Article Content Repurposing - 7 Strategies for Repurposing Your Article Content in Text (Read)

   Article Marketing is perfect for repurposing content. Here's why:

Imagine, if you will, what your life would be like if each time you needed to use your car to go somewhere, you had to create a brand new vehicle from scratch.

Want to go to Starbucks for a cup of Joe and the morning newspaper? Create a new vehicle.

Great seats to hear your favorite band? Need a new vehicle.

Off to see the latest popular movie? Hang on, gotta build a car.

Stressful, ridiculous and over the top, right?

Of course. The purpose of a vehicle is to get you to as many places as you want to go, over and over again, right?

So why do we as entrepreneurs believe we need to create a new piece of content each and every time we want or need content?

The Good News

The good news is that you don't need to recreate content every time. You can repurpose content in many ways.

You have probably heard about repurposing content before. I bet you have yet to grasp and access the full power of repurposing.

The above example with cars is a little crazy. And speaking of crazy, I bet you are also familiar with the standard definition of insanity.

"Doing the same thing, that does not work, over and over again, and expecting different results."

Well, Alex Mandossian and I have come up with a similar, but much more useful definition of Repurposing. "Repurposing is Hyper-Sanity - using the same thing over and over again and getting fantastic profit producing results."

So, are you ready to be hyper-sane and get fantastic profit producing results? Then you are really going want to keep this article within reach. What follows are 7 Text Repurposing Ideas for your Article Content.

And all from one piece of content.

7 Text Repurposing Ideas

1) Online Articles - Since I'm known as the Article Marketing Guy, it makes sense that I would begin with this one. Repurpose your content into a 400 - 500 word article on a specific topic from your niche. While there are many online Article Directories https://yoo.rs/, I recommend you start with EzineArticles. They receive over 50 million unique visitors a month. You want to be in front of that much traffic.

2) Newsletter Articles - Bill Glazer will be teaching an entire blueprint on marketing with newsletters at the 2011 GKIC SuperConference in Chicago. Any content you create can and should be repurposed as articles for your newsletter(s).

Maritza, my wife and business partner, recently used a previous article of mine for our February newsletter. The original article was created in 1995. While it's been reworked and updated, it's still relevant today. That's flat out evergreen.

3) Blog series - Don't make the mistake of only getting one blog post out of a piece of content. Create a blog post series. How many blog posts could I get out of this article?

4) Email - Start an email off with a few sentences from your content and provide the link to read the rest of the content. I could make it harder for you, but why?

5) Tweet or Tweet Series - Tweet the title of your content with a link. You can tweet quotes from your content as well, with a link. You can also create a Tweet Series. Include one tip with each Tweet, with a link, of course.

6) Facebook Update or FB Update Series - Create a FB Update with the title of your content with a link. You can use sub-headings from your content with a link. You can also do a FB Update Series, including a link with each update.

Side Note 1: Now you can no longer say you don't know what to say on Twitter or Facebook.

7) A Compilation Book - Collect several pieces of content or articles around a topic. Deliver them in a small and inexpensive traditional book. Beats the heck out of the traditional business card when you are networking.

The decision whether or not to use Adobe Flash content on one's website has always been a controversial issue for webmasters and online business owners alike. Skeptics present the issue of the lack of global compatibility, whereas followers believe you can never get too many vectors flying around your screen. The point is - you can have both, by creatively applying dynamic flash content to your website that targets older player versions.

Flash has been around for a while, and compatibility has been a growing concern for designers across the web. Adobe updates its player frequently - making most people believe that flash content can quickly outdate itself. This itself is a common misconception. Adobe Flash Player is probably the most versatile dynamic media programming medium available on the web. The player is both backwards and forwards compatible (meaning it works with content created for previous players and any content created will always work with future players), and it's cross-platform, working EXACTLY the same whether you're on a Mac or a PC, or anything between! The problem that flash content creators and website owners face is that they are trying to design for the latest player, which may not yet be globally distributed.

To solve this, and creatively apply dynamic content to our websites, all we have to do is target an older player. For example, any content targeted for Flash Player 8 utilizing Actionscript 2.0 will be compatible with 99.6% of all internet users! This being said, compatibility should never be a problem for your website; and it should certainly never be used as an excuse to not provide creative content.

But why would you want to host flash content on your website anyway? Well, computers work mainly using data values - simple text that represents the information that you are trying to convey. A lot of websites really show this off by using plain white backgrounds with boring black text on top, but we can go beyond that using flash! Humans tend to work graphically. For example: if I showed you a list of 1000 numbers, you would just see numbers and would have a hard time finding correlation; yet if I used flash content to graph those numbers into a line chart or pie chart, you would probably be able to tell me all sorts of interpretations of the data (such as minimum and maximum values, the mean average, any even the variance and standard deviation for the data set). This type of information would allow you to perform comparisons, make informed decisions, and truly understand the 1000 numbers provided to you.

The same technology can be put to work on your websites. Let's say your customers log-in and get a 'welcome back' message that says: "You've sent 346 out of 500 available pictures". That's all fine and good, but it doesn't really give a clear picture for your customer to look at. What if there was a progress bar graphic that set itself dynamically based on the value, literally showing your customer how many pictures they've sent - that would be so much more intuitive and useful for your customers!

But how would flash know all this information, and how would it be different for each and every customer? Would you need to publish and individual flash movie for each customer? Nope, not with flash! Flash operates using variables which hold the data that is used to generate the elements inside the movie, and perform other actions such as the mathematics used to calculate the remaining percentage of pictures that can be sent. Usually, variables are strictly internal to flash (meaning they can only be accessed from inside the flash applet), but there are ways of dynamically loading content inside from your server. Let's take a look at those methods:

LoadVars. This is the 'calling' method inside of flash, meaning that flash is told to go find the information and return it to the applet as a variable. This is useful if the data you are hosting is on a different server or if you want to collect user information before retrieving the data.

FlashVars. This is the 'telling' method outside of flash, embedded in the actual HTML code. This is useful if you are creating the entire page dynamically (such as a PHP homepage where you have a user id stored in a PHP variable that you want to transfer to the flash applet). This information needs to be passed at runtime when the page is created, so it's pointless unless the page is generated on server-side or unless a different HTML code will be used to embed the same flash file on multiple pages.

From here webmasters and online business owners alike will be able to create flash content for the web without the fear of compatibility issues. Once data is loaded in dynamically from your server (either in a database or any other method you choose) then you will be able to create stunning multimedia content, ranging from graphs, to data-dependent imagery, even all the way to entire custom web applications - all from your website!

Where should you go from here? Begin by reading up on flash and all of its capabilities. Just because we're using AS2 doesn't mean everything is outdated - you can do some VERY powerful things with this technology. Take a look at the two methods for loading data dynamically, LoadVars and FlashVars, and start implementing flash content into your website today - you'll be able to create an experience that will keep your visitors coming back for more!