9 Ways to Recycle Your Content for Maximum Payback

by Jennifer Tribe

Your expertise is valuable! Make sure you are leveraging it to its fullest extent. If you create content for one item, such as a newsletter, look for ways you can re-use that content in other places. Below are nine ideas to get you started.

  1. Don’t offer past issues of your newsletter for free. Instead, collect those issues and sell them. You might sell a whole year of issues as a bundle, or group the issues by topic and sell them as specialized e-booklets.

  2. Record your speaking engagements, then sell copies on tape or CD to those who couldn’t attend the live event. Transcribe the recording and sell it as a special report or e-book.

  3. Record your teleclasses. Turn them into tapes, CDs and reports as well.

  4. Take a magazine article that you’ve written and expand on it. You’ve now got a chapter for a book. The reverse works equally well: pull portions out of your book and turn them into magazine articles.

  5. Do you offer your web visitors a valuable collection of articles, links, templates, forms, or downloads? Consider putting those resources behind digital bars, and asking people to pay a small monthly subscription fee to access them.

  6. Pull a series of tips, insights or techniques from one of your books or special reports, and divvy it up into chunks. Use an autoresponder to send one chunk of content in an e-mail every week for 6 or 8 weeks, and you’ve just developed an e-course. For added customer value, consider bundling in some one-on-one e-mail coaching or support.

  7. If your book contains how-to steps or exercises, draw these out from the rest of the content and expand on them a little. Add some forms or templates and turn it all into a companion workbook.

  8. Turn snippets of your tapes or CDs into streaming audio files. Offer them as a bonus for signing up for your newsletter, insert them as "audio articles" in your actual newsletter, or use them as a sales tool to whet people’s appetite for the full recording. These same ideas work for video as well.

  9. Offer the same magazine article to several different print publications. They won’t mind as long as their target audiences are all different.
Be creative! When you invest time and money in creating content for a product, think about ways you can re-use and recycle it. It will help you get maximum payback for your work.


© 2004-2007 Jennifer Tribe
Jennifer Tribe is a principal at Highspot Inc. Want to self-publish a book, produce an audio program, launch a seminar? Highspot can help transform your great ideas into lasting knowledge products.

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