Reuse, recycle, reinvent

Nothing is more depressing than coming to write your regular blog or social media post and finding yourself thinking, ‘I have nothing new to say.’

Let me reassure you. It happens to everyone.

Let me reassure you even further – what you have to say does not need to be new! Why? Because it only needs to be new to your audience – and your audience is changing all the time.

Besides, do you retain 100% of everything you see, hear and read. And do you understand 100% of it on first contact?

Almost certainly not. And, if you don’t, neither does your audience. So why not present your content in a different way, to help them understand you better (and make your life easier at the same time).

Reuse – by playing with formats.

I do this all the time. I’m doing it now.  You are reading my blog – but this same content is also a live broadcast I did last week. People like to consume their content in different formats, so increase your reach by appealing to as many different audiences as possible.

It doesn’t always have to be from one form of dynamic content to another. You can take something dynamic and use it in your static content. For example, your 60-second networking pitches can make great videos for your website – either on your home page or on your product and services page.

Reuse isn’t ‘lazy’ or ‘cheating’ and it makes sure your message is constant across different channels (which is vital if you want customers to understand you).

Reduce – boiling things down into nuggets

The most obvious version of content reduction is to go from a blog to social media. Write an article and then, over the course of a few days or weeks, post half a dozen short posts picking out one point from your blog and linking people back to it.

For example, I could make a social media post from this blog which reads “Do you retain 100% of everything you read? If not, there is nothing wrong with reusing some of your content” with a link to the full blog. Then another one which says, “Your 60-second networking pitch makes a great video for your home page.”

There are lots of ways to do this. Can you take nuggets from your online training course? Or the user guide for the product?

It works from small-to-big as well – a series of blogs can sometimes make an e-book that you can offer your prospects. Or it can become a training course where you go into more depth.

Recycle – older content can always be used again

Suppose, a while back, you ran a workshop on mindfulness. It isn’t something you do now but all that content is perfect for recycling. There are four or five blogs that can easily be made out of that workshop. No one will ever know (or care) that this content had been used before.

And there is nothing wrong with looking at the blogs you wrote 18 months ago, sprucing them up, adding new images and running them again (take down the old version, though…). Your experience since the last time you wrote the blogs will really improve them.

Never be afraid to repeat your key message – every time you do, you touch a different person, or someone may notice it for the first time.

To get a better idea on how to generate great content ideas and turn them into working content for you, take a look at our online course Demystifying Content.