This is part of my Makin' Bacon podcast, you can check out all the episodes or subscribe on your favorite podcast player.
There is never enough time.
Once I started implementing this one method in my blogging process, it exponentially increased my efficiency. I've gotten more done, I've gotten better quality content out there, and I'm moving my blog forward much more quickly.
I'm going to show you how you can harness this superpower for yourself.
This episode from the Makin' Bacon Podcast podcast is available on all your favorite podcast platforms including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast, and Google Podcasts.
The video of the interview is also available on the Makin' Bacon YouTube Channel.
One of the things that food bloggers consistently run into is that there's not enough time to get everything done, we want to get done. There's just not enough time in the day.
There's too much that can go into blogging to ever accomplish all of it. But good news, I found something I consider a superpower and that's to reuse, reuse, and reuse.
Taking the same content, the same concepts, the same ideas and information, and reapplying them in different ways. It's the fastest way to grow your blog, get more content out, and save time.
Way too many bloggers I hear from talk about putting out a recipe and then that's it. They might promote it on social media, but once they write the recipe and put it on their blog, that's all they planned to do with it. And that is such a waste.
There's so much more value you can get out of that content. And the more you can reuse the same content, the less new content you must create. It's a win-win scenario and it can really increase your efficiency.
To help highlight how effective this can be. I wanted to share how I've reused content over the years to become much more efficient.
I've grown a blog that has over 1,000 pages of content. I've put out 14 cookbooks, 2 video courses, 2 email courses, and I've done a lot of recipe content creation for external companies and equipment manufacturers. And there's no way I could have done all of that if I wasn't reusing content smartly and intelligently.
Here are 4 examples of how I've harnessed this "reuse, reuse, reuse" power in the past and show you how you can apply it to your own blog.
This first example is a pretty basic one. When I started blogging 10 years ago, I created a website on sous vide. I had several guides on it for how to use sous vide for different types of meat, and I had probably 15 or 20 recipes. I was getting a little bit of traction. I had about 2,000 monthly visitors, which I thought I was pretty good at the time, and I thought, what more can I do?
And so I took all that content I'd written, I packaged it and I self-published a cookbook. I think I wrote 2 new recipes for my cookbook. It's a small cookbook, only 70 or 80 pages, black and white, and it only had content from my blog. And I made more selling that cookbook in the first month than I did in the rest of my blogging career combined!
And you know how many people complained about it just being content that was available for free on my website? None. Not a single person wrote in to say, "Hey, I can get this content for free!", because they didn't care about that. They wanted a physical cookbook that they could hold in their hands.
So now I plan on this.
Every single recipe in a cookbook of mine that has a photograph is also on my blog. Every one. You know what those recipes do? They bring in Google search traffic. They bring in new fans, and you know what those fans see? Hey, this recipe is from my cookbook. Are you interested in purchasing a copy? It's perfect marketing and is reusing all that content.
I've also reused these recipes in lead magnets, video courses, licensed them to equipment manufacturers. Some recipes of mine have been reused 7 or 8 times already, and they keep getting used and people keep getting value out of them.
So what content have you created? What recipes or guides can you put together and package in a new way to get in front of new fans?
The second example is what I call complimentary content. That's coming up at something that will be presented in different ways, but uses the exact same content.
My best example of this is that I wanted to put together a detailed email cooking course. I thought it would be a great lead magnet, which it was. You can check out my article on that: Case Study: Free Email Cooking Course.
The course takes someone from not knowing how to use sous vide to being an intermediate sous vide user who has confidence in the method.
And so I put this content together. It was 20 emails with 40 lessons in it. It's a really long email cooking course but I took that same content and put it on my website.
Every article in the course was also freely available on my website and at the top of each one of those I said "From My Exploring Sous Vide Email Course, Sign Up Now if You Want to Take It".
It drove a ton of traffic from Google. It drove a ton of signups from those header links and it was a great way to bring in a lot of new people.
I also took that exact same content and I packaged it together in a cookbook that I could sell for $24. I sold almost a thousand copies of that book. I also took a lot of the concepts that I developed for that course and put it together for a video course that I produced.
The same content, put in 3 or 4 different formats. And I only had to do the work once to create it, instead of coming up with all new stuff for each one of the different formats.
And again, you know how many people complained about reusing the content? None. No one complained because it was helpful to have that either in a book form, all in an email course being sent to them, or being on the website if they just needed an answer to a specific question that was answered by an article that I did.
So think about your upcoming projects and the themes that you're going to be working on and say, "Is there some way that I can come up with not only some new recipes for the blog, but tie it together in a way that can be a lead magnet or video course, or put it in a book?".
It's going to maximize the exposure you get from the content and really increase your efficiency.
The third example is something that I harp on all the time, and that's bloggers will put together recipes and guides and create a PDF download that they can sell on their website and that's it.
You went through all this effort putting together a PDF, there's a lot of work putting together the recipes and the content. By just putting out a PDF on your website, you're limiting yourself.
Take that exact same content and create a Kindle book. It might take you a week or two, but that's a lot less time than it took you to put together the entire ebook.
If it's long enough, over 50 or 60 pages, put together a print on demand cookbook to get on Amazon.
These processes are pretty easy to do now. They're not going to cost you anything upfront in fees and it's going to maximize your exposure.
Unless you're getting hundreds of millions of visitors a month, Amazon has more customers than you do. Getting in front of their audience is a great way to expand the people that are going to hear about you.
You already created all this content. It's a great PDF download. Awesome. Take that and put it out everywhere, so people can consume your content in the method that they want to consume it.
The fourth example is what I like to call "refine and reuse". And that's coming up with a concept that you think has a lot of value and iterating on it again and again in different formats to improve it and to keep testing out if this is something people want.
The best example from my blog is whenever you get started with sous vide, every time you're cooking something tender, you need to measure the thickness of it, and that determines the exact time you need to cook it. So you measure the thickness, you look up the corresponding time in a chart online, and then you can get started cooking.
So we started by creating some good time and temperature charts. You could go to my website. You knew that the meat is an inch and a half thick and my chart would tell you how long you needed to cook it. There were a lot of different options: whether it's chicken or beef, if you wanted to pasteurize it or not pasteurize it.
That was one of the most popular pages on our site. So we thought, how else can we use this information or simplify the process.
What we came up with was a lead magnet. It's a downloadable PDF that you can print out at home, and it's a little sous vide ruler that you can hold up next to the food. It has the times already on there so you don't have to go to your computer anymore and look it up. And that drove a ton of signups to our website.
At the time, we were doing a lot of iPhone app development, so we thought, Hey, this would make a perfect app. You can hold your phone up next to it.
So we built it and released it on the iPhone and Android. It drove hundreds of downloads of that app and expanded our brand.
Because of that, we thought, Hey, this is something people love, so we actually put together a physical plastic ruler that we have produced.
People can buy it from us, it's plastic so they can wash it in the sink. It's flexible. It's not just paper and it's going to get soggy with raw meat juice.
We've taken this concept, reapplied it 4 or 5 different times, and got value every single step along the way.
And if we would have put it out as a lead magnet and no one would have used it. We never would have gone through the next steps.
So it was a great way to kind of start small and then test out different ideas to see what really resonates with your audience before moving forward. Then the ideas that do resonate, reuse them again and again and again, in different formats. Improving a little bit every time and getting it into the hands of your fans in the format that they want.
I feel like reusing content is almost like a superpower. A lot of people don't do it, and if you start figuring out how you can work it into your blogging workflow, you will become so much more efficient.
People will look at what you do and say, how did you do so much work? The trick is you didn't. You did the work once and then you applied it and you used it in multiple places.
So take a look at your workflow. Take a look at the content you already have out there. What are your popular posts? What resonates with your fans? And figure out how you can reuse them in different ways to save yourself time, energy, and honestly, to serve your fans even better.
If you want to read some more about this, here are a few helpful links.
How do you approach reusing content? What do you have that you may be able to repurpose and reuse? Let me know in the Makin Bacon Facebook Group or the comments below.
Hi, I'm Jason Logsdon! I'm an adventurous home cook and the head writer and photographer for Amazing Food Made Easy. I grew my income to 6-figures by focusing on serving my Fans by providing massive value, and I want to help you do the same.
