Several admired colleagues write intelligently about online content. This post is for the others who need a gentle reminder: think first, repurpose second.
My inbox is filling up with tips from marketing companies that treat content as if it were a commodity, like baking soda or apple juice. There is no such thing as “content,” just as there’s no such thing as “literature.” Customers want to know how your observations can benefit them, taking into account their exact needs, experience, skills, locations, pocketbooks, and any other pertinent factors.
It makes me nervous to get e-mails like this one:
Whenever you are writing editorial content, you must keep in mind the upstream and downstream products. This is what [name of company] does. We recycle, repurpose, and reuse content…
The content that typically goes into our email newsletters, email promotions and special reports generally is derived from our premium products – primarily, webinars, seminars and [proprietary product]. This article, for example, is actually a chapter from an upcoming report that we will be distributing in the near future.
Well, sure, everybody does that. Read a piece in The New York Times Magazine, and you often find it’s excerpted from a forthcoming book.
But marketing companies that treat content as a commodity insult the reader and turn their message into wallpaper – pretty soon, you forget it’s there.
If you are sending five emails each week, whether tips, product reviews or promotions, you also are making 260 blog posts annually (5 days/week X 52 weeks/year).
Wait a minute. That’s like asking Herman Melville to write Moby Dick so he can extract the screenplay, voice-over for the trailer, and CliffNotes, all by close of business. Charles Dickens might have given it a shot, but he got paid by the word.
There is a way to write copy you can repurpose easily. It’s called “modular content.” We wrote about it awhile back. If you want to learn what it’s all about, go to the venerable Information Mapping, Inc. Or call us. Be prepared to spend a few bucks to get your copy modularized. It is very hard work.
And please do not expect magic. We can save you money by writing copy that can be repurposed efficiently, but we cannot give you 260 good blog posts a year based on e-mails. Not even Charles Dickens could have done that.
