There’s so much content out there today. It’s a dime a dozen. You almost start to think good content is magically going to drift into your brain. There are a lot of gaps for most leaders in the creative process. There’s good news; there are some creativity hacks you’re not utilizing.

Normally I’m not a fan of productivity hacks. Most of them are pushing us to do more cheap work. But for us content creators, there’s a key principle we need to catch onto; repurpose as much of your content as possible. 

I bet you’re wasting some of your best content.

There are so many different mediums to put the same message on. Imagine you pour your heart into creating a talk for twenty people. You spend five hours crafting the talk. As soon as it’s over it hits you; beyond these twenty people, nobody will ever hear this message again. It’s certainly not a waste to produce something for a small group of people. Maybe seeds of life transformation fell on rich soil.

what if your message could affect more people?

How could you repurpose that talk and repost it somewhere else to influence more people? We tend to think one piece of content is for one group of people. This is addition, not multiplication. You’re not scaling the impact of those five hours creating that talk. Those people may take a few notes in their journal and never think about that content again. Pretty discouraging. 

When you write that talk, craft that post, produce that video or publish that blog that’s just the beginning. Think about how you can upcycle that on a different medium. Turn the talk into a blog then the blog into a short Facebook live then distill it into an Instagram story. It will hit different people on different mediums. 

Why aren’t we doing this already?

Number one, we just don’t think about it. Content creators aren’t talking about this, and we think one talk, one post, one blog belongs with one group of people. The second reason; fear. We are afraid people are going to see that content somewhere else and think, “I’ve already seen this. This is old hat. They don’t have anything new! They’re just posting the same old stuff!” I bet the same people rarely see it twice on different mediums. And if they do maybe they need to hear that message twice.

We’ve got to get wiser about the way we invest our creativity. We have limited time, so we must think about scalability. Scalability is not only about spanning a large group of people, but it’s also about spanning different audiences in different seasons.

I did this recently with a keynote talk I gave over a year ago. I spoke at a university for a conference, and at the end of the conference, I didn’t think about the talk again. It was gone into the ether. Honestly, I didn’t even know the talk went on YouTube. I found the talk a year later on a Google search. 

With some work, I honed it down, and it will morph into a few blog posts and a future podcast episode. Maybe it will help someone take their next right step. This isn’t about your personal branding; this is about life transformation. If you’re a content creator, you want to produce life change, and there’s never been a better time to repurpose your content on different mediums in order to have the greatest impact on the most people.

What are some other ideas you have for ways to repurpose content?