As a Relaxed Marketer, my goal is to do things the easy way. I don’t want to spend hours doing a task if I can do it just minutes. I want to do things the smart way, so that I can spend more time doing other things. So if there is a way to spend less time on a task, you bet I’m going to do it. Repurposing is the key.
Last week, I spent about an hour and a half on two different mornings creating videos. I went from one idea to the next recording them. On the second morning, one of them was on “Batching Tasks.”
Well, I really love that idea. I do it all of the time. In fact I had been batching creating videos when I created that video. I ended up creating 10 usable videos (Please don’t ask me how many I had to stop in the middle of and delete!!!) all at the same time that morning. It was a great way to get more done in less time, and made me feel very productive.
After I finished creating the videos, I wanted to go through and watch them so I could see which ones were good enough to post. While I was watching the batching posts video I got excited. Like I said, I REALLY love that idea. So I decided to write a blog post about it. Not the next day. Not later that day. But right away.
In fact, I hadn’t even put my video equipment away, but I HAD to get my ideas out. I went over to my laptop and opened up a new post. Since I had finished talking about batching minutes before, I knew exactly what I wanted to say.
Was it exactly the same as my video? No. I will admit that I would have saved even more time if it was. If I had pretty much written a transcript of my video, I would have been finished with the blog post in under 10 minutes. But as often happens when you’re interested in something, as I wrote the post about batching tasks, I had a lot more to say. So I spent some time writing down everything that I wanted to.
That’s how it ended up taking about 20 minutes to write the post. But if I had started a post from scratch at that time, I can tell you that it would have taken me so much longer to get a post written.
But even adding all of the extra things in that I wanted to, it still saved me a lot of time. Talk about repurposing!
What is Repurposing?
You may have heard the term repurposing before, but what does it mean when doing things within your business? Repurposing is when you take something, and use it for something else. So when it comes to your business, it could be taking a video and turning it into a blog post. Or taking a video and turning it into an audio. Or taking a bunch of blog posts and turning it into a book. There are a million different ways you can repurpose content.
Why Repurpose?
Going back to the blog post that I created, that means that in under a half of an hour, I got a video and blog post done. How awesome is that? It didn’t take much extra time to get content out in another form once I had finished the first one.
Repurposing saves time. If I had started a blog post from scratch, it would have probably taken me over an hour to write it, if not more (depending on the topic.) But this blog post took hardly any time at all. Why start something from scratch if you already have a lot of the work done?
This is where you might wonder if people will be upset if they see the same (or very similar) content in multiple places. Here’s the key: Will everyone see both? Of course not. Some people will be browsing on YouTube and will come across my video. Others will be on my blog and see it and want to read it. Some others might see a link on Twitter and end up reading the blog post. But that’s the whole point!
Most people won’t even realize that I have very similar content in both a blog post and a video. They’ll see one of them, and hopefully like it. They’ll never come across the other version. If they do somehow come across both versions, it will reinforce my ideas. The first time they might have said to themselves that yes, they should probably batch tasks, but most likely they’ll forget about it. If they see it again, it will remind them and they might actually start to batch their tasks. In fact, there’s a good chance they won’t even notice that they saw the content before. You definitely don’t need to feel bad about having similar content posted in different ways.
People enjoy taking in media in different ways. For example, I love to read. I read a lot of content online. When I see a video that sounds interesting, I’ll usually save it somewhere. But I rarely come back to watch it, because I’m not someone who enjoys watching videos to learn. Other people prefer to watch videos, or listen to audios. The more ways you offer your content, the more opportunities you have for people to consume your content.
Plus, unless you’re someone who is very well known, do you really think someone will always come find you to consume your content? This way you have more chances for someone to find you and your content. One person might be on Twitter, and see a link to your blog. Another person might be on Facebook and see a link to a video you did. Yet another person might be looking for a podcast and might come across your content there. Having all of these different types of content will allow more people to find you, and hopefully like your content and want to consume more of it.
Does the Content Have to be Exactly the Same?
No. You don’t have to have a transcription of your video or podcast to create it as a blog post. (But you can if you want to, and it will take you very little time to do it!) If you want, you can make changes while you’re doing it too. That’s what I ended up doing when I wrote my blog post. I had a bunch of other thoughts that I wanted to include, so I did. There’s nothing wrong with that at all. It didn’t take too much time for me to add, and now if someone does come across both the blog post and the video, they’ll learn slightly different things. But again, even if it’s the same content, it isn’t an issue. Your audience either won’t come across multiple versions of your content, or won’t realize they did.
Whenever you create a piece of content, you should ask yourself a question. What else can I do with this awesome content? If you spent time on it and like what you had to say, spend time figuring out how else you can share this content. What else can you do so that more people will get to hear what you have to say? Repurposing not only helps you, but allows others to learn something that they wouldn’t have otherwise.
Enjoy,
