of your audience. 

Social carousels can also be a great way for podcast guests to share a teaser on their social media channels. This is what Enfuse Group did to promote the podcast episode in which their co-founder was the guest.

4. Create an infographic

An infographic is a visually appealing content format that uses charts, graphs, icons, and illustrations to complement the content and make the information more accessible and shareable across social media platforms. 

If your podcast episode is packed with stats, unique findings, or survey results, turn your content into an infographic by condensing main topics and key points and presenting them visually, like the one below from the podcast Think Fast, Talk Smart. Make sure the infographic follows a logical flow, mirroring the podcast's structure, and include the podcast episode title, key quotes, and a call to action or link back to the full episode for those interested in more detail. 

5. Make a social video

The short-form video boom ushered by TikTok has made this one of the most popular content formats for digital creators. According to Insider Intelligence, 72% of Gen Z’s social media usage was watching videos.

To capitalize on this trend, extract compelling audio segments from your podcast episodes, pair them with relevant visuals or animations, and edit them into a cohesive narrative that resonates with a visual audience. 

Not sure which clips are most compelling? Descript can help. Just navigate to Underlord > Repurpose and click on Create clips. Specify what kinds of moments you're looking for, and the AI will choose the best clips from your episode and turn them into visually appealing social video clips.

‎One of the creators who nails the short video game is Ali Abdaal. In his podcast, Deep Dive, Ali sits down with inspiring creators, thinkers, entrepreneurs, and high performers to help listeners build lives that they love. Ali later repurposes the podcast episodes into bite-sized social videos that get millions of views across social media. 

How to repurpose video content

Video content can be repurposed in multiple different forms, such as audio podcasts, social videos, GIFs, and blog posts.  

1. Publish it as an audio podcast

If you already have an archive of videos you’ve created in the past, you can publish them as audio podcast episodes. To do this, you need to extract the audio, check it for quality, and publish it on podcast platforms. 

Using a tool such as Descript allows you to extract audio from video files. Aside from helping you split audio from video, Descript offers a bunch of features designed to speed up the audio and video editing process, such as voice-cloning technology to fix audio mistakes, automatic filler word removal, Studio Sound to remove unwanted background noise, and a built-in library of background music and sound effects. 

2. Make a GIF for social

GIFs have become an integral part of modern communication. People use them in their daily communication to add a new dimension of expression. To grab your audience’s attention, you can create shareable GIFs from your videos in seconds. 

Transforming your videos into high-quality GIFs with Descript’s video-to-GIF converter is as easy as 1, 2, 3: upload your video, find clips you want to turn into GIFs, and polish and export your GIFs. 

3. Make a social video

Use your videos to make short clips for social media to get discovered and maybe even go viral. Making short video clips doesn’t need to be daunting. With Descript, you can turn your long-form video or podcast into clips, quickly change aspect ratios to fit different platforms, and use AI to deal with the most tedious processes, such as removing filler words and adding captions. 

The best part is that you can use Descript’s AI to find your most social-worthy highlights. Find the moments with the highest engagement potential, then clip them, add your own branding or choose from a wide selection of pre-made templates, and you’re ready to post on social media. 

Colin and Samir are YouTube creators and podcasters who break down the latest news in the creator economy from a creator's perspective. They became famous for their long-form YouTube videos, but later, as content formats evolved, they focused on repurposing videos into clips to establish their presence on social media platforms known for short videos, such as TikTok. This strategy brought them millions of views across channels and platforms. 

4. Write a blog post

To preserve the essence of your video and ensure that you’re not solely relying on third-party video platforms (which can go down, discontinue your channel, or remove some of your videos), you can always repurpose your videos into blog posts. 

Start by summarizing key points and insights from the video. You can transcribe your video and use the transcription to outline your blog post structure and pull out quotes you want to include. Make sure to add an engaging introduction and conclusion with a call to action and include visuals, such as screenshots from the video. 

You can also ask AI to do the work: In Descript, just click Underlord > Publish, and click Draft a blog post. The AI will refer to your podcast transcript to draft a publish-ready blog post—with a few human tweaks, of course.

Content repurposing best practices

• Plan your content with repurposing in mind: Think of all the repurposing possibilities before creating your content. 
• Don't feel limited to evergreen content: Avoid repurposing time-sensitive information, but feel free to refresh your old content for a new era.
• Don't attempt to repurpose for every channel: ...at least not at first. Focus on the channels you're trying to build or you already have a presence on, then expand from there.
• Create a repurposing plan: List all the formats you need and create a distribution plan for the repurposed content. 
• Tailor your repurposed content for specific platforms: Different platforms have different format and style requirements. The better you tailor your content for specific channels, the better it will perform. 
• Keep the same level of quality: It's not worth the extra content if repackaging requires you to lower the quality bar—and therefore tarnish your reputation as a quality creator.
• Use the power of AI to scale content repurposing: AI can remove the burden of repetitive, time-consuming tasks. Descript’s Underlord can help you choose social media clips, write blog posts, draft social copy, write a YouTube description, and more, making content repurposing much faster.
• Track performance, experiment, and optimize: The only way to find out what works and what doesn’t is to track the performance of your content, experiment with different formats, and optimize from there to achieve better results in the future. 

5 examples of smart content repurposing

Now that we’ve gone through the tips and best practices, it’s time to see real-life examples in action. 

1. Repurposing podcast content for email newsletter 

Lenny Rachitsky is a popular creator known for his podcast Lenny's Podcast, in which he interviews world-class product leaders and growth experts to uncover concrete, actionable, and tactical advice to help others build, launch, and grow their own products. Lenny also has a newsletter with 600,000+ subscribers, with a weekly advice column about products, growth, and careers, where he also shares the content from his podcast episodes. 

2. Creating short LinkedIn teasers 

Content, Briefly, is Superpath's Content Marketing Podcast. In each episode, Jimmy Daly analyzes a B2B company's content strategy with help from the people who created it. Jimmy regularly posts short teasers of the podcast episodes on his social media channels to promote the episode and capture the attention of more podcast listeners. 

3. Turning a podcast episode into an article

The Modern Retail Podcast hosts entrepreneurs from the retail space, including the buzzy world of DTC. Besides the ability to listen to podcast episodes on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Google Play, and Spotify, listeners can also read the articles on the Modern Retail website. 

4. Repurposing long-form videos as YouTube shorts

Leila Hormozi is a famous content creator known for her long-form YouTube videos. To make the most out of the content she produces, she repurposes her videos into YouTube shorts and TikTok videos that get thousands of views. Leila’s short social media videos, with bold editing, have been crucial to the success of her channels. =\[[

5. Sharing audio content on social media with audiograms

Discovered is a product discovery podcast by Klevu featuring the brightest minds in ecommerce and product discovery. Klevu uses audiograms to promote its podcast on social media by making it more visually engaging for the audience. 

How to repurpose content FAQ

How can content be repurposed?

Content can be repurposed by transforming it into different formats such as videos, blog posts, infographics, podcasts, or social media posts to reach new audiences and maximize its value.

What is an example of repurposed content?

An example of repurposed content can be turning a podcast episode into a blog post, creating YouTube shorts from a long-form video, posting a LinkedIn teaser with a clip from a podcast episode, repurposing video content for an email newsletter, and more.  

What is repurposing other people's content?

Repurposing other people’s content is taking content created by others and adapting it into new formats or contexts while giving proper credit and adhering to copyright laws.