A topic near and dear to my heart, as Denise knows. 😉

A couple of notes/questions.

1. It does seem like people often confuse content repurposing with content syndication, doesn’t it?

Content syndication is pure content republishing on other sites.

Content repurposing is a completely different animal: adapting, reinventing, reimagining content for a different audience on a different platform.

For instance, turning a post into a video for those folks who wouldn’t read a post, but would be happy to watch a video recap.

Seems like you are mostly talking about content syndication in this post, since that’s the only reason duplicate content issue (never a penalty, right?) might come up.

That brings me to a question/food for thought of sorts.

2. Let’s face it, most website don’t stand a chance of ranking for much on the first page of Google.

Repurposing their content just might be their ONLY chance to make it on Google, considering they are publishing their repurposed content on sites with much higher authority than theirs.

With that in mind… to say that you become your own competition is true in some way with one major difference:

– with your own website, you ARE in the race, but don’t stand a chance to get ahead of the pack – more likely to end up one of the last ones to cross the finish line.

– riding on coattails of high-trafficked third-party sites, you actually DO stand a chance to get your repurposed content ranked. Drive traffic to that repurposed content (I call it ‘recontent’ for short), then through a strong CTA (a MUST), channel that traffic back to your website.

That way you’ll at least end up with SOME search engine traffic vs no traffic at all.

What do you think, Ann and Denise?