#276: Repurpose Your Content

Welcome to Kingdom Writers, where we help equip and empower Christian writers of all genres to share your unique gifts with the world. We're your hosts, C.J. and Shelley Hitz.

This podcast is filled with spiritual encouragement as well as prayers to help you overcome the resistance you face as a writer. Your story matters.

Welcome back to this public Publish With a Purpose episode. My name is Shelly Hitz.

And I'm CJ Hitz.

And we are your mentors and author coaches inside Christian Book Academy, where we help you write words that outlive you, publish books that fulfill your calling and reach more readers with your message. So today's topic is about repurposing your content. This is one of my favorite topics. This, because I think sometimes we make things harder than they need to be. And so if you've published any kind of content in the past, blog post, podcasts, videos, maybe you've given presentations, maybe you have journals full of content, you probably have some content to share.

Yeah. So take a moment, look over your content that you've already created, something that you think you can repurpose. Start brainstorming some of the things that you've been a part of or experienced, things that might lend toward content for a future book.

Yeah. And one of the things you can do is look at things that have gotten a great response. So, for instance, in your blogging platform, a lot of times you can see what posts have been visited the most often. You know, what are your most popular posts, or when a post gets a lot of positive feedback or comments on social media. Take note of that.

Yeah. So we want to share a few examples of what we're talking about by being able to repurpose your content. So one example, Shelley, is podcasts and videos can actually be transcribed.

Yeah. And this is a great option for those of you that are speakers. So, you know, if you have some sort of podcast or videos, you know, C.J. and I obviously have a ton of content we've created in this way in the past. And I remember we had a live video we did that included 15 prayers for Christian Writers, and then we got that transcribed. CJ did some editing, and it's something now we can use in other ways.

Yeah. And one of the people that come to my mind in terms of being vast content wells would be.

Pastors.

Yeah.

You know, you pastors out there, if. If you take a look at your messages that you've shared week in and week out, year after year, you've got content in there that could be edited for books.

Yeah.

And so that's definitely something to consider.

Yeah. And, you know, the thing I will mention about that is I am working on a book right now, as we speak, that was transcribed from podcast episodes. And the content is amazing. But I will say it has taken a lot more editing because I did not create those audios with the intention of writing a book. And so just keep that in mind. Like, if you really want to write a book, I would actually recommend that you create your outline and then record an audio specifically with. With that outline. And you'll have much less editing from the transcript that way.

So another example would be presentation slides that can be used as part of your outline.

Yeah, so I'm kind of just interjecting some personal examples as we go, but C.J. and I, we used to give a presentation, and we would still give it if we were invited, but on forgiveness. And we got an amazing response from. From those presentations. And so we started talking and I said, cj, what would you think if we co authored a book on forgiveness?

And those presentation slides ended up becoming an outline for our book titled Forgiveness Formula.

Although the original title.

Some of you might recall this, it was the Mathematics of Jesus Making Sense of Life When Life Doesn't Seem to Add up. So, you know, amazingly, there were. There were some people out there that started contacting us because, man, they were really interested in finding some Christian math curriculum for their Christian schools. And we had to quickly correct them and say, oh, you don't want to learn math from us. It's a book on forgiveness. Yeah, but the title, we just decided for that reason, we should probably change it so that right away they know it's unforgiveness.

Yeah. And that's another case study I often share in that you want to make your book title, you know, reflect what your book is about. And for us, we were speaking in Christian schools, and so it got really confused, and we ended up retiring that version and republishing. And so you. You can do that as an independently published author. You know, if you find that for some reason your title isn't hitting the right audience or you want to change something with your book, you always have the opportunity to change and to update it.

Yeah. So another example of ways that you can repurpose your content would be deleted scenes that can be fleshed out and used as a free gift for newsletter subscribers. It's sort of like that hidden content or something that doesn't get out to the general public. But maybe your insiders, you know, get a chance to see some of what you were working on and decided not to have included in your book.

Yeah. And this can be a really fun way to make it exciting to be on your email list. Or if you're writing nonfiction, maybe it's an additional chapter that you decided to edit and not include or something that. That you had written on that topic. And so, you know, it doesn't have to just be content that you use for books. You can also repurpose things that you can use for your marketing.

Yeah. And so another example would be journal content that can be used when sharing your own story or your own journey. For those of you that keep a regular journal, you probably have several gold nuggets in there that either the Lord has shown you or something that occurred to you that day. A story, a happening that you can then take and use it as an illustration for, for a future book or a blog post, whatever it might be for your. Your. Your newsletter list. So being able to take a lot of your personal life and turning that into. Weaving that into your story.

Yeah. And so I have done this a couple times with forgiveness formula. Some of that book came from my journals. And then broken crayons still color. You know, I had some of the information that originally was in my journals. But I really encourage you to check out our previous episode on how to organize your journals for book content, if that's something that you're interested in.

And another example would be social media posts and emails that can actually be repurposed into content for your future books. And we've done this in some of ours. You know, we've had.

Things on our social media that we turned into stories and.

Edited them. That's a tough word to say over and over.

And that can be used for your books as well, you know, so all that social media content or email blasts, those things contain stories that could go into books.

Yeah. And you think, oh, I'm writing this and it has one purpose, but it may actually have multiple purposes. And for my book that I'm working on right now, I'm working on several books. But another book I'm working on, it's for devotionals, and I actually released these one at a time on social media as social media posts to kind of get some feedback, to build some buzz that the book is coming. So that's something you can do as well. But there are so many ways that you can repurpose content for books or repurpose book content for other things, or, you know, there's just multitude of ways you can use the content you create. My very first book, Mirror Mirror and My Beautiful was created from articles on my website and procrastination to publication. It was transcribed from a one hour audio edited into a book. It became a course, a digital course that I sold and then it ended up becoming the core content of our academy, Christian Book Academy, which we've really expanded upon by this time. But when we first launched in 2015, that one piece of content became all of those things. And then my book, prolific Publisher was transcribed from a webinar presentation and then edited into a book. And Self Publishing Books101 was created from blog posts and expanded into a resource many writers have used to publish their books. So really the options are limitless. You know, don't forget to consider content you already have as you write. And now that you've learned this, be thinking, when you're creating content, when you're creating social media content, when you're creating blog posts or presentations, be thinking, what other ways can I use this same content? And you know, I have really gotten CJ on this repurposing bandwagon now too.

Well, and I was gonna say that it's, it's a, another way to put it is you're getting the most mileage out of, you know, you think of those of us that are runners. You know, how much mileage can we get out of our running shoes before they need to be tossed? You know, you're, you're really getting the most bang for the buck when it comes to repurposing your content. You know, your social media platform, you've got an audience. Your email newsletter may have a whole bunch of people that don't see you on social media. And then your books have a whole nother audience. So what you need to be thinking about is how many eyes can I get on this content that I've created that I don't want to just have it go to waste. I know other people can be encouraged by it. So it's getting, it's squeezing out every drop of mileage that you can get on that. And it's not being lazy. It's using the resources that you have to help the most people with that specific piece.

It's actually being a good steward of the message God has given you. So, you know, being resourceful, but being a good steward, I believe is using it in every way. Because the honest truth of it is most people are not going to see all of your social media posts. They're not going to open and read every email. Not everyone is going to Read your book. And so if you can have that content in multiple formats, it's actually a way to be a good steward of that message that God has given you and to help more people, to serve more people. And so, cj, why don't you pray and close this episode in a prayer of encouragement?

Yeah. Father, we thank you so much for each and every person that's listening or watching this video. And we ask, Lord, that you would give them creative ideas on how to repurpose content that they've already created. I ask, Lord, that they would be able to get more mileage out of their stories that are unique to them. Getting that into more hands, getting it in front of more eyeballs, just being an encouragement in ways that perhaps they haven't thought of yet. So we just pray that your Holy Spirit would. Would inspire us and give us some of our own examples. And maybe there's. There's some things that we haven't even mentioned in this short little podcast that others may think of. And we just pray that you. You give them those ideas. We thank you for the glory and the honor that are yours, Lord. And we ask that our writing would honor you. And we thank you for that blessing. To be able to do what we love, we ask this in Jesus name. Amen.

Amen. And if this encouraged you and you're interested in even more, I encourage you to join my workshop Book Writing Lab. I will take you through some different steps of being able to choose your book topic, but outline a book and then also how to write the book and include some tips on repurposing your content. You can find that@christianbookacademy.com writing and we will see you in the next episode. Bye Bye.

Thank you for listening to this episode of Kingdom Writers. We believe that you, as a Christian writer, have a specific role to play in the Kingdom of Heaven to impact lives for eternity.

And because of this, we choose to pour out our lives into encouraging writers like you to not only tell your stories, but to take the courageous step of self publishing your stories in books that will outlive you and leave behind a powerful legacy. This podcast is sponsored by Christian Book Academy, where we help you give birth to your books. We invite you to join our community of Kingdom writers.