Tips to Repurpose Blog Posts Into Courses and Webinars

Your blog posts are a valuable marketing tool that can be used differently many times over to reach new audiences.

A great way to achieve that is to repurpose your existing blog posts into courses and webinars.

That way, your inbound marketing strategy gets a powerful new upgrade that you don’t have to develop from scratch. It is a very effective method for attracting customers.

Outgrow has reported that 20 to 40 percent of webinar attendees turn into qualified leads, with free online courses also acting as magnets for qualified leads.

In this blog post, we will share some tips on repurposing blog posts to create webinars and courses that excel at capturing attention and making lasting impressions.

Identify High-Performing Posts and Topic Clusters

Identify which of your blog posts performed the best and had a high engagement with your audience.

If a topic you’ve covered in a blog post had a lot of inbound traffic, make a course, or host a webinar event to address the topic.

There are 3 reasons why your strategy should start with your high-performing posts.

They help you identify possible topic clusters, i.e., the topics that readers often search for, instead of popular keywords.
The shares, comments, and views help you address your audience’s specific pain points and approach the topic again in more detail.
Blog analytics reveal the average time spent on pages, so you can tell how many people have read through the entire blog post and how you should present the content.

In short, your highest performing blog posts will give you the foundation for your webinar/course strategy.

After you’ve identified your top posts and topic clusters, you’re ready to work on the content.

Update the Data in Your Old Posts

A great learning experience relies on accurate and current data.

When you use the content of your old blog posts as a foundation for a new course, make sure to update the data as necessary.

Since industry trends change often, the content of your blog posts has to address the current state of the situation, industry, or topic.

When you’re reevaluating blog data, don’t focus only on the timestamp.

Instead, put in the effort to compare the data from your old posts to the current situation. Ask yourself such questions as:

What changes have occurred?
Is the topic still relevant in light of new data?
How does the data from old blogs relate to today’s state?

Imagine you’re planning an online course on eCommerce, and you’re repurposing your old posts and infographics from 2018 for it.

Know how to How to Make an effective Infographic in this guide from Visme

Since the digital industry has been affected by a variety of events since then, you’d have to update your blog posts with the latest data to be able to discuss developing trends in eCommerce.

Therefore, consult reliable sources and industry reports to get the latest data, and update your old blog posts so you can use them for your course.

Rewrite the Posts for a Course or Webinar Format

If you want to create a memorable webinar or course experience that can attract qualified leads, rewriting your blog posts is a must.

When you’re repurposing those posts to use in webinars or courses, they have to fit the new format.

The step-by-step format is most commonly used for online courses.

It achieves learning goals by teaching through a string of lessons that build on each other.

For this format to succeed, you have to:

Rewrite your blog posts to be shorter, concise, and readable as lessons.
Focus the data from the blog posts into infographics that are easy to scan
Rewrite the posts so that they have actionable takeaways with practical value

On the other hand, the webinar format is not based on a linear lesson progression, but on presenting insights found in your blog posts and educating your participants on the topic. Rewrite blog posts as coherent, well-organized references, with actionable takeaways that participants can easily follow as you present the topic.

Structure a Course Around a Topic

A well-written course structure is at the center of a great course experience.

A course structure is essentially a blueprint for the course.

If you haven’t worked out the fundamental outline, you won’t know how to integrate the content of your blog posts into the grand scheme of your course.

On a fundamental level, a course structure must explain:

The course goals and learning outcomes
The tools and learning materials that will be used
The learning progression of the course

When the course has a lot of blog content to cover, break the course structure into several smaller learning modules, each focusing on a different skill or goal.

The modules are then further divided to achieve bite-sized, 5-15 minute lessons that are easy to follow.

Knowing how to outline lessons is crucial when setting up learning modules to achieve an effective learning flow.

Structuring a course is a hard task, but know that your blog posts are already clusters of knowledge that you only need to repurpose into lessons.

Break Big Blog Posts Into Smaller Units

Webinars and courses offer a chance to discuss topics separately and cover more than in a typical blog post.

If your blog posts are big and cover multiple topics, break them into separate sections of the course or webinar, so you can expand on them and present them in more detail.

The major benefit of this tactic is that it allows you to address a specific issue or topic that a larger blog post has touched upon.

These are the steps you should follow:

Identify several topics that overlap in your blog post and separate them from the body
See which of your blog posts also discuss the same topic
Expand on the topic by adding new data and different angles

If you’re lost on which topics you should single out, the best place to find them is the comment section.

Your audience will usually be vocal about the parts of bigger blog posts they might disagree with, find interesting, or even enthusiastically agree with.

Use this opportunity to break multiple posts into smaller units you can cover in a webinar or turn into course lessons.

The Takeaway

The potential of webinars and courses for generating qualified leads is huge.

At first, it might seem that organizing learning experiences is difficult, but in reality, you’re already sitting on a mountain of valuable insights and lessons tucked away in your business blog.

The only step you need to take is to repurpose your blog posts, and with these tips, you should be well on your way.