Content repurposing

What content repurposing is

Content repurposing is taking one recording or document you already have and making several finished pieces from it, each written for the place it will live. A single one-hour webinar becomes an edited transcript, a readable article, a fortnight of social posts, a newsletter section and a short page of the questions the audience asked, with answers.

It is not pasting a transcript into a blog and calling it an article, and it is not cutting the recording into clips, which is short-form editing and is priced separately. Repurposing is writing work. The recording is the raw material; the pieces are new.

Who this is for

A business that has already spoken: a webinar given twice a year, a conference talk, a recorded customer interview, a podcast that has run for thirty episodes, or a founder who explains the business beautifully on a call and has never written any of it down. Most of these businesses have hours of recorded material that produced one post each and then sat in a folder. The material is good. It has simply never been written up.

It is not for a business with nothing recorded yet. If you have not spoken on the record, start with a script or an interview outline so that the first recording is worth reusing. And if what you have is written rather than recorded, the narrower article to social series is the right buy.

What it contains

From one recording of forty-five to ninety minutes, the standard set is five pieces. Each is written from the transcript, not assembled from it, so it reads as if it were written for its own page.

1. An edited transcript. Clean verbatim, with speaker names, timestamps at each topic change, and the false starts removed. Two to three pages per ten minutes of speech.
2. An article. One piece of a thousand to fifteen hundred words that answers the single question the recording answered best. Headings, a plain opening, and one next step at the end.
3. A series of posts. Eight to twelve posts, each built around one point or one quotable sentence, each making sense to someone who never sees the others. Written for the one or two networks you actually use.
4. A newsletter section. Two hundred to three hundred words for your next email, with a subject line and one link.
5. An answered-questions page. The questions the audience asked, or that the speaker answered unprompted, with the answers in plain prose. Usually six to ten.

A recording that covers two distinct subjects can produce two articles instead of one. A recording that is mostly slides produces a guide rather than an article, and the quote says which.

What you get

The pieces. Five documents, each finished, each in a file you can paste straight into your website, your newsletter tool or a scheduling tool. Nothing arrives as a single long file for you to cut up.

A publishing sheet. One spreadsheet, one row per piece: where it goes, the suggested date, the title, and the link each piece points to. Twelve to sixteen rows for a standard set, covering three to four weeks.

A quote bank. One page of the fifteen to twenty best sentences from the recording, attributed to the speaker, for later use in proposals, graphics and pages.

A worked example

An illustration, not a client. A commercial roofing contractor gives a forty-minute talk to a property managers' association about flat-roof inspections. It is recorded on a phone from the back of the room and the sound is usable. The company posts a link to the recording once and eleven people click it.

Repurposed, the talk yields: a transcript of nine pages; an article titled with the question the audience asked most, which was how often a flat roof actually needs inspecting; ten posts, one per warning sign the speaker listed; a newsletter section for the spring mailing to property managers; and a page of eight questions from the floor, answered. The publishing sheet spreads them over four weeks. The contractor did not write a word, did not record anything new, and had a month of material from one afternoon it had already spent. The article is the page the sales team now sends before every inspection quote.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. What you have recorded, who it was for, and where the pieces will be published. No charge.
2. A fixed price in writing. The number of recordings and the set of pieces from each, agreed before anything starts.
3. The transcript. The recording is transcribed and edited first, and you see it, because everything else depends on it being right.
4. The writing. Article, posts, newsletter section and questions page, drafted from the transcript over seven to ten working days.
5. Your review. One round of changes across the whole set. Anything the speaker would not have said is cut.
6. Delivery. All pieces, the publishing sheet and the quote bank, in one folder.

What it costs

Content repurposing is quoted as a fixed price in CAD after the half-hour call. The price depends on the length and sound quality of the recording, how many pieces you want from it, and whether it is a single recording or a standing arrangement for every webinar or episode you produce. A monthly arrangement that also publishes the pieces for you falls under the Content Engine band on the pricing page, and the quote will say so if that is the better fit.

What happens next

Most buyers do this once, see what one recording produces, and then make it routine: every webinar or episode goes through the same set. At that point the publishing side is content production management, so the pieces go out on the dates in the sheet without anyone chasing them. If the recording was a customer conversation, the most valuable output is a case study, and that is written as its own piece. And the next recording is better if it is planned with reuse in mind, which is what an episode outline is for.