Peter Winick shows how to turn existing content into new formats for different audiences. Inventory what you have, customize about 10%, and shift the angle: a post about happiness becomes one about resilience for managers in a downturn.
We all tend to produce more stuff in the format that we're just comfortable with. That's just how people are, right? So if you're a writer, then you're going to be writing. If you're a video person, you're going to do video. It's not that difficult to say, hey, I've been doing this for a long time. What are the blog posts and the articles I've written that have gotten the most action, that have either agitated people or gotten the most response? Oh, here they are, boom, 10 of them. What if I turn those into little 3, 4-minute marketing videos to get it out there? It doesn't take much to do, folks. You don't have to spend a ton of money to do that. And what you're doing is you're reaching a different group. Even if you're reaching the same group in a different format, it's refreshing and you're exposed to other people. There are tons of people, I mean, I'm still the dinosaur that gets the New York Times delivered, the physical gray thing, because I love the taste and the smell of it. That's one way I consume content. But plenty of people are consuming it on video. You need to repurpose your stuff. You need to come up with a strategy and a way to take inventory of what you've got and repurpose what you've got. When you're repurposing, there are a couple things to think about. Don't just necessarily regurgitate it verbatim, but repurpose it through the lens of a specific population you're trying to connect to. Repurpose it through the lens of a situation. So it could be— a population might be a newly minted manager. How would they use content X that you wrote something about? Well, it's about a 10% customization of the content you've already written. A situation. Oops, companies are laying off money. Oh, these are downtimes. Oh, remember right before the recession hit, like late 2007, 2008? Every book was on happiness. Do you guys remember that? Yes. And it was like, one more happiness book and I'm going to vomit. Now I'm not happy about the recession, but one of the things that happened as a result of the recession is we got all these new books on resilience. Nobody wanted to be happy anymore. We wanted to be resilient. And now, remember, flat is the new growth? That lasted for about 6 quarters. And then the CFOs came in and said, no, flat is flat, and down is down. And those days are over. Anyway, think about just telling the story and teaching the lesson through either a situation or a population. Thank you.
