Get the Most Out of Your Work Through Content Repurposing

“Work Smarter, Not Harder”

Back in the late 1980s, I used to enjoy watching Ducktales in the afternoon after school. I remember a phrase that Scrooge McDuck would use all the time: “Work smarter, not harder.” 

That has really stuck with me through the years. And when it comes to marketing, it’s definitely a rule to live by. I’m sure you’ve noticed that marketing can have a large number of moving parts. The better you are at leveraging your efforts so that you can get a maximum gain out of minimum effort, the better off your business is going to be.

The last few articles have been all about content marketing. Today I want to talk about how to widen your marketing net through repurposing content.

Creating a Content Repurposing Strategy

I know, you’re probably tired of hearing me talk about the importance of creating a strategy before you begin. But I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to have a strong sense of direction from the very beginning. If you don’t have some sort of marketing strategy, all you’re really doing is throwing spaghetti against the wall and hoping that something sticks.

When it comes to content repurposing, your content itself is obviously going to follow your overall marketing strategy. (In case you missed it, I talked about that here) What I want to emphasize here is that you want to create content with the expectation that it is not going to be used in just one single place. 

Instead, you want to create content that works well everywhere. Think about this for a moment. Extremely visual content will work wonderfully on video, but how well will it transfer to a podcast? If you create content that is overly tailored to one medium, you may be eliminating the possibility of using it on a different platform.

Now let’s look at some practical ways you can leverage content repurposing.

Reformatting

Start with your favorite form of content. Let’s say it’s video. Once you’ve created great video content and uploaded it to YouTube or Vimeo, now, what can you do to recapture its value on different platforms?

One option might be to turn it into a podcast. Heather created a quick tutorial for the Get Leads & Clients program to help them extract the audio from their videos. Then you just have to add your podcast introduction and upload it to your podcast as an episode.

Another option is to turn it into a blog article. Once you have stripped the audio, you can upload that to rev.com and get a transcript. Of course, you will have to go over it to make sure that it has transcribed the audio correctly, but that’s a lot easier than creating a new blog article from scratch.

Video, audio, and text covers your three major bases and you’ve done that by simply reformatting from one to another.

Splintering

Have you ever started to create a piece of content with an expectation that it was going to only be so long, but then it grew into a monster? If you find yourself doing that, don’t stop. Keep working on it. You don’t need to scrap it and start over so that you can get something that’s more manageable. Instead, you can just break it up into smaller pieces that become their own separate installments.

Of course, this is absolutely perfect when you think of a monthly theme. Basically, each month is its own topic with splintered content.

Alternatively, you could do a series with several parts. Plus, if you do a series with a bunch of parts, each one of those could become its own chapter in a larger ebook. That, of course, brings us back to repurposing content.

Combining

Actually, the ebook I just mentioned is also a good example of how you might combine content. In that case, you have multiple installments on your blog which you combine into one nicely formatted ebook.

If you have a series of videos, you could sell courses. Simply take relevant videos and put them together in a series, and then sell them as an online course. You can add bonus value to the course by turning somewhat related material into supplemental PDFs.

Let’s Talk About Planning in Advance Again

As you can see, with all of the different things you can do to repurpose content for your business, it’s so much better for you if you think everything through in advance. When you plan your monthly themes, look at each installment like being a separate chapter in an ebook, so that when you write it it will transfer easily to becoming an ebook. Select your topics for different installments so that you can cover all the bases for a much larger e-course. This way, when you’re ready to put your course together, you know exactly where all your pre-made content is. And, it has been intentionally created to dovetail nicely into your predetermined package.

Of course, planning everything out in advance can become a bit complicated. So, I recommend you find a way to keep it all organized.

If you haven’t already, I strongly recommend checking out Heather’s 5-Minute Marketing Planner. It can be a huge help as you plan out your content with an eye toward content repurposing. But, it’s also much, much more than that.