I’ve adapted the slogan above, borrowed from the original green movement, to apply to the new rules of content and information on and offline.

A lot of people are telling you that content is king, and to a certain degree it is, but your head is swimming and you’re thinking, “how do I create all this content and education based material when I’ve got a business to run? You say I need a blog, newsletter, white papers, podcast, training courses, instructional videos, I mean, how do I get it all done?”

Yes you do need all that stuff and, yes, it’s a lot of work, so the trick is to find ways to take content you absolutely need to create and find ways to repurpose it. And, take content you’ve already produced and give it new life, new audiences.

• If you are doing an online demo, record it and put it on your website.
• If you get the same questions over and over again, answer them all in an audio format.
• Take those same questions and turn them into blog posts
• Take several blog posts and stitch them together into an article to submit online and off
• Create a series of 7 related blog posts and you have a presentation
• Write a white paper by posting questions to your blog and letting readers add their comments, turn the entire project into the white paper.
• Record all of your slide presentations and upload them to sites like YouTube and Slideshare
• Schedule interviews with industry experts and even customers – record, transcribe and publish in several formats.
• Turn bits and bites of all of this into your monthly newsletter
• Take something you’ve already written and break it down into bite size chunks in multi-formats

The key to making this way of content production a success is to always view your writing, speaking, selling, and research efforts with an eye on multi-use. If you know you have to give a speech at a trade show next month, write it as blog content over the next 5 days and you’ve solved several needs at one time. Anything you produce should have several lives. An important note – the word repurpose to me implies more than simply taking your newsletter and calling it a blog post, you’ve got to give it a bit of new life, new function, new delivery, new format, new spin. It’s not that hard if you have that in mind as you create it.