One of the things that will impact your life as a solopreneur is learning to re-purpose your content, allowing you to do the work once and use it over and over again. There’s only one of you but you can use all your content several times, in different ways and on different platforms.
The more content you have in circulation, leading back to your offerings, the more customers will find you and purchase those offerings. You won’t be surprised to find out that this post is re-purposed content! It’s an excerpt from my ebook The Savvy Solopreneur’s Guide to Content Creation, which is on sale right now for just 99 cents. Check out the ebook here.
Disclosure: Links in this post (and anywhere on The Savvy Solopreneur) may be affiliate links. Find out what that means here.
How To Re-purpose your content: 15 ideas
Turn your blog into a book
My first two Kindle books were simply all the information I’d built up over three years of blogging, adapted and repackaged into book form. I happened to be closing down my blog and didn’t want to waste the work I’d done, but you can use posts from your live blog to produce a book, or even write your whole blog (or a series of themed posts) with the intent of re-purposing the content as a book, so you’d write each post as a new ‘chapter’. There’s some great advice on this at HowToBlogABook.com.
Turn your book into blog posts
You can use a chapter from your book (adapted if necessary) as the blog post that announces your book, and pull out relevant chapters to post on your blog if they fit in with your content calendar. I’m doing that right now. This blog post is adapted from my ebook The Savvy Solopreneur’s Guide To Content Creation.
Remember that (at the time of writing) if your book is available through KDP Select, you can’t post more than 10 per cent of it online. Check current restrictions if your book is available via KDP Select or other programs that restrict online distribution.
Turn your book chapters into guest blog posts
When pitching other bloggers with guest posts (especially if you’re doing a book tour to promote your book) offer excerpts from your book as a possible guest post.
Turn a set of themed blog posts into a short report
Giving away reports to your readers and subscribers is a great way to add value. Re-purposing a set of posts into a report presents a big chunk of useful information on a topic in an easy-to-access way.
Turn a report into blog posts
If you’ve written a report (or bought a PLR report) you may be able to break it down and post excerpts on your blog, with a link to where readers can buy (or download for free) the report.
Turn a long article into a report, how-to guide or PDF to give away
When you create long, super-useful pillar content (such as resource guides, checklists or a detailed step-by-step how-to post) consider saving the whole article as a PDF. You can give it to readers and subscribers as a gift, or upload it to document sharing sites. Make sure you brand it with your website address, as a PDF may get passed around by email, or even physically printed and shared at a workshop or as part of a training course, especially if you state that you allow it to be used in this way.
Turn an article into a video
Simply read your article to camera (or webcam). Post the video on YouTube and other video sharing sites. Brand it with your web url.
Turn an article or blog post into a slideshow
Take the text or main points of a post or article and copy to a Powerpoint presentation. Add a few illustrations (perhaps the ones you used in the post) and brand it with your url at the end. Upload to slideshare.net and encourage others to share on social media or by embedding on their blog or site.
Slideshare make this very easy by generating an embed code when you upload.
Turn quotes from your book into a blog post
Pull out ten, twenty or fifty favorite quotes from your book and post them on your blog, with the title and book cover and a link to buy the book at the end.
Turn quotes from your book into images
You can do this for free using a site like Canva.com. You can post your images in the above blog post, create a post around each quote, using the image as an illustration, or post the images on social media, especially image-based sites like Pinterest, but also on Twitter and Facebook. Add your website address or the name of your book to the bottom of the images.
Turn those images into a slideshow or book trailer
Post it on YouTube, Slideshare, your Amazon author page and your blog.
Turn a video, or audio interview, into a blog post or article
You can hire a transcriptionist to do this, or have your videos transcribed on SpeechPad.com for a cost of about a dollar a minute.
Turn a webinar or podcast into a book/ebook
If you produce webinars or podcasts, it’s simply a case of having them transcribed and then editing for clarity.
Turn a book into an audiobook
You can do this by reading it yourself or by using ACX, which is part of Audible.com. Both options offer a way to convert books to audio (usually an expensive process because of hiring voice talent) without any upfront costs. If you use ACX there is an option to hire a narrator with no upfront payment and split the royalties on your audiobook. If you narrate your book yourself, you also avoid having to pay a narrator.
Here are two excellent blog posts that give you an overview of the two different options.
How To Make an Audiobook Using ACX
How To Read Your Own Audiobook and Sell Direct to Customers
This is just a partial list of how to re-purpose your content. Once you start you’ll come up with more and more ways. Always be honest with your readers. State that this book is based on that webinar, or this blog post is an excerpt of that book. This is a way of promoting your other content, as well as making sure readers and customers know what they’re getting. You can simply say something like this:
The above is an excerpt from The Savvy Solopreneur’s Guide to Content Creation.
See what I did there?
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Thanks for including my piece on making audiobooks!
No problem, Roz. Thanks for the article. It gives such a great overview of how to use ACX. Everything any author could need to know to get their first audiobook out!
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Welcome Jimmy. I’m getting a lot of StumbleUpon visitors at the moment. Great that one of you took the time to introduce yourself. 🙂
This is great – we have often taken our video recordings, gotten them transcribed and turned them into PDF courses, which have then become email courses.
This is a good, exhaustive list – thank you!
Hi Neil. Yep, video recordings are so easy to re-purpose. Not everyone realizes this but you can easily download a MP4 file of your Youtube videos, which is a particularly useful format if you’re going to have them transcribed. Glad you enjoyed the list.
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