We hear it all the time: “Content is King!” We are told we must have the content that reflects our values and expertise if we are to grow our businesses. But how do we find the time?
- Do you want to spend less time creating new content and more time finding new clients?
- Are you finding it really hard to find quality time to create quality content?
If you answered yes to either of these questions you may want to consider repurposing your content.
What does it mean to repurpose content? It means taking content you have used for one purpose, example a blog, and using it for another purpose, example course material.
Repurposing content helps you to share your work and expertise with a different audience. Some people prefer the written word, others prefer audio and still others absorb information best when it is on video. So by repurposing work across different mediums you satisfy more people and thus grow your following.
But the content must be evergreen; that is topical for a long period of time. A whitepaper that compares different desk top computers from 5 years ago is not topical. An instruction video that explains how to achieve value from networking is topical; its content will not significantly change over time.
Blogs Are Rich with Content to Repurpose
Blogs are full of valuable content that deserve a second and third life by being repurposed into something else.
Dissect your most recent blog into very small chunks of content to post to your favourite social media platforms with links back to the blog. This will reinforce your expertise to your followers and provide additional traffic to your blogs, without writing any additional content!
A favourite of ours is to write a series of blogs on a topic important to our ideal clients and followers that we later repurpose into a workbook that can be offered as a free value or as material to accompany a paid course. While we don’t have to rewrite the content we can add to the design and visual elements that increase the learnability of the content.
To reach a further audience we have selected some of our favourite blog topics and created very short audios. We call them the 2 Minute Tips; a way to learn something new in a minimum amount of time; very valuable to some people. You can find these on our website under Free Resources; www.yourplanningpartners.com.
Like many business owners we knew we had a book in us! The challenge that kept stopping us was the enormity of the task. Then we had the ‘aha’ moment. We spent time creating the structure and topics for the book and over a year started writing blogs on all the topics. You guessed it. The time came when we had the book content written and now they just needed editing and tweaking. Our book the Balanced Business Wheel was born by repurposing our blog content.
Tools of Your Trade
We work with small business owners to help them grow their business into a strong and sustainable entity. Over the years we have created tools to help our clients achieve this end. For example, we created a process and checklist to help our clients bring the right people onto their team. This tool was repurposed into a number of blogs and I am sure it will be further repurposed into something else.
Take a good hard look at some of the tools you have created for your practice. Which ones could become the subject of a blog or be used in a course? Keep in mind you are not giving away your intellectual property. You are further proving your expertise and knowledge. You are building your fan base.
So sit down with your favourite beverage and list all the tools you have in your program and identify which ones you want to repurpose. These tools might be processes, questionnaires, checklists, articles all aimed at helping your clients achieve the results they want. You will be surprised how long the list is!
Webinars Are an Excellent Source for Repurposed Content
If you do webinars read on. If you don’t do webinars read on so you can see their ongoing value.
Clarification; I mean recorded webinars. The result is a video of the webinar that can be used for many other things. A reminder; the reason we want to repurpose is because we want to expand our followers and some people much prefer video over the written word.
You repurpose the video into many things:
- Video clips for social media
- Video tutorials on how to use specific tools. We have done this with our business development tool called Top 20, which was part of one of our webinars.
- Video blogs
- Videos for your website
- Videos for online courses
To effectively repurpose webinar recordings you need to edit the recordings into smaller chunks. To do this you have two options. Find someone to do it for you or do it yourself. If you don’t want to do it then you can find someone by asking around and/or searching Upworks.
If you want to edit videos yourself here are three different softwares we recommend:
- If you are PC user – Windows Movie Maker. It’s free.
- If you are a Mac user – iMovie. It’s also free.
- Photoshop Premier Elements. This is the software we use. It’s priced around $145 at Staples and you can buy it bundled with Photoshop Elements ($215) if you want to also edit photographs.
Keep in mind there are numerous video editing softwares available. These are the three we are most familiar with.
Repurposing content is only as restrictive as your creativity. We created a series of blogs to help small business owners understand their financial statements. We then took those blogs and turned them into a workbook called the Three Pillars of Financial Management™. Its third lease on life became a webinar. All three of these still exist and are still available, each one attracting a different following.
This blog does not attempt to cover every possible repurposing strategy. If you have any questions or comments on the content of this blog, and/or you have an example of repurposing you would like to share then please don’t hesitate to be in touch with me; nick@yourplanningpartners.com.
Happy repurposing!
Nick Hughes is cofounder of Your Planning Partners Ltd, a company that works hand in hand with small business owners to help them grow their businesses. He and his partner Judi Hughes owned a number of successful companies before launching Your Planning Partners
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