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How I Repurpose Blog Content into LinkedIn Posts to Expand My Reach

Marketer Irina Maltseva shares her proven process for repurposing blogs into high-performing LinkedIn posts. Apply these strategies to increase your blog traffic, build a personal brand, and grow your LinkedIn following.

Mar 21, 2024 9 min readLinkedIn
Photo of Irina Maltseva
Irina Maltseva

Growth Lead at Aura

If you’re publishing quality blog content, you’re also creating ideal content for LinkedIn — you just need to learn how to repurpose it.

I’m Irina, a Growth and SEO Advisor, and I help companies grow their visibility with inbound marketing. During the last eight years, I’ve helped well-known SaaS companies (like Hunter and Aura) grow their traffic to hundreds of thousands of sessions from organic and social media channels

I also contribute to popular SaaS blogs (like Ahrefs, MOZ, and now Buffer!) and repurpose that content to increase my LinkedIn visibility.

In this comprehensive guide, I’ll share my proven process for repurposing blog content into high-performing LinkedIn posts. You can apply these strategies to increase your blog traffic, build a personal brand, and grow your LinkedIn following.

Let’s dive right in!

Why you should repurpose content for LinkedIn

There are several strategic reasons why repurposing content for LinkedIn is worth the effort:

  1. Expand your reach: Repurposing content puts your work in front of thousands of professionals and organizations in your target industry or niche. Instead of trying to draw LinkedIn users to your blog in the first place, you bring the content straight to them on the platform they already use daily.
  2. Boost traffic: Many bloggers find attracting new visitors to their sites challenging. Organic search and social media referrals have diminishing returns over time, so finding new traffic sources is crucial. LinkedIn drives 46 percent of social traffic to B2B websites, and a well-optimized repurposed post can tap into that traffic stream.
  3. Showcase expertise: LinkedIn is an online resume and portfolio highlighting your work history and domain expertise. By proactively sharing your blog content directly on the platform, you can showcase your knowledge to new audiences organically over time.
  4. Networking: Publishing share-worthy insights is a proven way to grab the attention of recognized figures in your field. Industry leaders, potential partners, affiliates, and collaborators monitor LinkedIn for relevant content and commentary.
  5. Cost and time saving: Creating new blog content requires significant upfront investment. You must research topics, outline posts, write drafts, gather visual assets, promote your content, and more with each piece you produce. Repurposing, on the other hand, means taking existing self-created assets and distributing them for new channels. 

How to choose blog posts for LinkedIn repurposing

When selecting existing blog content to repurpose for LinkedIn, follow this three-step filtering process:

Select content with repurposing potential

The first step is identifying posts with the highest potential value when repurposed for LinkedIn audiences. Ideal content types include:

  • Ultimate guides and ebooks
  • Evergreen "how to" articles
  • Podcasts (Most podcast tools, like Riverside, Descript, and Adobe Audition, have features that will help you repurpose video and audio clips.)
  • Business strategy and career advice
  • Beginner's guides
  • Best practices posts
  • Linkable assets (aka magnet content)

This evergreen, high-value content tends to attract steady organic traffic and engagement over time, making it perfect for giving new life through LinkedIn repurposing.

Identify timeless blog posts

Next, dig into your blog traffic analytics and engagement data to pinpoint specific top-performing posts demonstrating continual readership interest over time. Sort historical content by metrics like:

  • Total lifetime pageviews
  • Social shares across platforms
  • Volume and quality of comments
  • Proportion of search traffic

Posts that rank highly across these engagement factors reveal their enduring usefulness and appetite from readers. This signals strong repurposing potential.

Reviewing blog post performance

Finally, assess shortlisted posts based on their ability to offer relevant value for LinkedIn audiences if published natively on the platform. Consider:

  • Breadth of appeal for professionals across industries
  • Ability to highlight your expertise credibly
  • Potential to spark constructive discussions

This relevance check ensures you only repurpose content that is poised to resonate based on what engages LinkedIn's community daily.

By following this three-step filtering process, you can confidently identify and select optimized blog content with maximum repurposing viability for LinkedIn.

How to get the most out of repurposing your content for LinkedIn

Once you’ve selected outstanding blog content to repurpose, it’s time to customize it for LinkedIn to drive maximum visibility and engagement.

Here are my top seven techniques for optimizing repurposed blog posts for success on LinkedIn:

1. Tailor content to the audience

Avoid simply reposting your blog content verbatim. The introduction and opening paragraphs especially should be tweaked to better align with your audience.

Ask yourself:

  • How will this help fellow professionals or industry peers specifically?
  • What common frustrations or needs does this address?

Then incorporate that perspective right up front before getting into details, data points, etc., shared from your original piece.

Framing content around shared points of professional relevance better engages visitors scrolling quickly. Give them clear takeaways tailored to their role needs before proving your expertise in detail.

For example, I repurposed my personal article for MOZ on LinkedIn and started my post with a common problem:

“The list of high-intent keywords you can target is limited.” 

Here, I quickly teased my strategies on what to do after you’ve exhausted the high-intent keyword list but left the juicy details in the article for the readers to find.

2. Incorporate LinkedIn’s unique features

Embrace native LinkedIn functionalities other networks lack to make your repurposed content more visible and interactive.

Examples include:

  • Relevant hashtags: Strategically include tags so your posts appear across related conversations outside your immediate network. Prioritize broader industry hashtags over niche interests.
  • Mentions: Proactively notify influential profiles referenced directly in your post. This exposes your repurposed content to whole new spheres of connections.
  • LinkedIn articles: For long-form posts, natively publish and link to these instead of off-site blogs to appear more prominently in feed searches.
  • Polls: Prompt commentary by asking an intriguing question related to your content and sharing initial opinions.
  • Carousels: LinkedIn carousels, the platform’s version of a slideshow, help you visually and mentally engage your audience as they click through slides containing your key take-home messages 

Tapping into these options makes your repurposed content feel like a more natural, value-driven part of the LinkedIn community versus an out-of-context blog post dump.

3. Start strong with compelling headlines

You only have a split second to capture attention as visitors scroll through crowded feeds. An intriguing yet professional headline lures readers better than generically reusing your existing blog post title verbatim.

My go-to formula is:

Common frustration + teased solution

I name the problematic symptoms readers likely share and then hint at the details available in my full post.

4. Include a clear, actionable CTA

Every repurposed post should direct readers somewhere strategic once they reach the end. Don’t leave them without a recommended action.

Calls to action give repurposed content stickiness. Readers shouldn’t passively consume the post and then move on. They should engage further with your brand after reading.

Some CTA options include:

  • Visiting your website for related resources
  • Signing up to your email list
  • Messaging you on LinkedIn
  • Participating in a LinkedIn poll

One of my favorite CTAs is the simple and straightforward “check the first comment,” which encourages the reader to engage with the post if they wish to see the full article. 

Another reason I like this CTA is that, according to Buffer's research, posts that include links on LinkedIn have a much lower engagement rate than other formats (think video, images, and text). This is likely because LinkedIn wants its users to stay on their platform, which is an issue if you want to direct a consumer to one of your blog posts off LinkedIn. Putting your external link in the comments section and encouraging the reader to click it with the “check the first comment” CTA navigates this problem:

5. Use emojis strategically 

LinkedIn allows using emojis, but you must balance personality with professionalism.

I recommend:

  • Using one to two emojis max per post
  • Placing emojis only beside key points or calls to action

This prevents your post from seeming too informal yet makes it more scannable.

6. Cross-promote your content

If you reference, quote, or link to noteworthy industry accounts in your original blog article, be sure to tag them using @mentions in the LinkedIn version.

This exposes your content to their whole network. Then, their followers and connections see your post featured prominently in their feed since it includes someone they already follow.

Influencers self-promote, so proactively tagging them incentivizes sharing your post containing their name to spread their personal brand further.

Additionally, when you tag these influencers and industry accounts, consider reaching out to them with a thoughtful message about the post to cultivate that relationship

Carousels stand out brilliantly in crowded LinkedIn feeds, especially on mobile. Distill your post into key statistics, talking points, or visual assets shared horizontally. They’re also among LinkedIn’s best-performing types of content, per the Buffer data I mentioned earlier.

You can also use the final slide for your CTA, directing people to continue engaging on your site.

Carousels operate separately from link previews. Even if readers don’t click through to your full post, they still absorb core insights complete with intended messaging and branding.

Here's a cheat sheet summarizing tips for optimizing repurposed content:

Goal

Optimization Tactic

Grab attention

Adapt intro for professionals

Increase visibility

Use hashtags, mentions, articles, etc.

Make content scannable

Compelling headline, emojis by key points

Drive action

Clear call to action

Expand reach

Tag featured influencers

Improve consumption

Create eye-catching carousel

Optimizing your repurposed blog articles using these best practices massively elevates the likelihood of garnering strong engagement vs. blithely reposting something verbatim.

For example, at Aura, we created a quick and engaging carousel to tease the key ideas of the article we wanted to share, with the last slide containing the CTA “learn more” on the Aura blog:

8. Share refreshed content

Repurposing evergreen content allows you to refresh and update older posts with new examples, data points, recommendations, etc., while retaining the core value.

For instance, at Aura, we regularly share our blog posts on LinkedIn (and other social media channels) immediately following major updates, such as these posts we released about identity theft and the vulnerability of iPhones compared to Nokias

Best practices for posting repurposed content

You’ve carefully customized your selected blog posts for LinkedIn. Now, it's time to work on actively publishing to promote discovery and readership.

Here are three recommendations:

1. Post during optimal engagement windows

Pay attention to when your target audience tends to be most actively scrolling LinkedIn to pinpoint ideal times for sharing content.

Research suggests that between 8 a.m.-12 p.m., Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday are the best times to post on LinkedIn, as these times have the highest user engagement rates. Share thought leadership-style posts like repurposed blogs when professionals are proactively networking.

Every audience has different habits, though. Buffer’s Analytics feature helps you see an overview of what day, type of post, and frequency is best for each of your connected channels. 

2. Create an editorial calendar

Scheduling content in advance prevents scrambling to continually crank out social posts each day. 

Creating a content calendar helps you identify blog posts you want to repurpose and share over the next month and then plug them into an editorial calendar alongside other planned LinkedIn content.

Social media management tools like Buffer are perfect for saving your ideas, planning your content, and scheduling your posts. 

3. Commit to consistency 

Sporadic posts fail to establish authority. Professionals ignore profiles with lots of dormant periods indicating dubious expertise.

Research shows that accounts that post 20 times a month reach 60 percent of their target audience, but those that publish more than this, up to 80 times a month, will more reliably be seen by the people they’re trying to reach. 

Consistency, not quantity, matters most. Repurposing evergreen content makes managing a reliable posting cadence much more feasible in the long term vs. starting from scratch perpetually.

Maximize impact with strategic content repurposing

Content repurposing, especially of evergreen blog posts for LinkedIn, offers a strategic, hassle-free tactic for materially growing your reach and influence. Carefully selected existing content gets a second life in front of the platform's over 850 million member base. 

This drives brand discovery, site traffic, lead generation, and partnerships with minimal effort on your end. The next time you publish a hit article you want to continue capitalizing on beyond just blog readers, set aside 30 minutes to craft a customized LinkedIn version following the best practices outlined in this guide. 

Then, watch the repurposing ROI roll in for months to come! You expand your impact exponentially without continually crafting new content from scratch.

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