Repurposing Your Content
As we considered what rewards to offer backers of our Kickstarter campaign to fund Present Yourself: the Book, we wanted to be able offer something at a low cost that we could deliver sooner than the book to support people on their public speaking journey. We thought about what we had to offer and what folks in our community might benefit from. We arrived at a downloadable guide for finding your talk topic.
One of our signature workshops is called Design Your Talk Topic, focused on helping people discover what it is that they can share with the world. We decided to repurpose the material from this workshop to make the guide.
Creating a downloadable guide based on a workshop we’ve run numerous times over the years may sound like an easy task, but there was a lot we needed to consider.
In our programs, we talk a lot about the importance of context when you’re sharing your ideas, and while the content for the guide would be based on the content from the workshop, the context of the two were completely different. The workshop is designed for a group, the guide is designed for an individual. The workshop has live guidance and facilitation, the guide could be consumed on someone’s own time.
We started by thinking about the goals of the guide, how people would access it, what they would do with it, and when. We created the structure and then started repurposing the content we had into this new format.
This process got us thinking about all of the different ways that folks in our community share their voices. There are so many different mediums available. Just like we talked about in our Kickstarter campaign for Present Yourself: The Book, which is based on an 8-week online course, different formats will appeal to different people for different reasons.
Some folks may prefer to learn at their own pace while others enjoy the structure of scheduled sessions. Some learn better by reading, others by listening. And, while some may be excited to dive into an immersive course, others may prefer to sample a topic first with something shorter.
Repurposing content into new pieces not only extends the lifetime of those learnings, it also opens them up to new audiences. We’re always looking for ways to make everything we do more accessible–whether that means format, affordability, or timing.
We’re excited to bring the lessons from the Design Your Talk Topic workshop into a new, more accessible format as the Find Your Talk Topic guide.
We encourage you to try this out. What are some of the ways you’ve shared your voice that can be adapted into other formats? Is there a talk you’ve given that would make a great article? Are you ready to dive deeper into a topic by teaching a workshop? Can the masterclass you’ve created be broken up into shorter, standalone modules?
If one of those ideas resonates with you, let us know. We’re here to help!
P.S. If you didn’t get a chance to purchase the guide through the campaign, stay tuned–you may have another opportunity!
