If time is money, then making the best use of your time is all about getting more bang for your buck. Killing two birds with one stone, stretching your ideas, and giving your content LEGS! And this is what we’re talking about today.

1. Split them into more than one piece of content

The first way you can make more than one piece of content is to split your ideas up. When writing your blog posts, planning your videos or sharing your images, ask yourself “can this actually be more than one piece of content?” Because each item you cram together is going to dilute the power that each item holds in and of itself.

Split topics into parts and spread out the sharing of that information.

Sharing images one at a time. My other business is about shooting weddings. I might be dying to show my audience a whole luscious gallery of images from a recent wedding. Instead, I schedule them out one by one and use them as opportunities to unfurl a beautiful narrative about that couple’s day or to share the value propositions for that particular brand of mine. If that wedding has a blog post with all the images in it, I can use each photo I post to Instagram and Facebook as an opportunity to drive traffic to that post where they can see everything at once.

2. Master pieces and micro pieces

Another example of splitting your content up is taking a master piece and sectioning out micro-stories which stand alone as strong-enough pieces of content. And then using those tid-bits to point users back to the master piece from which they were extracted. For example, the masters of my podcast land in your favorite podcast app every Monday. And when I have my shit together, you’ll see and hear posts on my various social platforms with short excerpts from the master episode. I try to post these on a Wednesday and a Friday. These are tiny bits that add value all on their own and drive traffic back to the master. I’m making the effort of creating this content and so I might as well go a tiny bit further to make that huge load of work produces even more value in terms of traffic to my blog, education for my audience, and content to keep me at the front of your mind.

3. Fit for Platform

When planning your content, be aware that some ideas are perfect for only one platform while others can be adapted to feel as though they were created for every platform.

When I was in ad school, we learned that an advertising concept was strong if it could be communicated only in print. As a video producer at the time, all of my ideas were complicated stories to be fleshed out as TV commercials or web videos and I was consistently being redirected to refine my ideas into something so simple and powerful that they could be communicated first as print and later as TV commercials or radio spots if that was necessary. This really trained my brain to think in terms of how to tell one story in many different ways depending on the way your audience is accessing you in that moment. It’s about reaching them not with just great content, but content that is in CONTEXT for them.

4. Recycled Content

The easiest way you can amplify previously published content is to post it again! This episode and the blog post that goes with it lands on a Monday. On a Tuesday, I’ll post and Tweet a link to it again with a “ICYMI” headline. Feed algorithms mean that most of your Facebook, Instagram or Twitter followers probably didn’t see it the first time anyway and if they did, then seeing it again reminds them of a piece of content they wanted to click before but didn’t have time. Or they want to read it again. I have never been annoyed by seeing something twice.

Another way to recycle content is to go into your archives and backlog of previously published content and sharing it again. You can simply share it as if it were new or create a new piece of content that’s an updated version that drives traffic back to the first time you spoke about that thing.

5. Treat your blog like a Wiki

Any time I use a phrase or talk about something I’ve talked about before, I turn that into a link to the original content. I do this for many reasons:

If users are wondering what I mean when I say something, and I’ve already defined that in the past, I don’t want them leaving my platform to go searching for that information.

I want to show the richness of my expertise and whether users click on those links or not, it still displays the vast amounts of information users can hope to access on my platform. It says, “I’ve been at this for a while and you can trust me”.

Tip: when I create these links, I make sure that they will open in a new tab for users. This means they don’t go down a rabbit hole and forget where they started. I ESPECIALLY do this when the link drives them outside my own site and onto Facebook, etc.

So those are 5 ways you can stretch your ideas, give more life to your content, get more bang for your time-is-money buck and give your content legs.