12 Ways to Re-purpose Your Fashion Knowledge
Anyone in fashion will be familiar with the terms reduce, reuse, recycle. These approaches make sense because we find new ways to create items from existing resources and many other benefits. The same can be applied to our knowledge too. We can reuse or repurpose it in multiple ways to serve our customers and potential students differently.
It saves you time and energy, not having to create output from scratch. Everything hinges around the original piece of content you are sharing your knowledge within. There is always the source, the original item. Repurposing rejuvenates old material and other forms of content and allows you to serve new or existing students.
6 Benefits to Repurposing Your Fashion Knowledge
Repurposing will help you:
- Offer a wider content portfolio and expand your reach on multiple platforms.
- Boost your search engine rankings and improve your organic reach, so you are found more easily.
- Breathe new life into old content.
- Meet the needs of different audiences that want your knowledge accessible in a different way.
- Save your time creating content, as you can leave at least 80% of the original material alone and tweak no more than 20%.
- Expand your own skillset.
Let's look at these in some more detail.
1. Offer a Wider Content Portfolio
When you expand your content portfolio, you demonstrate to your audience that you are interested in helping them grow and learn in different ways and make your content more accessible. It shows that you are more than just a course creator but an individual that is willing to truly share their expertise and knowledge with anyone that needs it.
A richer, deeper and more diverse portfolio is more rewarding for your students and followers as well as you. In fact, you'll probably find that there are some types of content repurposing that you prefer doing more than others, and this encourages you to share yet more. The process can be fun and rewarding for you too.
2. Boost Your Search Engine Rankings
It's becoming increasingly difficult to show up naturally in people's search results without having to pay for advertising. By repurposing your content and sharing it multiple times on different platforms or across your own site, you increase the chances of it being found naturally.
3. Breathe New Life into Old Content
Naturally, some content will age over time. Or perhaps your skill set has improved, and your original material looks less than your current best. So repurposing tired and less than your best material gives you a chance to up your game and offer better, more accurate, higher quality content on its second iteration.
By updating older content, you improve your material's overall quality on offer without having to start new pieces from scratch every time. These updates may be as simple as including the latest data, figures or examples and then republishing it as an update to your audience.
4. Meet the Needs of Different Audiences
Different audiences have different needs. Some prefer audio over video; some prefer to read and have their content available as downloadable PDFs. Repurposing allows you to address these needs from the same intellectual property, your knowledge. Just make sure that you always indicate that the material is updated so that readers or students know there are changes in the piece that they may not have seen before.
5. Save You Time in Creating Content
I love this one. Anything that saves me time and delivers additional benefits is good in my book. Repurposing is the best way to save yourself time in creating content. You can leave at least 80% of the original material alone and tweak no more than 20%. When you create an awesome piece of fashion content, you want it to give you the most bang for your buck.
Create once, repurpose multiple times. That's the secret to efficient use of your time and limited resources.
6. Expand Your Own Skill Set
By exploring how to repurpose your content in multiple ways, you'll develop your skillset and learn as you go further, increasing your ability to tap into the exploding knowledge commerce that is waiting for you.
What Type of Knowledge Content Should You Pick?
First of all, don't repurpose everything just because you can. Not all your content is going to be worth applying the technique to. Otherwise, you'll waste time and energy needlessly. Instead, choose content from one of the following three categories.
1. Evergreen Content
This is the content that remains relevant to month-to-month and year-to-year. It's essentially timeless. So any material that doesn't age would be classed as evergreen content and will continue to work for you long after you publish it.
Therefore avoid repurposing newsworthy or timely pieces since they go out of 'fashion' quickly and people's attention toward them drops.
Anything that has a short lifespan is excluded from your evergreen list.
2. Outdated Content
Look for material that is now out of date and needs a refresh. You will find that at least 80% of it is still relevant, but it just needs a tweak here and there to bring it back to life as a contemporary piece.
3. Popular Content
Definitely repurpose popular content because if it's popular, people want more of it. So check your viewing data and figure out what content you have that could be repurposed. If it's material that you have already published online or posted on Facebook, and you have lots of comments and engagement, then the chances are this will serve as a great material for repurposing.
12 Ways to Repurpose Your Fashion Knowledge
Let's take a look at the possibilities. For the sake of an example, I'll use one of the courses I have on The Fashion Student Hub. It's a short course (about an hour) called How To Do Fashion Design Research Effectively And Never Run Out Of Ideas. It has several lessons, all of which I can select to take content from and repurpose.
In one of these lessons, students learn about the 15 sources of research to never run dry of material or ideas.
Here's how I could repurpose that individual lesson or, in fact, any other lesson from a course.
1. Turn it Into a Blog Post
I already have the script that I use for the lesson itself, which will form the basis of my blog post. All I need to do is take the script, add any links to it that might add extra value for the reader, include any images that enhance its appearance, and be ready for my blog.
If using the entire lesson is too long, I could select one section and use it.
2. Turn it Into a Podcast
The audio from the video lesson in the course could be stripped out (a two-minute task) and then used as a podcast. I could do an intro and outro for the podcast episode, add it to the lesson's audio and hey presto, I have another podcast.
3. Turn it Into an E-Book
I can also turn a lesson into an e-book with minimal extra work. I might need to expand on the content from the lesson script that I've already written, for example adding new subsections or more material.
To add some extra value, I could add graphics, perhaps ones that are already in the lesson, and insert a checklist, F.A.Q. etc. It doesn't need to be a mammoth book, and a simple e-book is all I need to be offering.
4. Turn it Into a LinkedIn Article
This is super quick since once I have created my blog post on my own website, I can then very quickly copy and paste it into an article on LinkedIn to spread awareness on this platform too. I do this every time I create a blog post. It always gets copied to LinkedIn to get extra exposure and help drive visitors to my own platform.
5. Turn it Into a SlideShare
My lesson will have several slides within it that deliver visual reinforcement of my lesson content. These will contain examples, images and bullet points. So I already have content that can be repurposed and used as a SlideShare presentation. This reaches yet another audience for me. It's free, and I'm using content that has already been created!
If necessary, I might add some additional slides or add some text and images to enhance them further.
6. Use it as a Video
The lesson already has a video, so this gives me the source material to release a video within a blog post or a free training video that I can share in multiple ways, for example, on Youtube.
7. Turn it Into an Email Series
By taking the lesson content, I can break it down into short content for an email series on the topic. Students can then subscribe to the series for free, and I generate new prospective students for other courses.
8. Turn it Into an Infographic
Infographics are highly shareable because they relay seemingly boring data (such as statistics) engagingly. So they are great for sharing lessons that contain data or where you have several content-rich categories. So my lesson on the 15 sources of research would make a great and easy infographic to share.
Free tools like Canva allow you to design an infographic without any design skill or knowledge.
I can also submit my infographic to directories that make it searchable and shareable.
9. Turn it Into a Series of Tweets
The key learning messages from the lesson can be released as a series of tweets. For example, the 15 sources of research could be tweeted and a link to the course sales page for those interested in learning more.
10. Turn it Into Visual Content for Pinterest Boards
Pinterest allows you to group images based on a specific topic or theme, making it easy for your audience to find images that you feel are valuable. I can take the images from the lesson and publish these on a Pinterest board.
11. Turn it Into Q & A Post
This is similar to a blog post but taking the lesson and repurposing it as a Q & A feature for posting on our website.
12. Turn it Into a Guide
By repurposing the course content as a whole, not just the one lesson I mentioned above, I can create an in-depth guide on the subject. This can serve several purposes, from improving my SEO (getting better search result rankings) if I write a long blog post to use it as a lead magnet (a gift). The later can be a downloadable e-book. This will be especially suited to looking for in-depth information and want a single source of information.
Alternatively, I could sell it and generate some income.
Summary
Remember, you save time by repurposing your content, and you can generate fantastic results. By repurposing, you can grow your audience, get found more easily and provide more information and benefits to your students at a lower cost to you and them.
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