27. Repurpose Podcasting Content to Expand Your Reach

Ever feel like you're burning the candle at both ends? That has been my reality for longer than I'd like to admit. But, I'm making some changes to work smarter, not harder! In today's episode, I share some strategies to repurpose your podcasting content.

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Transcript

Hey, hey, and welcome back. Even though you may have just listened to a new episode a week ago, I feel like it's been for ever since I recorded anything, and that's because it has been a while. I last recorded something a month ago before my husband and I left on our big vacation. We started out by taking a cruise from Florida through the Panama Canal and ending up in California. I highly recommend seeing the Panama Canal if that sounds interesting to you. It was absolutely amazing. Once in California, we spent a few days in Disneyland and then did a road trip back to Florida. Overall, it was a great trip, though I did come down with the flu or something towards the beginning of the road trip portion, which forced us to cancel some of our plans, unfortunately.

But before that, the first part of the trip on the cruise was so relaxing, and it really gave me a lot of time to think about life and that elusive work life balance. I have been going full steam ahead for a couple of years now, building and shaping my business into what I want it to be. For the past few years, I have almost always worked weekends. And more often than not, I could be found on my computer until the wee hours of the morning. Now that's partly because my brain tends to function better at night, and I'm a lot more productive during those hours, but also because the to do lists were always just so long, and there were never enough hours during the day to accomplish it all. I have been saying for at least a year that things will slow down soon, and I just need to get through xyzproject, and then the load would lighten and I would have more free time. Spoiler alert, they never did. And I know I'm caught up in a bit of a story about my self at the moment, but I promise that I'm bringing it back around to give you some podcasting tips.

So stick with me. So while I was on this cruise and loving the relaxation time with my husband and reading books for fun and not having headaches every day from being so stressed out. I was contemplating how I can have a better work life balance because it's not sustainable to keep going the way I have been. And, of course, it's not going to be cruise level relaxation the whole time, but I want to be able to do something like read for fun outside of vacation. At the same time, though, I want to continue to grow my business and do bigger and better things. And as an entrepreneur, I am in charge of that. This is my business. So at first glance, more free time and doing bigger and better things in my business seem to be at the opposite ends of the spectrum.

I've been doing a lot of thinking about my identity as a business owner, as a CEO, And I won't go into that very much here in today's episode. But if you haven't caught last week's episode yet, go check out episode 26, which is who do you need to be to get to 1,000,000 downloads? I've also been thinking about how to work smarter, not harder. And one of the key components of the formula to work smarter, not harder, is repurposing content. Since this is a podcast about podcasting, I'm going to talk about repurposing podcast content. I've talked before about the benefits of repurposing your podcast content, but I have to admit that I haven't actually been doing any repurposing. One of the things that my business needs to grow is visibility. More people simply need to become aware of me and consume my content. I'm confident that once they do, they will turn into clients and customers.

But they need to be aware of me in the first place in order for that to happen. Up until this point, I've been focused on doing new things to accomplish this. But after this relaxation vacation reflection, I am going to shift more into repurposing existing content. A few weeks ago, we heard from Jen Gosar about LinkedIn. That's episode 25, if you haven't had a chance to catch it yet. And she and I discussed the power of posting an article on LinkedIn. And she's the LinkedIn expert, so go listen to that episode and hear her talk about why that's a powerful thing. But what I plan to do, and you can too, is take the transcript from a podcast episode and then format it into an article to post there.

And when I say format, I mean, just cleaning up the kind of, typos that the transcription is making and then adding some headings to kind of break up and organize the the transcript into something that's a little bit more reader friendly. I also plan to post that same reformatted transcript as a blog post on my website, And then create a few Pinterest pins that then link back to the blog post. Yes. There's a little bit of work involved to repurpose my podcast episodes in this way, But considering that the new LinkedIn article, blog post, and pins have the potential to significantly increase my visibility. The amount of work required is pretty small. And the minor amount of extra work can lead to major benefits, especially when you consider the alternative of creating a blog post or article from scratch rather than repurposing something that I already have. So for me, those are my immediate repurposing goals. Putting my podcast on YouTube is also fairly high on the list.

And, no, I will not be recording video, at least not anytime soon. But putting the audio onto YouTube will allow my content to show up in those search results, again, getting in front of additional people. If you're into social media, you can also repurpose your content there, creating posts, carousels, and reels. Personally, this is lowest on my priority list because, a, I don't enjoy showing up on social media, and, b, dealing with the finicky algorithm is not very appealing. I would rather put my energy into creating something that is not subject to a 24 hour lifespan. Repurposing content onto different platforms is the goal here. And, sure, you'll have some people who listen to your podcast and follow you on social and get your newsletter, etcetera, etcetera. A lot of times when the idea of repurposing is brought up, podcasters express concern that they're overwhelming their audience with the same exact information in multiple places.

But remember that most people aren't going to be connected with you on that many platforms. And even if they are, the algorithm may not show them all the posts, or they may not click to read every article or email. And for the small handful of people that do, well, they must be super fans, and they just like seeing your stuff. So they're not going to be annoyed. You have to remember that the goal of this repurposing is to reach new people. You want your content to pop up when someone searches on Pinterest or YouTube or Google. It's hard to continually add content to those platforms unless you're repurposing. I will also add that if you haven't started your podcast yet, I see you, And I urge you to think about what content you have already that could be repurposed into a podcast episode, kind of flipping it around.

So do you have some robust emails that you could turn into an episode? Maybe you've done a guest interview on another podcast that you could turn that into kind of a solo episode for your podcast. Or social media posts that, with a little fleshing out, could stand alone as a podcast episode. You probably already have some assets that you can use, so take a look at those. Work smarter, not harder. And if you are ready to start your podcast, I'm running a free podcasting 101 workshop in June. Yes. It's back if you've been listening for a while. Been a couple months without them, but the workshop is coming back in Julia, and you can get all the information by heading to the podcast teacher.com slash workshop.

The best news about repurposing your content is that it's fairly formulaic, and it's one of the easiest tasks to delegate in your business. So if you are using your precious time and brainpower to create the original piece of content, it's possible to then have a VA or an intern or your teenager, someone help you repurpose it, and you're not adding any extra work to your own plate. Now I do realize that you may be a solopreneur, and you don't have anyone to delegate to at the moment, and I totally get it. I currently wear most of the hats in my business. And to some degree, that's for financial reasons and keeping expenses down, but it's also about control. I don't like to relinquish control of tasks to someone else, and that's an issue that I'm currently working through. This comes back to the identity work that I talked about in episode 26. I need to be the CEO who trusts someone else to do a few simple tasks.

And as I am home from vacation, it is tempting to just slip back into old patterns. And I am constantly reminding myself of how much I enjoyed the lack of stress and the downtime and spending time with my husband and reading for fun and feeling physically better and sleeping and all of those wonderful things. And I'm using those to motivate me to work towards a better balance. I have no doubt that the process won't be perfect, but I am wholeheartedly embracing the mantra of working smarter, not harder, and repurposing my podcast content is a key part of that plan. Until next week, happy podcasting.