Repurpose Your Knowledge
Once upon a time, I would write and publish a blog post and then I would write and publish another blog post, and then another and so on until I had a lot of blog posts. It was a great deal of work, and not always rewarded. Some posts got attention, some didn’t, but in any case, a few days or weeks after they were written, they just sort of disappeared from the world.
I would often link to those older posts when someone asked me a question, but that was about it. I had this huge library of knowledge and it just . . . sat there.
One day, a friend mentioned a teaching opportunity she’d come across that she thought might suit me. I was interested, so I pulled together a lot of those old blog posts, freshened them up, and created a class. People liked it! They asked for more! I pulled together more blog posts, added new material, created another class, which people also liked.
How to Repurpose Content
This went on and on until I ended up running Club Ed, but that’s not the point of this story. The point is that you probably have a lot of knowledge sitting around on your hard drive, in emails you sent to colleagues and friends, on your website, that you could reuse in the way I’ve described above: freshening the content, adding a bit more material, shaping it in a new direction. This repurposing can help you market your business and it can help you earn more money.
It doesn’t have to be a class, of course, if that’s not your jam. It could be a book, or a series of white papers, or a subscription newsletter. The idea is that you should keep your ideas and your work circulating in various forms so that people who are looking for it can find it.
This doesn’t have to be another huge, burdensome to-do item. You can start small, with a report of a few pages. I typically save repurposing projects for when I have downtime. For example, Club Ed slows down in the summer, so that’s usually when I’ll work on these projects. You probably have similar times in your life when things are slower and you could spend some time creating a class or information product to sell (or to give away for marketing purposes).
