How many ways are you using your content?
SHAKING THE TREE #43
There are certain people who only write articles.
There are other people who only make videos.
Then there are those who only record podcasts.
And if you want to stay where you are, helping only the people you're helping, that's OK (mental note to self: start that podcast you’ve been planning for longer than I care to recall).
But have you ever wondered if it's wise to focus on just one kind of content at the expense of reaching other people by doing something different?
If you're only creating one kind of content, aren't you reaching fewer people than you could be? And aren't you helping fewer people?
And could that mean you're also missing out on building your list of subscribers?
This isn't a sales pitch for an offer—it's a reminder.
Rather than reaching more people by spending money on advertising, or by spending more time creating content, why not make better use of the content you already have by repurposing it across more distribution channels?
Why do all that research and put in all that time on an article or on a video or a podcast not to use its content again somewhere else?
Why not turn that article into a video, or into a podcast?
Why not turn that video into a podcast or a slide show, or into a series of social media posts?
Why not make that podcast into a video and into an article?
If you're licensing other people's content through private label rights, why just republish that material as it is?
While it's easier to republish a 500 word PLR article as it is, before you republish it as it is, copy and paste a sentence or two into Google and place quotation marks around it: "like this". Then carry out your search.
If the search results return dozens or even hundreds of identical entries, your PLR content won't do you much good because other people are republishing the same stuff.
As with reusing content in other ways, the secret to success with PLR then lies in making it your own, lies in making it different.
Let’s look at some of the ways you can repurpose your content.
Webinars
If you host a webinar, consider getting it transcribed so you can then offer the transcription to the people who signed up to view the webinar as a PDF.
If your webinar uses very few visuals, you could easily turn your content into a podcast.
With a few charts, graphs, and illustrations, your transcript can easily become an ebook, a series of social media or blog posts, or a case study of some kind.
You could even repackage your webinar as a video and share it on Vimeo, YouTube, Facebook, MetaCafe, PhotoBucket, SmugMug, Viddler, and Vidyard.
Slides, infographics, and images
If you've created images for a non-talking head video of any kind, you probably already have enough slides to create a stand alone slideshow you can easily upload to slideshare.net.
You can make slides for presentations in Keynote or PowerPoint. Or you could use any of the online slide making apps like Canva, PromoRepublic, Prezi, or Google Slides.
You could use your slides as the basis for a book, or a series of social media posts, or perhaps for a blog or an article.
Anything you create about a topic can be used again in image form, and remember, because Google ranks and indexes images, each individual image as a JPEG or a PNG can help with your site visibility.
The best way to avoid any kind of copyright issues with images is either use public domain images or to create your own.
If you're using your own photographs, you own the copyright and you can do with them what you like.
If you're using images you've bought from an online image library, be sure to read the license rules for your images before you share them. Sometimes, extra image use may require an extended license. Be sure to read the fine print before you buy.
You might want to turn images you're using inside a report into a meme, or into additional slides by adding text overlays in Canva.
If you have lots of data you want to communicate and if you have access to InDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop, you could create a range of infographics.
The great thing about each point on your infographic is that with a few extra images and perhaps a bulleted or numbered list, it can become a separate blog post or article in its own right.
Combined with images and soundbites from your articles, you can easily combine all this information into a book or magazine. You can also use infographics as the basis for a webinar or even a podcast.
Articles, blog posts, and … more podcasts
Whenever you write an article or a blog post, whenever you write a longer than average post on LinkedIn or on Facebook, or whenever you buy a piece of content with private label rights, you have a great opportunity to tweak things and to recreate it.
A series of short blog posts can be combined into a longer article, or into an ebook or a special report. A long article or special report can be broken up into emails, or into shorter blog posts or into a series of related emails.
If you have an article that includes a series of bulleted or numbered lists, each one of those points can become a slide in a specific slide show or a set of social media posts. You could turn slide sets into a video. Your bulleted lists can become a podcast. Or they could be reshaped into a series of emails.
If you think things through and get your distribution channels set up ahead of time, every one of your articles and blog posts can become a piece of extra content.
If you think a stand alone podcast is limited in what you else you can do with it, you might want to rethink things.
By having your podcasts transcribed, cleaned up a little, and expanded with a few extra examples or anecdotes, you’ll find you have plenty of material for case studies, social media posts, blog posts, and articles.
Live video and live events
While I've yet to do anything with Facebook Live, I'm thrilled to discover that once you've done a Facebook Live event, you can download it and—without the need for any extra editing—put straight onto YouTube as it is.
With a little bit of effort you can also transcribe it.
Once you've got the transcription, that text format can be used in any number of ways, from articles and blog posts, to ebooks and special reports.
Anytime you do a live event, if you get permission to video and record everyone you can use that information and transform it into new content you can use as a lead magnet.
If it's your event, you might even want to sell the recordings to the attendees or to those who couldn't attend in person.
The bottom line here is that there's really no reason why one piece of content can't be turned into other pieces of content. Your followers all consumer content in different ways, so why not offer them a way to consume your content that works best for them?
With a little thought, effort, and planning your material can reach a wider community and do you a lot of good in terms of building trust and expanding your reach.
The key lies in your willingness to experiment. What are you waiting for? get out there and start repurposing!
As always, thanks for reading.
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P.S. Next time on Shaking the Tree … 5 questions to help you stand out