3 Ways to Repurpose Your Old Content This Quarter

It can feel like we are in an endless loop of creating. So I want us to take a pause, just a little pause, and I want to think about how we can repurpose some things we've already created as we move through this quarter.

Welcome to The More Profitable Podcast with Stacey Harris. I'm Stacey. This is the spot to learn more about the strategies, tactics, and tools you need to build your more profitable podcast. My team and I work every day with podcasters like you to shift shows from frustrating time sucks to productive members of your sales team, because your show should be built to generate and convert leads. So let's get into it.

If you know me well, you know I love a repurpose moment, one of the things we do regularly on this show is re-release content, and when we work through the Profitable Podcaster Mastermind, we spend an entire month building a repeatable series.

We have a whole series that I tell you every year, it's what happens in August every year is we re-release that same series. I think there is so much power in capturing our expertise, capturing our value content, and then finding lots and lots and lots of ways to use it.

We're going to talk about this from my re-releasing your episodes perspective, as well as how you can turn non-podcast content into podcast content so that you're still leveraging things you have already created. I personally want to have this conversation here because this is an important time of year for us.

We're in Q4. In Q4 our clients get the task of working a little further ahead. By the way, I'm doing it too. We do this every year because our team closes down and the entire team and company sign off for the last two weeks of the year because we don't need to work.

Last two weeks of the year, nothing's going to happen. One of the things we do though, in addition to that, is we make sure that all of our clients have their episodes edited, scheduled, and ready to roll through the end of January so that our clients don't come back going, “Oh, no,” and we don't come back going, “Oh, no,” and have to be in that rush or push.

I don't want to start the year that way. You don't want to start the year that way, so we prepare for it. This is also a time of year where we can feel like no one's paying attention for parts of it. We've got Thanksgiving here in the US in that last week of November. We've got the Christmas and end of the year holidays, we've got new years, we've got some time where people are just naturally not in their regular content flow.

It can feel like we're just burning an episode. It's like, “Okay, so this is a waste of content.” Because you're [inaudible] that time of year. Cool. How can we meet people where they're at and get an episode to them, be of service in that way, and make sure that we're maximizing our capacity, and our return on the time investment we put into creating an asset in the first place?

Well, the fastest way to that is repurposing. I love, love, love to repurpose because it buys me back time and gets me additional return on capacity I already spent. Now the three ways we're going to talk about today have differing levels of capacity required, meaning some will have more or less that you will need to do to prepare them for this.

I'm going to be real transparent with you. Some of these are easiest to do if you have support. If you have an editor on your team, if you're working with a production agency like ours, some of these options, especially what we're going to talk about towards the end, get easier. Keep that in mind.

But also, know you don't have to do all of these. This is not about building you a checklist like we've done in other episodes and you need to mark off all of them. If you choose one of these things to action on in this last quarter of the year, I'll be stoked. I will be absolutely stoked because you will be challenging yourself to share something you've already shared.

If this is something, just before we get into this, just spring to mind, before we get into this, there is an episode I did with somebody who joined us for The Profitable Podcaster Mastermind, Molly, I will make sure Molly and I's conversation is in the show notes because we talk in that episode, that was a huge insight for her when we were in The Mastermind, is that she could re-release content.

We talked about her getting through that concern and how she was using it now. I will include that link in the show notes because it's an important conversation and I think it pairs well with this conversation.

Before we jump in, I want to remind you, we have The Podcast Newsroom available for you right now. We are answering some great questions over there and I need some more. Like I said, we're batching to get ahead, so I need your questions.

If you head on over to uncommonlymore.com/ama anytime, you can submit a question there.

Of course, if you want to make sure you have access to the feed so that you hear the answers to the questions you submitted, make sure you go to podcastnewsroom.com and get your private feed all set up.

Let's dig in to repurposing some content because I think that this is some of the most important podcast mindset work that we need to do in just being okay with re-releasing and it is the place where we leave the most money on the table because we're getting so little value if we're only putting something up and then pretending it never happened. We don't want to do that.

Too much time, too much effort, too much mental capacity, that’s the most valuable thing I have at this point is my mental capacity so if I'm investing my mental capacity in this I need that baby paying off.

I'm willing to bet that you might be in the same sea. I'm willing to bet I'm not alone. You may not feel like it all the time. I know I don't feel like it all the time, but some weeks, babe. Some weeks, I'm like, “Okay, we've got a very small cup to pour from this week.” So that's when I'm pulling out things like this.

Let's start with the first most obvious option, which is to re-release old content, re-release previous episodes of your show. Caveats, I try not to re-release anything I've released in the last 8 to 12 months. I do try to release stuff that's more than a year old just because it's been long enough that it's out of the scroll cycle.

It's beyond that point most people are going to scroll to and run into that. So I tend to want to release something that happened further back. I'll be completely honest with you, I have already done our content planning for Q4, thus me recording this episode.

There are re-releases happening in December of this year that are in fact from earlier this year. There's only going to be about six months between the initial release and the re-release for one of the episodes we're releasing in December. But it fits in a larger plan and it makes sense where it is and why it's there.

That overrides the best practices, something I want you to be looking at too. These episodes that we're re-releasing, we've got two choices with. One, you can straight up re-release them. A great example of this is right here on this feed, you'll have noticed—I think it'll be two weeks before this one comes out—there was a re-release. There will be a release.

It's an episode that came out in 2023. It speaks to what I'm selling right now, the season we are in, the sales cycle we are in, and it's a really good asset. It's a really good piece of content. It's one of my most popular downloads.

It's an episode I hear parroted back to me on sales calls quite a bit and so we're re-releasing it. Guess what, it took me about 15 minutes and I do mean from front to back including getting the marketing materials set up because I have in my system all of my podcast episodes are linked to the email that was sent to promote that episode, same with the socials.

I have all of that saved in my system. So for the case of this episode, I did make two changes. Both calls to action are re-recorded. We re-recorded—we, me, and the mouse in my pocket—I re-recorded the front CTA, so that free CTA, because it was for the Roundtable, which we're not doing right now. We've paused the roundtables, and we've got the Newsroom.

I recorded a Newsroom promo in there, and I edited the outro called action, which is for production services because, in the initial release, it was promoting a price increase we did, which I'm not increasing the prices right now, so I needed to remove that.

That took me two minutes, exported, got it done, tweaked the transcript so that it was accurate, show notes were already done, updated, uploaded, updated the player on the page, scheduled the email. I will say I made some tweaks to the email because I am a big proponent of making things 1% better. If we can improve it, let's improve it.

I'm not reinventing the wheel because the wheel worked. I don't want to accidentally make the wheel square because I'm messing with it so much, but I am refining. Is there a chunk missing from our wheel that we need to smooth out? Is there an extra bump on our wheel we need to smooth out? Where can we make it more effective by making a small change?

I cleaned up that email a little bit to speak to what we're doing now, got the social scheduled. The whole thing, front to back, literally took me 15 minutes. It was so easy and it'll just go out. Now it has just gone out. You could see it in the feed. If you scroll back a couple of episodes, you'll see that re-release.

Many, many, many people who listened to the show will likely not realize it was a re-release until now. Some way because they'll pick up on something I said that I passively mentioned. Who knows? No one will care. I can guarantee you that because we've done this before. If you scroll even further back, you will see another version of this, which is the Housekeeping Series. That's literally a series we've run every year for the last three or four years without any additional shifts or changes. We just re-release it.

Guess what? It has worked and led to clients every single year. It doesn't have to be about making big changes so that it is worthy of being re-released. With that said, I do think there is an opportunity to highlight why you're sharing something again to make it a stronger asset.

Again, like I said a minute ago, 1% changes where can we smooth the wheel out so that the wheel rolls better. If I were releasing, a great example is just like spoiler alerts left and right because I'm just really taking you inside of my own Q4 plans here, but we have a series of re-releases that will be coming out at the end of the year.

At the end of the year this year, we are going to be running a series of case study episodes from clients who have worked with us because I want to show you as you move through the end of the year and you're thinking about what's been and what's going to be I want you to think about what's possible.

So I'm sharing some case studies from clients who have done some cool things who have worked with us and seen some results so that you can see what's possible so that as you're looking at what's ahead, you can make sure you're doing that with all of the things available.

There is so much in my life, my business, and this podcast even that I would have told you was not even a real thing, was not on my radar when this started. So that series of episodes is really about showing you what's possible with your podcast.

In that series, there will be a bumper that's at the front of the episode of me talking about why I'm re-releasing that episode, why we're sharing this and pointing you towards some of the takeaways that I want you to have as you listen to that conversation.

I'm using that to better leverage those sales assets to make them stronger, more supportive assets for you to be listening to, because the bumper is adding, it's worth doing. That's the difference. The episode we released a couple of weeks ago, there's not value in you getting a bumper in that episode.

The value is in the episode. The changes that needed to be made to make it evergreen, to make it relevant now, I made those. I don't need to, at the beginning, give you a disclaimer and take you out of that value before we get into it.

When you're considering, “Do I or don't I add a bumper or an intro or whatever? Does it add to the episode or is it a distraction from you getting into the episode? The answer to that question is your answer about whether you should do it or not. Plain and simple.

First and foremost, look at your podcast. What can you re-release from your podcast? What were the most popular episodes? What were episodes that you got a lot of feedback on? People were in your DMs, you're hearing about them on sales calls, whatever the case may be, prioritize those episodes, especially if you're somebody who sells the same program in November and December that starts in January, I'm looking at you.

If you're somebody who sells masterminds or 12-month programs, I've worked with a lot of clients who do this, we often will re-release those same episodes in October, November to fill that January kick-off program.

Because guess what? They keep working. They speak to what they need to know, the audio sales pages, the case studies, that pre-client educational content. It works. So there's no reason for us not just to re-release it. Adding a bumper will take you out of the lesson I need you learning.

If you're somebody who has some one of those reoccurring programs where you open and close about the same time every year, look at what you released last year. What can you use again this year?

Number two, I want us to step into another option here. I want us to step out of looking at just our podcast. I want you to go into your email service provider. Do you have an email challenge that you run or that you do run? Have you had a hard time driving traffic to it? Cool. Let's turn it into a podcast series. Let's turn it into a three or five-part podcast series that drives traffic to that email option.

This is a fantastic way to grow your email list with your podcast and repurpose some of the content you've already created. You've already built this challenge, but now it's on the list of things you could promote. You don't have any particular reason to be driving traffic to it on a day-to-day basis, and so it just sits.

The landing page hangs out on your website, and maybe some opt-ins trickle in here or there because they find it, maybe you talked about it in an old podcast episode or something, but for the most part, it just sits.

But you know it works because when people go through it, you get feedback, they make purchases, whatever. Cool, let's use it. I love, love, love using email challenges and shifting them into a podcast series because not only do we grow our list, not only does it give us a really solid reason to be driving traffic to the email opt-in, but it is also already built to sell something on the back end. It is already built to drive them into a decision.

Your call to action is literally baked in because you built it to be a sales asset. We're just converting the medium at this point. Oftentimes, I find clients have videos that go with these or they've already created audios that they're sending via Google Drive or maybe they've got them in a private podcast, whatever the case may be. Cool, pull them out and put them in the public podcast.

I know it's easy to say, "Well, why would I want to give everybody who listens to the podcast access to the challenge they'll never sign up for?" Yes, they will, because when they sign up, they get emails from you reminding them, "Hey, this is what we're doing this week."

Also, they are going to be committing to the action. Lastly, they're getting whatever supplemental materials you're providing. Oftentimes, worksheets or additional videos, whatever the case may be, there are other things that could be supportive and will probably help them actually implement the things they're learning in that email challenge.

This is one of my favorite ways to dust off something that's just hanging out, that is so valuable for our listeners, and a really leveraged way for us to create content as we move through the end of the year. Where we're looking at needing some space from recording, a challenge will do it for you.

Now there are a couple of decisions you need to make here. You can run it over the course of four weeks and do one episode a week. You can also increase the amount of episodes you release by releasing all of these in one week, really running them through Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, whatever that looks like for you, the three or five-day challenges, each day being one day of the challenge, just like they would have gotten in emails. Each email essentially becomes an episode.

There are pros and cons to both. What I want you to look at is your content. Is it something we're giving them a week to move through that is actually going to help them actually implement as you're moving through? Got to look at how big a bite each content piece is right each day’s thought process is. That doesn't mean it needs to be a big bite for it to be weekly.

Look at the Podcast Housekeeping Series as a prime example of this. Each of those episodes is about 15 minutes. Nothing I'm asking you to do there should take you more than 15-20 minutes. That's a half an hour per episode from learning and actioning.

I still release them once a week because I recognize that you have other things to do. You're not living and dying by me sending you this podcast episode and being like, "Okay, I got this today and I'll do it all over again." No, we have a life. You have things to do. I want us to work that out over time now.

Now, I say this in the episodes and I talk about it when I promote the episodes, if you're somebody who wants to wait till they're all out and then listen to it as one hour and action everything, cool. Cool, babe. You do you. I've got no problem with that.

I'm still going to release them weekly because that's the cadence that makes the most sense for my schedule to be honest and also for there to be enough latitude for the most people to actually take actions, to actually do the things.

I think that's often under considered when we talk about running one of these challenges, either email or via the podcast, is the implementation time is one more thing on their to-do list. So if you've got an overextended potential client, adding four hours of work to their week is not going to get them in action. All it's going to do is get them to sign up and go, “Ooh, I don't need to buy anything else because I opted in for this challenge and I need to do that first.”

We've all heard it. I know, I just touched a sore little part of your heart. I get it, I understand, I feel that way too. This is one of the reasons I like that cadence of once a week.

On the flip side, oftentimes for my clients, especially where there's a big mindset component of the challenge, daily works well because the consumption of the content is the bulk of the action.

When it's something like consuming and then some journaling, daily over the course of three to five days can actually be really impactful because it keeps them in it. The cadence of a weekly gives them too much space. They have a hard time staying connected to what happened on day one when they're on to day three when we do a weekly with those kinds of challenges.

So in that kind of format where, again, there's some listening and some reflection, daily can be really powerful. Here's the thing I'm going to remind you of, love. You know your clients better than I do. You know how they're going to take on this email challenge as podcast content because you've already done it as an email content.

You've already done it as an email challenge. That's one of the great things about repurposing is we have so much data, so much information that we don't have when we're creating new. So we use that to make that decision around, are we splitting this weekly or are we going to run it over a week?

All right. The third and final piece is another outside-of-the-podcast option, and that's look at your live trainings and webinars. I love to go through the catalog of trainings and webinars that my clients do because oftentimes, there's a ton of great content there, either because we can break stuff up and we can end up getting five, 10 podcast episodes out of a presentation by breaking down each of the elements into episodes, or we can full on take those trainings that you recorded before and release them as episodes.

These are often really going to need editing because especially when you’re running them live, there is that live element. When we run a previously live training, I almost always recommend an intro bumper to let people know it was recorded live.

Especially if you're doing things like a webinar or a Facebook live where you're acknowledging people, A, I will edit out the beginning where we're like, "Welcome, where are you from?" That nonsense where we're warming. No, don't include that in your podcast recording. Edit that out.

Point number one, this is edited. Point number two because sometimes we'll answer a question in mid-call or we'll bring something up or we'll say someone's name or whatever, it brings you back to the live element of it, I will have in that bumper, “Hey, we pulled this webinar or this training out of the archive. Here's why it's valuable. I wanted to let you know this was previously recorded live so if you hear me saying a welcome or answering a question to somebody, it's because there was a chat element. Don't worry, you can ask your questions too. Reach out on Instagram, reach out on LinkedIn,” whatever mechanism you want them to reach out to, do it that way.

Again, I'm still also editing out as much of that live stuff that's not valuable. We're removing as much of that as possible. This is gold because again, these trainings or these webinars were often built to be sales assets on their own so so much of it is already there. So much of what needs to be there and what needs to be thought through has already been done. Now you just need to clean it up and make it ready to roll. That's it.

I highly recommend looking through your training library, looking through your Facebook lives, looking through your webinars, and seeing “What would be valuable for my listeners as we move through this last quarter? As we go through this next sales cycle, is there a webinar we did that is built to sell this thing we're selling this quarter? Cool. Let's clean it up. Let's make it right for the medium and then the platform we're using now and let's put it there.”

One bonus tip as we wrap this up because the place where all three of these come together is something I call a clip show and the reason this is a bonus tip is because there's a version of this in each of the three things we talked about today and this is the one that takes the most effort. This is the hardest one to produce.

This is the one where I highly recommend waiting to do this until you're partnered with a producer or an editor who is capable of it and who can help you with it. This is also the one that your editor will likely need the most “you” in production because there are going to be these points we want to edit.

I love a clip show, especially when we start pulling from case studies and we can show the consistencies. We can highlight those things that show up again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, because we all know those. We all have those clients who are like, "Yeah, I've just talked to six other clients about this."

We all see those things. That's the nature of being experts. We can recognize those patterns when we see them across clients, and when we get to highlight that for a prospective client, it allows us to show them the mirror. It allows them to see themselves in those clips.

So you can do this with case study episodes. You can do this with past trainings and webinars. There are versions of clip shows that you could do from any of the things we've talked about. Again, it's bonus because it's advanced. So it's another way, but it's the way that takes the most work.

This is not a great option if you're looking to repurpose content because you need space, you need capacity. Because this is the one that's going to take the most space and capacity to create.

With that said, if as you're going through your old assets, you see some common threads, you see some places where you're like, “It would be great if we could move people through a journey,” a clip show could be a great way to do that. So maybe put it on your list for next summer, next fall, and winter, wherever it makes sense, it's another really great way to repurpose content is what I call a clip show.

As we wrap up, because I've been dragging for a while here, let's wrap this up, we can do a couple of things here. We can re-release old content with or without a bumper. We can turn something like an email challenge or a Facebook group challenge into a podcast series.

We can also be looking at repurposing old Facebook lives, webinars, or Instagram lives. We can be repurposing those into content, which caveat here, this is why we record everything, love. This is why we are always recording and always saving because you never know when something's going to get real useful again.

I want to encourage you to look at where can you be getting more value from what you're already producing. This is one of the things we cover a lot when we sit down for that Q4 strategy planning in September with our clients is we are looking at where are the ways we can be leveraging what we've already created.

As we move through September, I will tell you right now, I can't think of a client where I won't be suggesting we repurpose at least three episodes as we go through the end of the year.

Some clients, I might be recommending more because we have stuff we run at the end of the year, every year. There is so much space in Q4 for you to be repurposing so that you can buy yourself some capacity to be either getting ahead on Q1 and buying yourself a softer reentry or just giving yourself some capacity as you move through this quarter.

Maybe this is the quarter for you. Maybe this is your busy season. I know for—and maybe this is true for you—but for a lot of our clients, this is when they're in sales mode, baby, because they are filling their high-level 12-month programs for next year.

So us being able to take some of the load off from content creation is a gift. That capacity is going to be well used somewhere else. So be looking at how can you be doing that. It gets easier when you have a production partner and you're building high quality assets year-round.

It gets easier when you are working with production team that helps you stay organized, that keeps those assets top of mind. It's one of the reasons we have the podcast dashboard that we talked about in that workflow episode, which was a re-release a couple of weeks ago. I will link to it in the show notes.

I cannot recommend enough building back capacity gets easier when you have a production partner. I would love for our team to be that production partner for you. So head on over to uncommonlymore.com/production and learn more about production services with our team. Reach out. We have a couple of spots left.

Once they're gone, we will be closed for the year as far as new production clients goes. I don't know what next year will look like as far as opening them up, to be completely honest with you right now. Reach out, let's have a conversation. I would love for our team to be supporting you in doing exactly what we're talking about today, buying back some capacity by leveraging things we've already created. All right? I'll see you right back here next week. Thanks.

Thanks so much for listening to this show. Remember that content consumption does not make changes, so commit to doing something from today's episode. Maybe it's taking action on what we talked about. Maybe it's reaching out to me and learning more about Podcast Strategy Intensives or what podcast production looks like with our team. All of that is over at uncommonlymore.com.

If you haven't yet signed up for The Podcast Newsroom, I want to remind you that is a great next step. If you're not really sure what comes next, hang out over there. Get those exclusive private episodes. That's over at podcastnewsroom.com. The last favor I will ask, because social proof is endlessly important for sure, is to leave a rating and review for the show. If you go to ratethispodcast.com/more, that's the easiest way to do it. But I would love to hear what you thought of the show, what you think of the show, and if the show has been helpful for you. I can't wait to chat with you. This is just the start of the conversation. Reach out so we can keep it going. Talk soon.