How to Repurpose a Single Piece of Content in to a $997 Course
By: Jeff Herring
Tags: Content Marketing, Writing, Content Strategy, Writing Tips, Content Repurposing

Profitable Content Repurposing

How to Repurpose a Single Piece of Content in to a $997 Course

And get paid to do it over and over again…

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[This column is adapted from a recent webinar show. If you’d like to view the webinar show too, click here]

One of the key strategies I see left out of the world of Content Repurposing is turning your content into course and other products. Since in my Content Marketing Model, you create your products when you create your content, this makes no sense to me.

Here’s what you’re going to get in this column:

The content to course mindset — Just a side note, I had a particularly good time creating the slide for that one.

Secret number one — How to create content you can repurpose into a course.

Secret number two — How to know with certainty which content to repurpose into a course.

Secret number three, How to repurpose a single piece of content into a 997 course.

Now those three steps may sound simple. One of the ridiculous myths online is if it’s simple. it can’t be serious. The exact opposite is true. Simple is the most serious, because it’s the most successful.

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So let’s get going. The course to content mindset. Here’s the graphic I had fun creating. This is where most people are stuck.

I remember this all the way back when I went full time in ’07. Being on a teleseminar one weekend, and they were telling us that it was going to take a year to create a course, and would cost $2,000 to do it. I was laughing, because I’d created a course and a product that weekend.

But most people get stuck in believing that it’s hard, takes forever, and you never want to do it again. Anybody ever feel that way? As they were looking at creating a course, or creating a product. It’s hard, it takes forever, and I don’t know that I even want to do it the first time. Much less again.

Don’t worry, I’m sure you’re not alone. It’s not your fault. It’s the myth that’s been the told out there.

From now on, this will be easy for you. The way to make it even easier, is to do one this way. Once you do that, boy do your eyes open up? Because the reality, the mindset I want you to have, the content to course mindset, is as follows. The mindset I want you to adopt is its easy, fast, and almost most importantly, repeatable. It’s scalable. You can do it over, and over again, if you want.

Now, the reason I picked this picture of somebody cruising along with a suitcase like this is, the next time you catch yourself thinking,

“Well that’s already been done, or there’s no more good ideas out there, or even better. No more good domain names out there.”

I just bought repurposingrocks.com today. Please remember this:

We put people on the moon before anybody thought about putting wheels on suitcases.

If you’re old enough to have carried a suitcase, a heavy suitcase in an airport, or from the car to the hotel, you know what I’m talking about.

Isn’t that amazing? We put people on the moon before we ever put wheels on suitcases.

So there’s plenty of good ideas out there. There’s plenty of good products to make. There’s plenty of people that want them, and even plenty of good domain names out there.

So it’s not hard. It doesn’t take forever, and you will want to do it again. When you do it, the easy, fast, repeatable way, which we’re going to do right now.

So here are 3 secrets to repurposing a single piece of content into a $997 course:

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How to create content you can repurpose into a course, right? Now, one of the things we’re teaching in RepurposewithPurpose.com, as you might imagine from that name, is how to create content from the get-go, with the intention of repurposing it. Repurposing it to build your audience, build your traffic, build your visibility, and repurposing it into products.

That’s what we’re focused on today.

The best way to do that is with something that I call Chunk Templates.

What the heck are Chunk Templates?

Well, Chunk Templates are when you’re doing content in numbers, like three mistakes, five tips, seven benefits, three myths, five things to avoid, seven things to always do. Because then with each one of those three, five, or seven chunks, you can turn those into a module, or into part of a course.

So now does it have to be three, five, or seven? No, it can be one, two, four, six, whatever.

Once you get past seven, you’re getting a little bit too much. You probably ought to have a part one, and part two.

But this is how I want you to change the way you create your content. Whether it’s in text, audio, video, meme, graphics, infographics, whatever. Chunk Templates, three, five, and seven. This is secret one.

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You got all this content, how do I pick one to build a course around that you know your audience wants, that you know your audience is going to pay for?

Well, there’s some simple ways to do it. Basically your audience tells you. Let me give you a good example here.

Every single time I’ve sat down to create a product, and wasn’t sure which one to create, I listed five. Some of them are ones I was thinking of creating, some of them I was thinking, “No, they’re not going to want this. They’ve already had something like this.”

Here’s what happened. Here’s the results. Never once, not once, have you all picked the one I was thinking about, and thinking you would want, and thinking of doing for you.

Not once.

Oftentimes, you all have picked the one that I thought, “No, that’s not it. No.” It just amazes me what happens when I pay attention to my audience.

Because when you pay attention to your audience, and your audience tells you what they want, and then you deliver it, how much more predisposed to buy do you think they are? Enormously predisposed to buy it.

Now a t story is from a few years back when Mike Stewart and I created Live Video Secrets, the first course ever on Facebook Live.

We were recording video for this upcoming course. We discovered through our research, that not everybody, even most people didn’t have Facebook live yet.

And we both realized we can’t put this out there, if most people can’t access the main tool. That would annoy the crap out of me. So we have to wait on this. And they said it’ll probably be a few months.

“Okay. Great.”

So I drove away from Mike’s later that day thinking:

“Crap, this was the product that was going to offer, and I need to put a product out there.”

I used a very important strategy that you may follow. I drove to one of my satellite offices, also known as hiking trails, the lake, or restaurants. Chose Rice, my favorite sushi restaurant. I read something the other day that said, “for every sushi roll you eat, you take a month off your life.” I know for a fact that’s not true, because I’d have been dead in 1983.

So it was mid-afternoon, I’d been there enough know the staff. I get my table, and I pull out my laptop, and I’m thinking:

“What am I going to make? What am I going to create?”

I wrote five things down. The one I did not think y’all would pick, because I’d done a course before on it, that’s the one y’all pick. That’s where Repurposing Content Secrets was born.

Pay attention to your audience, and ask them. Ask them. Some of you were saying,

“But I don’t have an audience yet. Who do I ask?”

One of the quickest ways to get an audience is over on Medium right now. Go out, and ask people that you know that fit your ideal client, that could be on your list. Ask friends, ask family, ask people online, ask colleagues, asking on your Facebook. Ask.

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Here comes secret number three: How to repurpose a single piece of content into a 997 course. Now that sounds just too good to be true, does’t it?

But it’s not, because I’m going to show you. Now remember at the beginning of this show, I said one of the myths online, if it’s simple, it can’t be serious. I’m about to prove that myth very, very wrong.

All right. The column we’re going to use as an example here came from an article I put up a few days ago, about seven great ways to repurpose your content. All I’ve done is taken each of those seven ways, and turned it into a training module. So seven great ways, we got seven modules.

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What are those empty boxes for? I’ll show you in a little bit. As I remember the first way that was suggested was articles. What a surprise, right? Articles.

That’s the first module. Now I’d come up with a fancier name than article module, but I just want you to see the topic.

Here is how I would build out that module. A lot of it would be done live. I would schedule this, invite the members of the course, and have them there live. So they can get their questions answered. So they can help me build this thing, you can make better courses that way. I have a whole backstage pass system that gets people in early, where you basically… Folks, how many of you would like to get paid to create your first course, or to create your next course? I’ve been paid to create every course I’ve created the last 10 years.

First thing I would do is in a Webinar training or a video training, I would do a video. Now you don’t have to do it live. You can do it recorded. Then I’d have that video transcribed at Rev.com or Otter.io. Then from the things we said to do in that video I would create a checklist; a high value item. People love it because it makes life easier. If it fit I would then create a template for doing it faster and easier. Then I would have a Q&A, either as part of that live training, or what you can do in some courses, is do the live training one day, and then do the Q&A after people have had some time to play with it.

So let’s go to one of the audio ones. I did two audios and three videos. Let’s go to this one, and it would be a podcast.

Now, you know I like to keep things simple. But this is where this gets a little complicated. Please hang in there with me. It’ll make sense in just a moment, right?

Some of you that know me well caught the sarcasm in my voice. All you would do to make this module is the same five things. A video, a webinar about repurposing into a podcast, the transcript, the checklist, the template, and the Q&A. Folks that’s it.

I could have made this harder for you. I’ve got a master’s, and half a PhD, but why? I don’t want to be a gooroo, G-O-O-R O-O. I want to see people do well, and thrive. That’s my whole thing in everything I do. From this stuff to the volunteer work to when I was a counselor psychologist. Make it simple. Help people thrive.

Now, for the other five modules. Anybody got an idea what you do? TWhat would we do for the other five modules? You would just do the same. Now, rinse and repeat.

This makes it very simple for you to create a product, the course, and do it over and over again. Follow the same formula, because the content for each of the five pieces is going to be different for everyone.

Now, do you have to follow this? No. What I want you to do, is take this formula. Take this template, use it, master it, and then make it your own. And add your own pieces to it.

Now, you notice there’s two blank spaces here, and a lot of people leave these out. I don’t.

This first pre-module, or pre-training one is the Get Started Here module. This is very important, if you have a course that’s not going to start right away. It’s called a Stick Strategy. You want people to stick around, and you give them so much good stuff at the beginning. It works.

Then you do your seven modules, and you come down here to this one, and I call this the Putting it All Together module. That’s when you review, answer more questions, give examples, case studies, maybe an example where you build something of your own, or someone else’s. So people can see that they can do it.

And that ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, is a darn good course, right there. Could it be three modules? Yep. Could it be five months? Yep. Could it be one module? Sure. It could be one simple course with one training module.