Episode 121: Recycling and Repurposing Your Content For Small Business Owners
In another quick tip episode with Fiona, she talks about how repurposing old can be a good strategy for small business owners to apply in their business. She also shares what to expect when joining the next batch for her Marketing For Your Small Business Course And Coaching Program. Find out all thge finro at marketingforyoursmallbusiness.com
Topics discussed in this episode:
Introduction
Loving Op Shops
Recycling
Repurposing old content
Conclusion
Get in touch with My Daily Business Coach
Links/Resources Mentioned in this episode:
Episode transcript:
Hello, and welcome to Episode 121 of the My Daily Business Coach Podcast. I am recording this during the fifth severe lockdown here in Melbourne. And I'm really hoping that you can't hear what's going on in the background because you know, #lockdownlife. I am trying to record this in my office, which is out the back in our garden, and directly behind me, my husband is skateboarding. And he does that every single day without fail. And he's kind of built a (what do you call it) like a ramp, and he has a skateboarding area. And you know, this is life. Just have to keep things going.
So, I really hope that you can't hear all the noise in the background. And also, I wanted to tell you today before I get stuck into today's quick tip episode, just a reminder that our Marketing For Your Small Business Course And Coaching Program, yay, is available now for enrollment. So definitely check out marketing for your small business.com. You can also find it over on the My Daily Business Coach Shop. We'll link both of those in the show notes. But yeah, the Marketing For Your Small Business Course And Coaching Program is really an opportunity for you to go through the marketing field small business course which is available anytime. But go through it with me as your coach and with a group of other small business owners.
So, what happens is you go through a module online in your own time, whenever you want to do it. As soon as you purchase the course and coaching program, you get access to the course. And you go through that. And then we meet the following week. And we talk about how you found that module any questions, you might have a dig deeper into some areas of it. And at the end of this course and coaching program, you actually come out not only with a marketing plan that you share with the group you present to everyone, which is exciting and awesome to see and get everyone's feedback. But you also fully understand how to create a proper marketing strategy.
So, you can do this again and again. And again, not just you know, the year that you did the program. So I would love to hear any questions or anything you have around that. If you're eager beaver, just like I said, head on over to marketingforyoursmallbusiness.com. And you can purchase it there. If you already own the course I know quite a few people listening to this already own the course, look out for an email because you will have been sent an email that gives you a significant discount to do the coaching program. As part of that you don't have to pay for the course again. So if you're running a business, if you're thinking of starting a business, if you run a business and just feel like your marketing is always ad hoc and last minute, and you really want to get a strategic marketing plan in place, definitely check it out. And again, we'll link to that in the show notes. Like I said, today is a quick tip episode. And it's something that I do all the time, and I'm excited to share it with you. So let's get going, shall we?
So today I'm talking about recycling. And I know you're like, is this a business podcast? Yes, it is. But I wanted to talk about a few things. I guess I'm someone who grew up with op shopping as a really big pastime of my life. My mom was an avid op shopper and for anyone listening outside of Australia or the UK, you might call it thrift stores, secondhand stores, whatever you want to call it. And mum just loved finding a bag and she loved to trash and Trevor cheddar markets, she loved op shops. Every time we went anywhere, especially like little country towns or driving through, she would always be sort of looking around and she might get anything from wool. She was a really big knitter to books to crockery. You know she wasn't necessarily going in there trying to find like, I don't know designer stuff at a discount. She was just really loved having a look through things looking through how other people had you know, styled things she loved. You know, books, she loved reading and it's something that she and my father passed on to all of us but she just loved devouring like books and recipes and recipe books and we just grew up like in and out of op shops all the time. And it's something that I love doing and I love doing it with my son. I just think we can find so much treasure in what other people have you know decided no longer fits for them. And I also think with the you know, huge amount of landfill and fast fashion and fast furniture and everything else that we're seeing. It just is a really nice thing to buy something that's already been pre-owned and give it a second life. I also love antique centers if you're in Melbourne after lockdown we can be free. I love the [] antique center. There's a really good running furniture galley as well. I bought a church pew from there. There's so many places I love that stuff. I love just getting into it. But where it comes into business I guess is that - Firstly, I have found so many great business books in our shops. There is always self help and development books in our shops and and also just great fiction books and recently I came across a 1968 copy I have a beautiful book of poems by Helen Steiner Rice. And I bought it. And I've been trying in my day to kind of create moments of stillness, moments of peace, particularly as here in Australia, I know we are nowhere near, you know, everything that's going on with COVID overseas.
But we keep having these lock downs, and they're really exhausting and disheartening. And, yes, they absolutely have to happen. But the impact on small business and particularly, you know, restaurants, event places, a lot of my clients are in that space. And it's just, it's really, really hot, they have physical stores that they have to keep opening, shutting, opening, again, figuring out how they're going to get orders out, and all of that sort of stuff. It really just, you know, it goes to a standstill during a lockdown.
And so what I've been trying to do is in my own life, find moments of stillness. Now I have talked about this before, when the big big lockdown that we had last year, I went across, you know, different strategies that helped me in previous episodes, things like going for a walk every day, having a cup of tea by myself, without the kids, without talking to anyone, making sure I got off my phone, putting my phone in that kitchen overnight to charge rather than in a bedroom, all sorts of things. But I'm trying to do you know more of this as a daily practice as well. And I guess I've been influenced in part by a mastermind group that I'm part of in the US with Melissa Griffin. I'm also been influenced just by conversations, even when recently with Ryan from Plant Charmer, he came on this podcast, you can check that out. I think it's Episode 118. And he talked about it just being a daily practice something that you have to do. And for me, when I looked at all the things I'd like to do daily, to kind of, you know, help myself get through what can be a really hard time. Even though I know we're in Australia, and I also know I have an online business. So I am very, very privileged in comparison to so many. And I thought poetry is one of them. So I picked up this book from the shop recently, Helen Steiner Rice, I also own a lot of poetry books, my parents were Irish, they were very much into poetry, we grew up with poetry. And I've just sort of been getting back into those and giving myself sort of like a five to 10 minute time, I guess, to do it every single day to look at the poetry to have that moment of peace. And I think that really impacts the way that you shop for your business as well.
So that's sort of one area of recycling and the kind of what can an op shop or thrift store provide for you, as well as I guess things like furniture and other stuff that you might want for your office. But the other thing I want to talk about when it comes to that attitude of like recycling, repurposing, is looking at that in perspective of your content, or your marketing within your business. So so often, we feel like we have to always do something new start from scratch again. And I talk about a lot with my clients. In fact, so much so that I had a beautiful dinner with five of them recently. And one of them brought up this concept that I'm always talking about, and the others all laughed. And it was kind of this funny moment of sitting there with people who were previously strangers. And they all have so much in common because they all work with me on their businesses. But one of the things that I talk about is the kind of concept of core content. So create once, repurpose everywhere. That's an acronym I'm not sure exactly who came up with it.
But there's this concept of, you know, taking something and recycling it, repurposing it, reworking it. And it could be that you take you know, in this sense, the core might be a blog post that they you didn't take as your core content. And then you take elements of that blog post for different social media posts for a podcast episode, for your email newsletter. And so you've got one thing that you've created, and then you're taking various things from it. But the other kind of way of looking at it. And I guess this comes back to the concept of recycling and repurposing and op shops and thrift stores is looking at what you already have access to, or looking at, you know, what your friends or family may have access to.
So, for instance, repurposing something that already have access to it might be an article that you wrote three years ago, or a social media post that you wrote six months ago, that you know, had traction. So it's either literally copying and pasting that and posting it again, or taking that and taking the the essence from it, tweaking it, maybe adding a sentence or two to kind of bring it up to date, and then putting it out into the world. Again, I think when it comes to marketing, we often think particularly in content marketing and content strategy, that we small business owners can get very overwhelmed by oh my gosh, there's so much to create, rather than looking at what do we already have. And it can also be in terms of what I said friends and family. It could be looking at, you know, what are your business friends doing right now? And potentially, maybe they're doing something that's really awesome that you could either collaborate with them or you could ask them if you can, you know, rework part of what they're doing and share it with your audience in some way.
All of those things can really help you not feel so overwhelmed by the volume of content and the volume of marketing that sometimes we perceive we have to do in order to cut through into our audience's attention. So, one way that I do this, in my own business, in terms of recycling content or repurposing things, is to look through email analytics. So, we have been running, I've been running a I mean, I have a team. So I should say, we have been running a Sunday email that goes out every single Sunday night, Australian time. And that's been going out here every Sunday night for years. So we have at least you know, 200 of those to look through. And you can look at, you know, the open rate, click through rate, what was the engagement, and then sort of look at the ones that people were really interested in.
And, you know, repurpose that and either send it again, repurpose it into a podcast episode, repurpose parts of it into Instagram posts. Other ways that I look at things is we have a blog, we also have the podcast, we also have you noticed looking at Instagram insights and looking at the content that's resonated for particular objectives that we've had. And we've just repurpose content. So that's something that we do. Another thing that that can work that a lot of my clients work with. And I didn't mention this before, in terms of repurposing reworking is to use something like Google Alerts and go through that and sort of get these alerts on key themes or topics that your, you know, business is relevant to, and that your audience actually enjoys hearing about, and simply repurpose or rework. Some of those, of course, always give credit to whoever was the original creator of an article or anything else that you talk about.
But there's so many ways to use the concept of recycling, to help you when you're creating your marketing. And as I said before, even just going into a thrift store, and op shop, anything like that can actually really ignite, you know, ideas and creative thinking. Like I said, there's always business books available, nice op shops, there was always so many self helps, you could literally go to an art shop, or go to the self-help book section, open one of those self helps look at, you know, the topic that they're creating, and then think how could I discuss this topic for my audience, whether your audience, new parents, whether your audiences, you know, people trying to get fit, whether your audiences, you know, people really looking at nutrition for children, or, you know, buying shoes or anything else, there is just so many great content ideas, all around you marketing ideas all around you, if we can just pause for a minute, look what we already have a look what we have access to. And rather than thinking we always have to create something new or start from scratch.
So, like I said, in the beginning, the Marketing For Your Small Business course and coaching program is available. Now, it's all done online. So as long as you've got access to the internet, you can take part and we have had people, you know, all over the world buy this course, from Sweden, to South Africa, all over Australia, or parts of Asia. So if you're out there, you already own the course, like I said, look out for an email, because you get a significant discount to come as part of the coaching program. But things like this is the sorts of topics that we dive deep into, so that we look at marketing, not just from a perspective of achieving things like sales, and you know, brand awareness, but also looking at your mindset and your overwhelm and setting up systems and processes that aid both of those things. You know, it really gives you a strong confident mindset to go out and market and you really understand why marketing and what the objective is and how it's going to help your audience and then reduce the overwhelm because you've got clarity. And I really do believe that when you have clarity, you have confidence. If you have a direction, you know what you're doing, then marketing becomes this thing you can actually enjoy, rather than kind of resent in your business. So like I said before, the URL for that is just marketingforyoursmallbusiness.com. We'll link to that in the show notes and everything that I talked about today will be in the show notes in full and you can find them over at mydailybusinesscoach.com/podcast/121. All right, I'll see you next time. Bye.
Thanks for listening to the My Daily Business Coach podcast. If you want to get in touch, you can do that at mydailybusinesscoach.com or hit me up on Instagram at @mydailybusinesscoach.
