If you are a content producer, you already know that it takes a lot of hard work to develop blog posts, white papers and reports. So after you've done all that work and posted it, what comes next? Repurpose it into other social media posts of course! Why bother to repurpose? The shortest answer is: audience. Posting content in new venues will reach a bigger audience than through blogging alone. Plus, since you already created the content, it is just a question of tweaking it a bit.

Here are 5 easy ways to repurpose your content:

1. Make a Visual. Visuals are so important on social media. Facebook posts with images get over twice as much engagement than those without images. Even if your post does not include any images, you can create graphics by pulling out a particularly memorable, quote, fact, or even just your post title, and create a graphic with text overlaid. You can check out my previous post on the best stock photo resources for some great backgrounds. Canva is another great (and free) resource for making simple, clean web graphics (seen below).

2. Create an infographic. Infographics are a great user-friendly way to share your info (if your data lends itself to an infographic, of course). Don't be intimidated by the design factor, though, there are many great tools to throw together a professional-looking. Canva also has the capability to create infographics, as does Venngage (an example of which is seen below) and Piktochart.

3. Make a Tip Sheet. If you have a few related posts, or ways to expand a little on what you have already written, you can turn your post into a downloadable PDF tip sheet or guide for download. This is an especially good way to make a "lead magnet" to entice people to sign up for your email (example below from Omnimonster). If you are new to the idea of lead magnets, Amy Porterfield has a great short video introduction.

4. Break it up. With a little tweaking, a long blog post can be broken up into a condensed Facebook post (or two) or a series of tweets. If your post has have bullet points (like this one!), you can tweet them out over the course of a few days - with a link to your blog post - to build interest, and drive traffic to your blog.

5. Add some audio (or video). This is the most ambitious repurposing - turning content on your blog into podcasts, or even Facebook Live videos. In these channels, you can go over what you covered in the blog (you could even consider doing a live Q&A after you discuss the post content). If you have a lot of related content you may even consider doing a webinar. Creating audiovisual content may require the most work, but it can also have the largest payoff. Facebook prioritizes videos in news feeds, and it has been shown that content with videos gets higher engagement.

While each of these steps requires a little extra work, you will reap the rewards of an expanded audience. Do you have favorite way to repurpose content?

The old maxim that a picture is worth 1,000 words may be trite, but research shows that content on social media that contains image is much more engaging. According to BuzzSumo, Facebook posts with images see 2.3 times more engagement, and Buffer found that Tweets with images receive 150% more retweets than tweets without images. However, finding the right image makes all of the difference. When the internet was in its infancy, the only options for images seemed to be expensive stock photo sites with awkward, corporate images or the legal gray-area of simply skimming images from the web. There is temptation, even today, to just search the web for related images and post those, without thinking about the copyright status. Fortunately, there are now more options for royalty-free, fair use stock photos today.

One of the reasons I like these selected sites, is that their images are more contemporary, and they avoid some of the cheesiness of some of the older stock photo sites. Striking the right tone, and finding images that fit the feel and message of your blog is just as important as the messaging. Each of my favorite sites below has a good selection of royalty-free photos that are clean and modern. As you night expect, there are tons of tech-related images, but other categories, like food, travel and pictures of people are covered as well.

Stocksnap - This is probably my favorite stock photo site currently. Though not exhaustive, it covers a wide variety of topics, is searchable by keyword, and the photos seem to be uniformly of high quality.
SplitShire - There are a limited amount of photos on this site, but they all have a more artistic bent, and are organized by category.
Pixabay - This site has a huge selection of images on a variety of topics. The quality level can be a little more variable, so make sure to vet your selections. On unique feature is that this site also has clip art, especially related to tech and business topics.
Creative Commons Search- Creative Commons licences enable content creators to share their work with alternative copyright licenses that allow others to remix and share their content. From the Creative Commons search page, you can search popular sites with CC content including Flickr and Wikimedia.

Though these are the sites I am using most right now, the list is by no means exhaustive. The Content Market Institute, Buffer and Freestack also have more extensive lists of resources. Do you have any favorite stock photo sites or resources?