Have you ever gotten hooked into one of those diet plans where, in addition to all the mindset mumbo-jumbo, macro-nutrient monitoring, and pages and pages of recipes (absolutely zero of which look the least bit appetizing), they also try to teach you to plan your entire week of meals in advance?
And not only do they want you to plan the meals and buy the entire week’s groceries in one trip, but they want you to do all the meal prep on Sunday and freeze everything in tidy little portions so you can just pull it out on the appointed day and throw it together in a flash.
I’m sure that works for some people–like .001% of the population–but for most of us living in the real world, forget it. I mean, do these people not realize that they’re working with humans here?
Maybe I’m being a bit harsh. Even I try to be efficient with my meal planning and cooking from time to time.
Case in point: The other day, I cooked a large pot of homemade spaghetti sauce for spaghetti one night, then used it as the sauce in baked mostaccioli the next night, then for baked meatballs with a salad the next night. I even had some left over that I froze to use with some rotini for a quick lunch sometime in the future.
Look it me being all efficient!
Unfortunately, that’s a rare occasion. I’m more likely to end up running to the store to grab some ingredients and throw something together for dinner at the last minute.
But I’ll give the meal planner crowd their props. I’m sure that they save tons of time each week compared to us slackers.
Anyway, you’re probably wondering why I’m talking about meal planners in a blog post about running your consulting business.
Fair enough. Here’s where I’m going with this…
Anyone who runs a consulting business and wants to grow their presence and reputation in their field can learn a lot from meal planners. Specifically, two big lessons:
- Intentionality–In order to plan and prep a whole week’s worth of meals at one time, you have to have a big picture plan in mind. You want a variety of meals, you need to make sure everyone likes all the recipes your thinking about fixing, you need to make sure the food you plan to cook is healthy, etc.
- Efficiency–If you can buy an item in a larger size or quantity and use it in multiple recipes across the week, you can save some coin. You wouldn’t want to buy a five pound bag of potatoes if you’re only going to make one recipe during the week that uses potatoes and it only requires three or four. You’ll end up a couple of weeks from now with some rotten potatoes smelling up your pantry.
And if you’re an educational consultant trying to put out content to achieve your content marketing goals of engaging with and making an impression on your audience, you need to apply those same lessons in your approach.
- Intentionality–Instead of just writing a blog post or creating a video about whatever topic hits you each day, you want to think longer-term. Is there a larger theme that you can explore in depth across multiple pieces over a month’s time or longer? If so, create a content calendar and plan it out in advance. This will allow you to mine that topic in such a way that your audience comes to see you as a real expert on it.
- Efficiency–Creating all of your content as one-off pieces is highly inefficient. Instead, in order to get much more mileage from your intellectual property, focus on repurposing your content in multiple ways. You just wrote an in-depth article as a guest post on someone’s blog? Great! Don’t stop there. Take a few nuggets from the article and turn them into social media posts. Do a short video where you talk about the main takeaways from the article and post it on your YouTube channel or your website. Write multiple emails about the article content to share with your in-house mailing list. You’ve done the heavy lifting by writing the article. Repurposing takes much less effort, as you don’t have to do the initial creative thinking a second time.
Now, there’s a lot more to repurposing content than I can cover in today’s post. In fact, I’m planning to write a series of blog posts on the topic in the coming days (that’s me being intentional–go me!).
So, keep your eyes open for those posts on the topic of content creation. Who knows, soon you could rival those meal planners in efficiency!
To Your Success,
Willy
P.S.–Have a particular trick for repurposing content that you’d like to share? I’m always looking to learn the best approaches people are using out there.
If you don’t mind, just reply in the comments and share that with me. If I like it, I might turn around and write a blog post about your repurposing strategy so everyone can benefit from your awesomeness.
Thanks in advance!
