With more than 750 blog posts and an opinion on everything, I kept hearing myself frequently tell clients, “Oh, I have blog posts on that topic.” It was my stock answer to just about anything related to their website or doing business online.
But finding the right posts wasn’t so simple. I knew I had to get my head around organizing all my content to help my clients and readers get the full scoop on all of the things they needed to know about a particular topic. It was time to re-purpose my website content.
As you continue to blog and share your expertise online, managing all of your content becomes an issue. When you become the go-to source for your people on your topic, you will want to make it easy for them to find solutions on your website. And you may find that you can possibly monetize the expertise you are sharing on your website.
My blog archives were a mixed bag. Some of my past archive of posts were great, some out of date and many covered the same subject from various angles. All of these posts remain free and are searchable to website visitors.
But, I wanted to find the posts that were most relevant to my readers who are either in the process of creating a website or learning how to get traffic to their sites after launching them.
So let’s say a client wanted to read my best posts about starting an email newsletter for her business. In fact, this was the case and was the impetus to organizing all of my relevant email posts into one document that I reworked into an ebook, Epic Email Marketing, which I sold as a passive income.
To organize my posts, I used a free WordPress plugin called, Anthologize. This little gem of a plugin, allowed me to create a Word .doc of all of my posts, arranged by category, right from my WordPress dashboard. You can use Anthologize to do a data dump of all of your posts or you can choose a category or topic area and cherry pick the posts you want to include in each area. I chose the category route and then combined like categories to create a more manageable number of content buckets. These topic areas were the result of my efforts:
1. Business Skills
2. Website Content and Content Management
3. User Experience for Web Design
4. Design Skills
5. Online Marketing Skills
6. WordPress Skills
7. Technical Skills
From those buckets, I created a series of mind-maps using the free version of MindMup to outline the courses, ebooks, and webinars I could put together on my various topic areas. The mind-map led me to create the first course, the Epic Email Marketing ebook and then another, Getting Started with WordPress, a 13 module video course to help people just starting out, to create and use a WordPress website. Now Canva also offers mind mapping capability with bubble maps.
As I planned my next course in the WordPress series for people who wanted to become WordPress web designers, I realized they would need more than WordPress skills to learn to create effective websites. The mind-map reminded me that people needed the training to price, close, create and deliver amazing, effective WordPress websites. Only then would they build successful businesses as WordPress web designers.
Bingo! Those seven buckets of blog content transformed right before my eyes into the Seven Core Competency Framework for Web Design Mastery. This became the foundation for my WordPress Web Design Mastery Course, a six-month online program with mentoring that I am super excited about. It starts this week!
To find people interested in the course, I planned a three-week free webinar series of appetizers from Seven Core Competency Framework, in which I gave away some of my secrets in each of the seven areas. I sent out emails to my mailing list and Meetup people, and about 350 people signed up to attend the 3 webinars.
Although I had not talked much about the course, by the second free webinar, people attending started asking how could they sign up for my Web Design Mastery Course. By the end of the third webinar, I was ready for them with a sales page providing all of the details. I priced the course so that participants could easily recoup the cost of the program by creating one small website.
Because this training is new, I knew I would be feeling my way to the best order of class material and how to organize our class projects. For that reason, and because I wanted to work closely with each person who signed up, I decided to limit this inaugural class to a number that was manageable.
I am very excited to report that I have five people registered and we will start this experiment tomorrow afternoon September 29 with a live kick-off workshop. I will let you know how it goes. If any of you have a burning desire to join before we start, here’s the Sales Page.
But the big takeaway from this story is the power of re-purposing web content you most likely already have, and offering it to your readers/clients in an easy way for them to get the benefit of your knowledge. You may think, oh it has already been done. But I’m here to tell you that it hasn’t been done by you.
You may also suffer from the illusion a lot of experts have, that everyone already knows what it is that you know. So think about how you can offer something on your website that someone would be willing to pay you for. In addition to being a source of passive income, it is a perfect way for people to get a taste of working with you and that can lead to future engagements.
If you follow my footsteps and market your online content like this, please invite me to sign up. I love sharing the success of others!
