$400,000—that’s the fine one company recently paid for using an unlicensed picture on its website.
Some photographers are now making more money suing people than taking pictures. And authors, musicians and videographers are now quick to sue when their work gets copied online. As we’ve written before, you should assume that everyone else’s content has leprosy: Don’t touch it.
But there’s one person you should be copying: yourself.
It’s Only Repetitive to You
No one reads all your blog posts.
No one listens to all your podcasts, consumes all your books and watches your entire video library. Your long-term audience has probably missed some stuff, and your new audience doesn’t dig deep into your back catalog. The stuff you wrote last year is invisible to them.
And because everyone has his or her own consumption preferences, the people watching your YouTube videos aren’t necessarily reading your emails. You need to repeat yourself across time and media. Here’s how.
Three Ways to Multiply Your Message
1. Strip Mine Your Masterpieces
Look at all the blog posts, articles, videos and podcasts you’ve produced over the last year. Which ones got the most interaction from your audience? Not just likes or even shares on social media. Which ones were watched right until the end? Which ones resulted in people clicking through to your website? Which were forwarded to friends?
Now create variations of those pieces on other media. See if you can capture the thing that made the original so powerful and share the message in a new way.
2. Update and Improve
Take your cornerstone content and rewrite or reshoot it every year.
Your big ideas—the ones you want your clients to absorb and share with others—should be revisited at least once every 12 months to reinforce your authority and ownership in your niche. Recreate your content with updates if anything has changed. If things are more or less the same, explain the ideas again as if to a newcomer.
3. Get the Message Out
Find creative ways to spread new messages across all your media.
If you like to write, start with a blog post. Then read the best parts of the post on camera and publish to YouTube. Strip the audio and publish that to a podcast. Slice out your best blurbs and share to social with a link back to the original. Then work backwards: Transcribe your old videos or podcasts and create blog posts around them. And send all of it to your email list. It’s like starting many fires with one match.
Publish, Then Publish Some More
Trust me: As someone who publishes across multiple platforms daily, you’ll get tired of yourself before your audience does.
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