Do you feel like there’s just too much stuff to create? In today’s really flooded and busy online business space it can be totally overwhelming to try and keep up with all of the content that you’re supposed to create on top of your regular business activities.
So for example, if you’re a coach and you have one on one client facing work but you also do a lot of content marketing: blog posts and newsletters and social media. It can feel like a lot of separate bits of content that you need to be creating in addition to your regular client facing work.
In this blog we are going to be talking cutting through that overwhelm by creating one core piece of content that gets repurposed through different channels.
What is a “Core Piece of Content”?
A core piece of content Is kind of like homebase from which you can pull out other bits of content. It’s chunky it has some weight to it. It’s quite in depth but doesn’t mean that it has to be a 50,000 word book. It might be a 1,000 word blog post, for example. It really depends on who you are and what kind of content you are used to creating.
What is a “Content Stream”?
A content stream is a blog or a newsletter or a podcast or social media Facebook or Instagram etc. and with content marketing it can feel really overwhelming when you’re looking at having separate pieces of content for every single one of these various content streams. Instead, I recommend we embrace wholeheartedly the idea of repurposing.
Repurposing your Core Content into Content Streams
What does that look like? Let’s get into some concrete examples.
Say for example that you really like writing chunky blog posts. Once you get into it, you might write say 700 words on a topic. Instead of them coming up with new Facebook posts for Instagram posts or whatever you can actually use your blog post to create those various different pieces of social media.
For example, you might turn a quote from the blogpost into an image for social media and post that on Facebook or Instagram or Twitter.
Or you might create a series of photos that you want to take or have taken based on the topic of your blog post. So for example, if your blog post is about self-care you might create a series of images that showcase the way in which you practice self care daily and share those on your social media.
You might also use your blog post as a launchpad for some Facebook live videos.
The possibilities are endless.
How to implement this?
So, if this is something that you struggle with, there are a couple of action steps I’d like you to try.
STEP ONE is decide what your main piece of content is going to be and how frequently you want to create it – weekly, fortnightly, monthly.
How do you decide which piece of content is going to be your main piece? That will depend on two main factors: what you enjoy creating and what your audience enjoy consuming. Don’t worry if you don’t really know what your audience enjoys just yet, the key is to start creating and see what gets you results.
STEP TWO is after you’ve decided what your main piece of content will be, next you’re going to want to set aside the time to create it. Get out your calendar, diary, whatever, and schedule in time to create it.
While you can totally nail this in a couple of hours (depending on your content), I highly recommend you space it out over at least two sessions. Why? Fresh eyes. When I was a university student, I used to try and give myself at least a few days between drafts of assignments. So, if I finished a first draft, I’d let it sit without looking at it for a few days, before returning to it with fresh eyes. And I cannot tell you the difference that it made. I went from half-baked ideas to well-considered ideas. From sloppy structure to tight structure. That time and space between first creating and finalising was crucial.
Now, you don’t have to do that with every single piece of content you’re creating. I’m suggesting you do this with your core pieces of content. The stuff you’re going to want to repurpose into different formats, chop up and reuse again and again. We’re going to get the most mileage out of this content, especially for the amount of time you’ve invested in creating it.
STEP THREE is to actively see how much you can chop up, repurpose, and reuse your core piece of content.
So, now can you see how simply focusing in on one core piece of content can cut through the overwhelm and create some flow into your content marketing?
What did you think? Have you tried this system?
