Content Writing – From None to Done

March 9, 2009 by yelena
Filed under Articles, blog

I’ve been kicking myself in the pants ever since last Saturday. Let me tell you what happened before I get on with the main topic of content writing. Believe me, there’s a great lesson to learn in the next few paragraphs.

So for the last few weeks I was mulling over the idea of giving up blogging altogether. I even skipped my Wednesday post last week! Then something happened – I decided to give it another shot thanks to a great and very inspirational webinar by Craig Cannings of VAClassroom and Allison Nazarian of Get It In Writing, Inc. These two have been busier than usual putting together a copywriting course for virtual assistants over at CopywritingKingdom.com. So this was a free webinar with a sneak preview of the things to come in the course.

If you think that free preview webinars are just gimmicks for selling you a pricey product and do not offer anything good, you just don’t know Craig. Every single one of his webinars provides lots of solid tips and techniques. Essentially you get a very detailed roadmap that you can follow either on your own or by signing up for a course.

But enough about Craig; let’s talk about me kicking myself since last Saturday. That Thursday evening I felt that I just had to talk to someone about content repurposing – one of the biggest ideas explored at the webinar. I mean, here I was, spending all my free time on putting together blog posts (mostly with original content) and running out of both time and ideas for everything else (i.e. articles, white papers, even tweets).

During the webinar Allison talked about turning an article into a few blog posts, several tweet tips, a newsletter feature, possibly some autoresponders and, for the most daring – into an info product. What’s more, according to her, most entrepreneurs already have at least one info product done, they just don’t realize it. It exists as a bunch of unconnected content – e-mail responses, contributions to forum discussions, blog posts, articles, even FAQ pages. All one has to do is to bring it together by copying, pasting and editing.

Back to me again… So I sent a quick e-mail about the webinar, the CopywritingKingdom program, and creative content repurposing to a fellow VA. And then it just occured to me that, darn, this is just what Allison and Craig were talking about – content from one channel fit to be used in another channel. So I quickly turned my e-mail into a blog post. And, of course followed that up with a couple of tweets.

So far so good, right? Then last Saturday I just had to try something out with my blog, something that would potentially mess it up for good. And since it was a weekend, I was being lazy and did not run a backup right before getting down to business. And according to Murphy Law, everything went wrong.

As you can see, I was able to get the blog working again. But since I had to use a week-old backup to restore it, I lost my beautiful original post about the webinar and content repurposing. Ouch, that’s me kicking myself again! So, lessons learned last weekend:

Content repurposing saves TONS of time and makes your life so much easier
I can use “prolific” in a sentence as in “Anyone can be a prolific writer if they just repurpose content”
NEVER mess around with Wordpress without running a backup first (here’s a plugin that automates the backup process).

Technorati Tags: Craig Cannings, VAClassroom, CopyWritingKingdom.com, social media marketing, copywriting, content reuse