Earn Money From Your Content: Never Use a Piece of Writing Once
How to can, clone, and re-purpose your hard work
As writers we get paid only after we’ve done the work. Writing is a speculative craft. Like movies, we don’t know if we’ve written something good until the sheep is out of the barn.
If you write a bad novel, say, you might lose a year of your life to the project.
Some writers would let the project die.
The more-efficient ones would use the content repeatedly. Maybe your novel isn’t good enough for the shelf, but a few chapters would make for entertaining email.
Or that popular Medium story you wrote might make a great book or course.
When we trade time for money, it’s critical we re-use our content forever. Not only should be re-purpose our stories, but our books and courses as well. We don’t get the time back. Why not have our writing do more work for us?
Anything you write is fair game for re-purposing.
When we write a piece, we have the opportunity to put that bit of writing to work, forever. Instead of allowing our writing to become disposable — such as our one-off Medium stories — keep it alive by re-purposing the writing until you’ve squeezed every bit of juice from the lemon.
Where to re-purpose your writing
Let’s say you write a Medium story. For most, that’s the end of the line. Maybe the story earns five bucks over its lifetime. There, it dies a slow, quiet death as the writer works hard to create another five buck story.
But that little story could be worth thousands of dollars for you.
Remember, we writers trade our most-valuable asset, time, to create our work. We can’t get our time back. No matter how hard we try. Although you wrote a free story in the beginning, it doesn’t mean you can’t profit from the writing later.
Isn’t it best to use every last drop of our content. Not once, but dozens of times?
Pro writers do this all the time. They bundle free podcast episodes into a paid course. They bundle blog posts into a paid book. Your tribe will pay dearly for curation. We don’t have time to sift through all your stuff to uncover the gems.
We need you to do the work for us. We’ll pay you for the effort.
Here are some great places to re-purpose your content:
- Turn an article into a blog post
- Turn an article into a podcast (Read it aloud into your phone. Done.)
- Turn an article into a YouTube video
- Turn a book into a series of emails over six months
- Turn a short story into a free opt-in lead-generation tool
- Turn your book into a high-ticket course
- Turn an article into a book
- Turn a series of high-traffic Medium posts into a book, course, or video series
- Cut-up snippets of your stories and post them on social
…you get the idea.
Can it. Clone it. Like that sheep, but less-weird.
Don’t let your valuable writing time get used once and discarded. The power of being a writer comes from our ability to have our work live beyond the time it took to create it.
We put in a lot of time up-front, but with content re-purposing, our writing will live long-after the time we sat to create it.
Email is a great place to re-purpose content
If you want to earn a lot more money from your writing, you need an email list. Email is a great way for writers to sell their work automatically, giving them more time to practice their craft, while spending less time selling.
- You can drip a book into multiple chapters via email
- You can send weekly short stories
- You can send relevant articles you’ve published elsewhere
…and you can send periodic offers to buy your work.
If you want to build your email list (before you need it), I have a special opportunity for you.
Guarantee your seat, before your fellow writers beat you to it. Here’s a link to my 7-day, Tribe 1K email masterclass. It’s free. If you sign-up today you’ll start today.
I’ll show you how to get your first 1,000 subscribers (or your next 1,000) without spending a hot nickel on ads.
We’re waiting for you.
Enroll in my Email Masterclass. Get Your First 1,000 Subscribers
August Birch (AKA the Book Mechanic) is both a fiction and non-fiction author from Michigan, USA. As a self-appointed guardian of writers and creators, August teaches indies how to make work that sells and how to sell more of that work once it’s created. When he’s not writing or thinking about writing, August carries a pocket knife and shaves his head with a safety razor.
