The cheapest piece of content you’ll ever publish is one you already made. Recycling content means taking something that exists (a talk, a video, a sales call, an old post) and turning it into new formats for new places, without starting from a blank page. I wrote the first version of this post in 2014 off a Friday tweetchat. Since then I’ve built a whole production line on the idea, and I can tell you where it pays off and where it breaks.
Start with a conversation, not a blank page
Here’s the single best source of raw material for a small business: a recorded conversation with someone who knows the work. A 45-minute interview runs 4,000 to 6,000 words of transcript. No blog post you’d sit down to write from scratch comes close, and every word of it is something a real person said, in the words your customers use.
Well, the truth is most businesses already have these conversations. They just don’t press record. Your owner explains the same thing to every new customer. Your salesperson answers the same five questions every week. Ross Jones taught Digital Marketing at Belmont and has led a free SEO meetup in Nashville for years. Think about how many hours of explanation that adds up to, and how little of it ever became a page.
I run this pipeline at full scale on the Unscripted SEO podcast, where I’ve recorded well over a hundred interviews with practitioners. For one contractor client, I built a home-improvement podcast for the same reason: each episode is a few thousand words of unique, local, expert content that no competitor can copy.
What one interview turns into
From a single recorded episode, our production line produces:
- A full interview article for the show’s site, plus three or four shorter blog posts built around the strongest ideas
- Show notes for the podcast feed and a YouTube description
- Three short vertical video clips for TikTok, Reels and YouTube Shorts
- Quote cards in three sizes for social posts
- A newsletter section and a Substack post
- A downloadable guide or slide deck when the episode has a real how-to in it
- Links: the guest shares their episode, and their site often links back
Joshua Altman, a fractional chief content officer, described the same habit on Unscripted Small Business:
“We repurpose a lot. One post, one idea… can become a post on every channel and then we can make more posts off of that initial concept.”
Joshua Altman, Unscripted Small Business
He also said something every overwhelmed owner should hear: “There are no content police.” If one good post a week is your pace, that’s your pace. Repurposing is how a small team keeps up without lowering the bar.
Where the pipeline breaks, and how we catch it
I promised honesty, so here’s the part most “repurpose everything” guides leave out. Automation makes this faster. It also makes mistakes faster.
- Transcripts aren’t verbatim. Our cleaned-up transcripts trim filler and false starts, and some run as much as 60% shorter than what was said. That’s fine for a summary. It isn’t fine for a quote with someone’s name on it.
- Speaker labels lie. Recording software guesses who said what. When we audited one batch of pull quotes, six “guest” quotes turned out to be my own words. Now every quote gets checked against the raw recording, with the speaker, before it’s published.
- AI fills gaps with fiction. I’ve watched an AI tool invent an entire section of a guest’s transcript that never happened. If a quote sounds a little too perfect, go back to the tape.
The rule we work by: a machine can draft the article, but a person checks every quote, every name and every number against the source. Anything we can’t verify gets written as a paraphrase, not dressed up in quote marks.
Old posts are raw material too
You don’t need a podcast to start. Your own archive is full of material, and some of it is better than you remember. Years ago a Nashville personal injury attorney we worked with mentioned, almost in passing, that he’d witnessed the last electric chair execution. It was sitting in a PDF on his site. We turned it into a post, shared it on Reddit, and it pulled a flood of traffic and ranked near the top for “electric chair” at the time. The story was always there. Nobody had put it where people could find it.
Here’s how to mine your own archive:
- Merge the weak with the strong. Three thin posts on the same topic are worth more as one good one. We’re doing exactly that on this site right now, folding dozens of short posts into fewer, better ones and redirecting the old URLs.
- Check what still gets found. In Search Console, filter by page and see which old posts still earn impressions. This post still shows up for searches like “recycle reuse repurpose” years after it was written.
- Read the old comments and the questions in your inbox. Each one is a heading for an update.
- Turn presentations into posts. As Megan Pritts put it in that 2014 tweetchat, a business presentation can become a blog post or a video. The slides are already an outline.
Repurposing is also how you earn links and mentions
Rob Bonham, who runs SEO for car dealerships among others, made the case on Unscripted SEO that integrated campaigns win:
“Integrated marketing campaigns, repurposing your content in every way, shape, or form you can think of that’s gonna resonate with your audience.”
Rob Bonham, Unscripted SEO
Every format you publish is another place someone can find you, quote you and link to you. A guest who sees their own quote card shares it. A journalist who finds a clear answer cites it. That’s the quiet benefit of repurposing, and it’s why it sits next to earning links in how we plan content.
If you want the writing side, start with our SEO tips for business blogging and how to put the right words in the right places. If you’re still deciding whether any of this is worth it, read what SEO actually gets you. If you’d rather hand the whole thing off, start with our SEO package.
So what’s the conversation you have every week that nobody has ever recorded? Press record on the next one, and send it our way if you want help turning it into a month of content.
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