Carving up your content. 10 simple ways to repurpose what you've written and recorded.

Recently, I was invited to be a guest presenter for an online entrepreneurial summit. Part way through the interview, the host said something to me that I have heard many, many times. After hearing about my daily responsibilities and the forms of content I'm producing, she asked, "How do you get all of this done?"

I had a very simple answer for her. "I repurpose everything."

I repurpose everything. Now when I say everything, I pretty much mean everything. I try to give every piece of content I'm creating a second life. It feels like poor stewardship to me to spend time and effort creating content only to let it linger in a file somewhere forgotten and unused.

My weekly workflow for Platform Launchers provides a great illustration of how this works. I love leading an online membership community, and frequently, people tell me they would like to do the same. But how enjoyable would it seem if I told you that my responsibilities each week include; hosting a live training session, writing fresh blog content, recording a podcast, creating a 60-minute video for the members-only training vault, creating a 15-minute video for YouTube, writing a chapter for my next book, and creating marketing materials to make new people aware that my membership community exists. Would that seem easy to you, or does that sound like too much work to be able to do that every single week?

While I don't consider what I'm doing "easy," I definitely consider it well within the range of being accomplished in a reasonable amount of time, especially when you carve up existing content so it can be repurposed in multiple ways. Here's an in-depth look at my workflow.

1. Write the blog post

The first thing I do each week for Platform Launchers is write a blog post. I have a list of topics that I want to write about for the next three months. When I finish that list, I'll use feedback from our Members' Club to help me decide what I should write about next.

My weekly blog post is roughly two pages long and single-spaced. Because I'm a fast writer, and because the topics I'm writing about are things I feel passionate about, it doesn't take me long to write the weekly post. Usually less than an hour.

2. Teach the Members' Club

Each week, I host live training for our Members' Club. That training is roughly 60-90 minutes, depending on the week. We start off our training calls by discussing our wins and celebrating the progress we're making on our individual platforms. Then the call transitions into about 15 minutes of teaching. My notes for the teaching portion of the call are taken from the blog post.

3. Create Videos

Our weekly training calls with the Members' Club are recorded. After the calls end, I immediately begin editing the videos. I create at least two videos. The first video I create is the 60-minute video with exclusive content and group discussion that gets uploaded into the members-only video vault. The second video is a 15-20 minute clip from the training portion of the call that I edit and upload to YouTube.

4. Create the Podcast

I record our weekly training calls with Zoom. After I download the raw video, I also download an audio file that I can use for the podcast. I delete the members-only content and polish up the teaching portion of the call. Then I add a pre-recorded intro. and outro. to the file and upload to my podcast host as this week's podcast episode.

5. Write the Newsletter

Now it's time to write the newsletter. To do that, I simply copy the first three paragraphs of the most recent blog post and paste them into an email. Under the third paragraph, I add a link that says "READ MORE..." If someone opens their email and clicks that link, they will be taken to the blog post on my website.

6. Post on Social Media

Once that's complete, I have several social media options I can utilize. Some weeks, I utilize them all. I can share a link to the blog post on my social accounts or I can simply share a quote from that week's content. I can also share a link to the YouTube video, or I can share a short clip from that video to multiple social platforms.

7. Use it for Marketing

The next thing I like to do is think about ways I can use recent content for additional marketing purposes. I often do this in two ways. Sometimes I'll take a video from the vault and use it as a lead magnet on the sales page of my website. I give the video away for free to visitors in exchange for them joining my email list.

I also like to take short clips of my videos and share those on my sales page. I find this to be a helpful tool for building rapport with site visitors. I'm giving them a chance to get to know me better as they hear me speak, watch me teach, and learn more about how I help people develop their platforms.

8. Turn it into a Course

If you're creating consistent video content, it isn't difficult to repackage that content into a course. On occasion, I will take several related training videos that I've made for our Members' Club, group them together, and sell them as a stand-alone course. For mini-courses, I usually charge about $50. For larger courses, I charge $200 or more.

9. Host a Webinar

From time to time, I use the content I have produced for our members to host webinars. I find these very enjoyable to do because they allow me to introduce the concepts that I'm teaching to a new audience and there isn't much preparation that's required from me ahead of time. I'm using content I've produced for my membership community and teaching it to new people in a new setting.

10. Write a Book

Most people say they would like to write a book before they die, but few people ever accomplish that goal. One of my favorite ways to produce book material is to take my most popular blog content, restructure it a little, update the formatting if needed, and present it in book form.

Many books are between 10-20 chapters long. If you're writing a new blog post each week for a year, you'll have 52 potential chapters that can be made from the content in your blog posts. What if you took your top blog posts each year and turned them into short ebooks or paperbacks? If you made a consistent habit of doing that, you could produce a new book every single year. And if you're prolific, you could produce several a year.

Now do you see what I'm doing?

So can you see how I'm going about doing all the things I'm doing? I know it sounds like a lot, but the secret to my efficiency is my knack for taking content and finding many different ways to share it. I carve it up and serve it in different and creative ways. I'm producing reading material for readers, audio episodes for listeners, and video content for viewers. Essentially, I'm taking one thing and sharing it as many ways as I can. Doing so gives my content a second life instead of letting it waste away in forgotten file folders, never to be accessed again.

-John