You can spend hours creating webinars, and then it seems like they’re done so quickly. All of the time that it took you to line up speakers, tweak presentations, and promote an event is over before you know it. As a webinar is a sizable investment, it should do far more than generate a couple leads. Re-purposing a webinar correctly is one of the greatest assets for long-term lead generation. Learning how to extend the life and reach of your webinar content helps you streamline your content creation time and maximize the scope of the content that you work so hard to develop and publish.

Maximize multimedia use

While many people don’t want to take the time to watch an hour long webinar recording, it doesn’t mean that they don’t have any interest in the content. Think about developing a three- to five-minute long highlight reel that details the webinar’s key points. If you write a blog post or article about one of the topics that you cover in the webinar, include a link to the portion of the webinar that covers the same topic. Uploading these videos on YouTube is a great way to encourage cross-promotion, as users are likely to arrive at your YouTube channel via social media, email, or a blog.

Create a transcript

Search engines cannot process an audio format. Adding long-tail keywords to the title and meta-data will improve the webinar search results, but a search-optimized transcript is even more effective for generating long-term search engine traffic. The most affordable way to do this is upload your webinar to YouTube and add captions. You can also hire a service that will transcribe the webinar for you, often at a very reasonable cost.

Get rid of or add a sales pitch

Direct marketing and content marketing don’t always use the same tools and mindset. However, it is still possible to convert a direct marketing approach into a relevant, meaningful message and vice versa. If you have a webinar about the benefits of a specific service that is separate from the service itself, you can turn some of that content into a pitch for the service. This can be particularly beneficial for a product or service with a hard sell.

Hyperlink to older content

Any time you write a new blog post or article or develop a new video, look for opportunities to place organic links. Hyperlinks to older content are a great way to extend its lifespan while keeping readers engaged. Make sure to link to relevant content and to limit the number of hyperlinks in a single post or video. You don’t want to distract readers from the content at hand or encourage excessive bouncing.

The next time you start planning a webinar, don’t wait until it’s all over to begin re-purposing content. The re-purposed content should be part of the comprehensive plan right from the start. As you work on each aspect of the webinar, think about options for blog posts, articles, videos, press releases, and email campaigns. Write down these ideas as they come to you. The more ideas that you generate during the creation process of the webinar, the more that you’ll be able to do with the webinar over the six months following its release.