When you write a blog post that resonates with your readers, don’t you wish could just press a button to repeat the magic? Good business writing is a challenge for most entrepreneurs, so it’s natural to want to replicate your writing success—and fast. While there’s no magic button to press, there are three simple ways to leverage your best writing ideas—and effectively double your content output, right away.
It all comes down to one little word with a big impact: Recycle. Recycling is the key to doubling your content output—and it should be a main component of your writing strategy. Every piece of content you create has the potential to turn into something different, new, and useful for your target readers.
When you recycle correctly, successful writing ideas can be repurposed time and time again. This means less legwork for you, and more content for your audience. It’s an efficient and effective way to turbocharge your idea-generation strategy: Without repeating yourself, you can use the same idea multiple times to maximize your writing production.
Here are three simple ways to double your content output by recycling:
- Turn audio into written content. Podcasts, teleconferences, and webinars are the perfect channels for repurposed content. The brilliant thing about audio is that it translates to an enormous amount of written content. Consider this: Just five minutes of audio is equal to a full page of written content—single-spaced. Use a freelancing site such as Upwork.com to find someone to transcribe your audio files. Once you have the content written down, the options for repurposing those ideas are virtually endless.
For example, I recently took a client’s hour-long teleconference and used it to create two 5,000-word e-books. I also could have easily created a 10,000-word print book, or turned the content into a series of 50 to 100 blog posts. With a little bit of editing, reorganizing, and revamping, audio content can be transformed into any type of written content at all: blog posts, magazine articles, e-books, e-book series, and print books.
(On the flip side, you can also easily turn written content into audio if your audience likes podcasts and webinars. It takes very little time to record yourself, and this is a great way to repurpose written content.) - Turn blog posts into e-books. If you blog regularly, you’re sitting on a treasure trove of reusable content. Even if your blog posts are short, they can still provide the essential framework for a successful e-book. The best way to turn blog posts into e-books is to start by researching your blog. Scan through all your content to find a strong common theme you want to focus on. Then identify five to 10 of your best posts in that category.
Once you’ve clarified the theme, copy and paste all relevant blog posts into a Word doc. Each blog post will be the basis for an entire chapter of your e-book. Don’t worry about specific chapter headlines until later. The key is to first lay out all the content together, and then begin to construct a cohesive e-book based on what you’ve written. (In the end, your e-book should be 3,000–6,000 words long, so plan accordingly.)
There are two main approaches to repurposed blog e-books—both are totally acceptable. First, you can keep each blog post as is, and do little to no rewriting. The second approach to repurposed blog e-books is to revamp, rewrite, and extend the blog content for each e-book chapter.
- Turn blog posts or e-books into print books. Little in this world is more exciting than publishing your own print book. We all secretly—or not so secretly—yearn to see our names emblazoned on the spine of a real, live book. Luckily, it’s never been easier to achieve this dream. Self-publishing platforms like Amazon CreateSpace have transformed, simplified, and streamlined the publishing process for independent authors.
The most efficient way to write a print book is to repurpose e-books or blog posts into one book for print. The overall process is quite simple: Choose a theme for your print book, and gather together all your e-books or blog posts that fulfill the theme. If you only have two e-books and a handful of blog posts relating to your theme, this will be a quick and easy procedure. However, if you have dozens of e-books and countless blog posts, it will require expert organization and a keen editorial eye.
The most important lesson to remember is that your print book must have a clear message. Don’t get bogged down by trying to include all of your “favorite” blog posts or e-books. Just because you love a piece of content, that doesn’t mean it fits into the print book you’re creating. Maybe it’s destined for your next print book. So be sure to edit yourself—and your content—with a clear eye on the prize. Aggregate a collection of writing that speaks directly to the theme of your print book, and nothing else.
What are three pieces of content that you can recycle into something else, right now?