Make Money Online

I’ve recently in the last year become a big, big fan of the idea of repurposing content. I originally was really opposed to it, thinking that if I write an article It should only stay as an article. But after talking with some really intelligent people, after reading some articles that Sean DeSouza has put out, I’ve switched tracks and I’ve realized the value to a customer or a client isn’t, I made this thing, it’s a one-off thing for you. It’s Here’s a thing that will help you solve a problem. And if I’m able to repackage existing content I have, articles, interviews, e-books, chapters, sort of sawdust from other client reports. Into something that solves a customer or a client’s problem, that’s where the value really is in the packaging and the delivering of it. So I’ve moved more and more towards Reusing content and reusing content in different forms. If I record a podcast, I’m starting a workflow where I’ll have a transcription service make a transcript for it. So now I could offer people the transcript. But then I’ll read through the transcript and say, like, well, what are the main ideas in here? And turn a couple into articles. And then I’ll turn those articles into content upgrades or bonuses for my book. So I’m viewing it as a one-to-many relationship between initial piece of content and the ways I could distribute the content. How about you?

What I found is most useful is, in my practice at least, It’s a process of looking at the content and figuring out how and where I could split off pieces of it. I’ve been of the mind shift, and this is only a recent mind shift in the last month or so. That I look at something like my book Podcast Outreach, and I view it as a singular thing. It is a book. It is a book-shaped object. I could distribute it as a book. But the truth is, it’s 13 chapters, and each chapter has different sections in it. And I could chip off any single piece of that. and provide value to my audience or readers or subscribers or clients. Like I have a section in there on how to do outreach or how to write good emails. If I’m on a podcast talking about how to write good emails, well, I could chip off half of that chapter and be like, hey, here’s a bonus for you. Like, here’s 1500 words I wrote about how to write great emails. So I think part of it is looking at content you produce. And starting to view it as individual pieces and then saying, well, how can I leverage these individual pieces? Another great example is with podcast outreach. I’ve recorded 15 different expert interviews with folks like Brennan Dunn and Bryce Bladen from Clients from Hell and Joanna Weavy. And I’m looking at those and saying, well, these are great. This is great content. They’re great interviews. How could I better distribute these to people? And so I’m starting to think about: well, great, I want a transcript for every single one of these. I want to make them available to people to read on my website or view on my website. I want to have them out there as content upgrades. So if I write a post about, you know, Calls to action. Well, I could have Joanna’s video as like a content upgrade for the call to action there. So I think one mind shift that’s really necessary is Looking at the content you’re producing and not thinking of it as a singular piece of content that could only be used once, but instead viewing it as Different answers to questions people in your audience are asking. And as you identify those questions out in the wild, figuring out, oh, I could chip off this piece. And make it available here.

I just started working with a copy editor for the first time in my life, and it is seriously one of the best investments I have ever made because, exactly like you said, they aren’t changing my argument. They aren’t changing the structure of what I’m saying. They’re making sure I’m using correct grammar. They’re making sure that my sentences read correctly. And I read through my copy editor’s revisions. She’s editing podcast outreach right now. And I’m like, oh man, like, you aren’t changing what I’m saying. You’re just making it so I don’t look like I wrote this at 2 a. m. while I was tired, which I happen to have done. So. Yeah, a copy editor like that is such a wonderful investment. So helpful.

On the idea of sort of turning larger pieces of content or larger things into smaller pieces, I think it jumps back to an idea of, like you mentioned, Having strong positioning when you understand the target market you’re trying to reach, when you understand the expensive problems they are experiencing. It’s a lot easier for you to say, like, oh, I see how this singular podcast episode can be used in a number of different ways, or how this Article I wrote can be used in a number of different ways because you could package it up in different ways. You could distribute it at different times. You could have it as a content upgrade. You could have it as a bonus on your list. You could have it as something that you share for clients once they cross the payment threshold. And it’s only by recognizing that, huh, this article can actually take a ton of different forms: be it an article on my site, a beautiful document that I can make available to them, a spoken word transcript. That you realize, wow, the value isn’t just in creating the thing, the value is in making the thing available to people at the moment they most need it.

Whenever I get that pushback from people, and I get that pushback a lot, since I often consult on ways to improve an information product. And people are like, I can’t reuse that article. People have already read it. And I’m like, listen, you have 45 articles on your site. Your archives go back eight pages. Your average bounce rate or your average pages viewed on your site is three. So the average person reading your site has read three pages. Are they going to go six pages back in the archive to find the singular article? No. Jam it into your mailing list. Make it available for everybody that subscribes. The worst case scenario is somebody is so engaged enough that they write you back and say, Oh, I read this on your blog. You also sent it out on your mailing list. And your response to that is, I hope you enjoyed the article.

No, and you’re absolutely right. You’re able to package it in so many different ways. And somebody who buys an e-book or a product of yours and is saying Well, great. You know, I need a template for one. One great example is a template for reaching out to people to be on their podcast. Well, I’ve published that in two different forms on my blog, but I also repurposed that in my book. And nobody’s complained about it because at the point when I’m like, You need a template to reach out to podcasts. Hey, here’s the template you can use to reach out to podcasts that I use myself every single week. They’re like, oh, perfect. You identified the problem. You provided me a solution. Nobody’s going to say, oh, I also read that same template on your website. Please give me a new template. They’re going to say, you provided the value right when I needed it. Thank you so much.

But to somebody, but I’ll take the opposite point and say, to somebody who has not been exposed to a large range of his works, and we’ve both read multiple books of his. Who picks up million dollar coaching, it’s going to be like, oh man, this is answering all the questions I had, even though there’s an overlap between how to be a million-dollar consultant and how to be a million-dollar coach, and there’s reused content there. It still provides value. We just, by virtue of having read multiple books of his, more easily pick up on that.

Yep. I’m guessing his thought was: okay, this is, these are the questions people are going to have, are going to be asking about being a million-dollar coach. I happen to have already written the answers. I’m going to reuse those answers because why reinvent the wheel? One example coming down the pipeline for me is After I launch podcast outreach, I’m going to start work on a book about guest article outreach and how to land guest articles as a writer. I know one of those sections is going to be like writing effective emails. Like, how do you write an email that gets a response from somebody? I’ve already written that twice in the Outreach Blueprint and in Podcast Outreach. So, I’m going to wholesale like drag and drop across the content, edit it a bit, but it’s going to be 90% the same. I’m not afraid of that because it’s going to provide the same amount of value to somebody who picks up the book and says, I need to understand how to send an email to an editor and pitch a guest article. Cool, this is how you do it. If you’ve read podcast outreach, you’ll be like, huh, this is 90% the same. Well, that’s because it’s 90% the same process. There’s no need for me as the author to You know, say, I have to throw it all away and start over, base principles, build it all up again. Instead, I’m able to say, okay, I happen to have answered this question before. Answering this question again is valuable in this context. I’m going to reuse that content. And I think. Amy Hoy in 30 by 500 talks a little about this. They have a process called fix storming, where you identify all the possible solutions available to A customer or a person experiencing a problem that you’ve identified that you want to solve as a product creator. And I think going through that exercise, you realize: wow. The same solution can be made available in different formats and provide a lot of value. We, like right now, we’re recording a podcast about, you know, high-level about being consultants and making money online. Any of these topics can also be articles or videos or worksheets. Like, here’s a one-page checklist to reusing your content. And it doesn’t do a disservice to any of the other forms of content by identifying the different shapes it could take. It just provides more opportunities for our audience, for readers, for subscribers to engage in the medium that they prefer.

Yeah, I’d say there’s also an element of fear that you get over with a mind shift where you realize, okay. My audience isn’t going to be examining everything I do with a microscope. My audience isn’t going to read everything I put out. They aren’t going to read every single issue of my mailing list, every single article, every single podcast episode. And It’s to their benefit actually if you appropriately reuse content, if you send out transcripts of like here’s an example. I subscribe to MixerG. I like listening to their interviews with successful entrepreneurs and startup founders. I happen to hate watching video on the internet. I don’t know why. If you send me a link to a video, I’ll say, ha ha, nice, and then not click a link to watch it because I just Don’t do video online, but they publish transcripts of every single one of their interviews. And so, what I do is I read through the transcript and I’m like, oh, this is awesome! This is valuable. I am so happy to give Andrew Warner money. Because he’s realized, okay, the video interview, well, I should make an audio version of that so people could listen to it as a podcast. I should make a written version of it so people could read it. And by reusing the content in that very simple way, You’re making it easier for people who otherwise wouldn’t have engaged with your content to engage with your content, to read it, to like it, to share it.

I had a call with a friend a couple days ago, and we were talking about ways to reuse content. And I was saying, well, think about it this way. You do a webinar, and you get a transcript made of the webinar, and you read the transcript, and you share the transcript with folks. Okay, that’s two pieces of content already. You read through the transcript and you figure out that there are three big ideas you touched on. Well, those are three ideas for future webinars and three ideas for future podcasts, six more pieces of content. Those are also three more articles you could write. Three more pieces of content. We’re up to 10 pieces of content off of a single webinar. And each, it’s almost an iterative ongoing process where, okay, I’m going to record a podcast episode on this one topic I talked about in the webinar. Well, you’re probably going to touch on other things and generate a transcript and generate an article from that. So, really, by viewing this as an iterative process where you take A seed piece of content or a seed thing that you’ve done, and find the different ways to iterate through it, create additional pieces of content echoing off of it or in different shapes and forms, that’s valuable. And six months down the line, you might be able to say, well, hey, I’ve done a bunch of podcast episodes. My audience keeps saying, I really love your marketing episodes. I wish there was an easy way for me to listen to just all of those. Well, you could package those up. Here’s a collection of six MP3s. It’s $19. What have you done? You’ve taken the hard work off of that person’s plate of sorting through your archive and said, You want the six episodes on marketing that have gotten the most downloads? Done. Here it is. It’s $19. And they get to make that decision at that point. Is it worth $19 to me to have this all available immediately? Or do I want to spend 20 or 30 minutes sorting through the archives and finding these episodes myself? Some people will do it themselves. Some people will say, sweet, here’s 19 bucks. Thank you. And it’s repackaging like that that I think is also incredibly valuable to keep in mind. Just curating your own content. And making it available in an easy-to-digest format, that’s valuable for somebody who’s in your audience because they don’t have to worry about it or think about it. And I think about like where 18 episodes into Make Money Online. I hope we get to 200 episodes into Make Money Online. There’ll be a point when somebody will approach us and say, I love your episode. I really want to listen to all the episodes about building my consulting business or how to create products. And they’re going to be mixed throughout those 200-odd episodes. But by making it available as a collection, hey, here’s the curated list and here’s a bonus episode for you because we love you so much. That has a lot of value.

Like, a really cool example of this is: let’s go to the grateful dead. Since we can always talk about the Grateful Dead more here, Dick’s Pics. So Dick’s Picks is a series of releases by The Grateful Dead put together by, oh, I can’t remember the guy’s full name. His name is Richard. Richard, this, and a collection of the live shows, and it’s basically the live albums, just like Hey, here are some great live recordings from The Grateful Dead. And there’s some absurd number of Dick’s Picks volumes out there. I can’t find the The count in front of me, but I know my dad, a huge Rapel Dead fan, has over a dozen of these. And what have they done but taken the live shows, which, you know, live shows are a lot different than studio recordings. Packaged it up and said, Hey, audience, if you want to download this or download, buy this curated list of concert recordings, awesome, here it is. Have fun and people love it. Deadheads said it was a significant breakthrough when they released the first volume of Dick’s Picks because It gave them access to content that they wouldn’t otherwise have had. It curated the content. You don’t have to sort through all of the Grateful Dead’s live shows. It’s amazing. And like on a meta level, if we could go like six episodes deep on. the ways the Grateful Dead monetized and reused their content in amazing, amazing, innovative ways.

I’m looking at their discography right now, and I think it really illustrates what we’re talking about. I’m just going to read selected excerpts from this because it’s a really, really long list. 13 studio albums, okay? 10 live albums, 7 compilation albums, 6 box sets, 54 retrospective live albums, 36 Dix Pics 18 Dave’s pics, which are just curated lists of curated C D’s of their live shows. Please tell me it’s a curation of Dick’s pics. They just have to Dick’s pics. And a 15-digital download series. But all they’ve done is say, like, okay, cool, we have this content. How could we make it more accessible for our audience? How could we make it more interesting? How could we repackage it? They could have stopped that. 13 studio albums and 10 live albums, but they added another 200 albums to their discography by curating and packaging the content in interesting ways. There’s more out there, and there is more coming.

Oh, you.

But and even the concept of I like how we’re merging music with product creation here because I think there’s a lot of cool overlaps. Like even the concept of a single, I think is something that The product creation and consultant crowd should be more aware of like a single is me releasing one track off of the album to build interest, to make people excited about this, to make some revenue. Why can’t we apply that to a consulting practice or a product creation practice? What would a single look like? Well, it’s a short e-book. Well, let’s make a short, you know, 10-page e-book and make it available for $9. If it solves a problem, if it helps somebody. Great. And then we’re able to package that as part of the larger book that comes down the line. But it builds up interest for what that future live album or studio album in the consulting world is: a book, a product, a course.