Leverage Your Content for New Revenue Streams

For busy business owners, the most efficient way to create new revenue streams is to take what you know (and what you’ve already created), and leverage your content into multiple paid services and products. It will dramatically increase your revenue stream and holistically serve your customers.

When you have a deep interest and knowledge in a specific topic, you often forget two things:

1. How much you know about your topics
2. How much other people would like to learn from you

If you want to leverage all your knowledge and skill into new revenue streams, you first must gather it all together and organize it into a system or framwork. This way, your audience understands how each piece of information fits into the bigger picture. Otherwise, it’s simply disjointed information and your audience can’t understand it — and worse, can’t implement it.

And if your audience can’t implement it, they won’t buy from you.

You might be surprised that you already have a “system” or “framework” about how all your knowledge fits together. But it might be in your brain instead of out in the world, which will doom you to failure.

Where you can leverage your content

Once you organize all your knowledge, skills, tools and techniques, it’s time to share it with the world in a cohesive plan. There are two main places to leverage your content:

• as free content in your marketing, to reach your target audience and get known. Content marketing works whether you are selling directly to the consumer (B2C marketing) or whether you are selling to other businesses or corporations (B2B marketing).
• as paid content to give them in-depth instruction so they can implement your ideas and succeed (and paid programs to support them while they’re implementing what they’ve learned).

There are three ways to share content: teaching, speaking and writing. Everything falls into one of these three categories.

Free Content

Free content is the cornerstone of a content marketing plan.

The strategy of content marketing is that you share a small amount of useful content for free, and then expand on that content and teach how to implement it in your paid offers.

Sharing free content is an excellent way to:

1. Get known in your field as a content matter expert
2. Stand out in a crowded marketplace by going beyond a content matter expert — become a “thought leader” and share your unique framework or system
3. Become a trusted source of information, the go-to person a client thinks of first when they’re looking for guidance
4. Drive traffic to your website, which increases your reach and builds your pool of potential
5. Nurture the not-ready customer through the buying cycle – because some prospective customers are early in the buying cycle and need “starter” content from you rather than a paid offer.

Free content delivery methods include: email marketing, blogs, podcasts, video channels, social media content, free speaking gigs, free webinars/tutorials, case studies, whitepapers, tools, worksheets, checklists, books, and ebooks.

Too many delivery methods to choose from?

Start with the delivery method that you are most comfortable with. Some people love to write while others detest it. Some people are natural speakers at live events, while others prefer to pre-record their speaking and teaching via video.

There is no “perfect” way to do content marketing. There’s only one solid rule: Be consistent. Produce content on a steady basis and get out in front of your audience often (without deluging them). I’ve seen too many marketing plans fail miserably because a small business owner started a blog or podcast, posted 3 times, and then abandoned it to try something new.

Design a monthly content marketing plan that makes production and posting easy. But please — be aware that your audience is hungry for your information AND they’re also busy — so respect their time. Some social media gurus say you have to post multiple times a day. There is no way your audience can keep up with that firehose of information and you’ll lose audience if you overwhelm them.

Here’s my blog post on how to use teaching to grow your business.

How to leverage free content:

Don’t just post it in one place — post it everywhere your customer might see it. For example, you have a blog on your website. What if a prospective customer doesn’t know about your website? They’ll never see your blog.

Go ahead and post it on social media and in your email marketing, too. Use the same content for a video tutorial on YouTube, and add it to a free or inexpensive webinar on the same topic.

Don’t forget traditional marketing options; send your article to the local newspaper, the regional business journal, or a national industry magazine. Share your ideas with podcast, radio, and TV hosts who are looking for new guests to interview.

Paid Content

This is where you build your revenue streams.

Your paid offers might be the final end-product that a customer buys — OR it might be the gateway product leading to higher sales. For instance, a $249 two-day workshop can lead to a $30,000 a year mastermind group.

Here’s my blog post on how to start and run a mastermind group.

Much like free content, there are many delivery methods for paid content.

Speaking:

Get paid for giving keynote speeches on your topic at conferences, events and corporate meetings. I’ll add here “facilitating corporate meetings” when you are brought in both as a content matter expert and an expert at leading corporate or board meetings.

Coaching and consulting fits under “speaking” when you work one-on-one with clients. While it’s not a supremely leveraged offer, it is still a paid offer to consider. People will always pay to work privately with a content expert when they want quick results or have a unique situation where a training workshop would be inappropriate.

Teaching:

You have many choices on how to deliver paid training content. You can deliver it live, in-person through a workshop or conference. The same content could be delivered live, virtually via Zoom video conference. You can pre-record video tutorials, or bundle the teaching into a membership group or mastermind group.

Writing:

Nothing beats a book for being seen as a thought leader — especially if it’s via a traditional publisher. Also, consider self-publishing a book — it’s easier now than ever before. Look into getting paid to write articles for other publications or a chapter in someone else’s book. Ebooks are a quick way to get your information in the hands of your audience. (Hint: ebooks don’t need to be as long as traditionally-published physical books. You can create and sell a 50-page ebook easily.)

Mastermind Groups and Membership Programs:

Often a combination of speaking and teaching, this form of group consulting and coaching allows you work with larger groups of clients in one place. It’s excellent for leveraging your time and marketing, as group work often yields more revenue than one-on-one work.

• Mastermind groups allow you to facilitate groups of peers who help each other to reach goals and solve problems by sharing collective wisdom and holding each other accountable for getting things done. You’ll use all your skills as a mastermind group facilitator: speaking, teaching, coaching, consulting, and facilitation.
• Membership programs are another way to leverage your time, and can include teaching, group Q+A meetings, events, pre-created training material, etc.

Example of how to leverage paid content:

This is where having a system or framework that organizes all your content becomes a revenue stream!

Let me use my One Action Now book and workshop as an example to show you how I leveraged one paid offer into five paid offers, one leap at a time.

In this example, my offers grew organically from one to another — essentially, I stumbled into the other paid offers because clients asked for them.

But once I mastered this process, I now intentionally create product lines into tiers like this:

• First, I worked one-on-one with private small business clients. Though it was not intentional, it did help me to design and test my “system” in the real world. Truthfully, I never really acknowledged it as a system for helping small business owners to set goals and create project plans. It was simply my repeatable process I used all the time. I noticed over several years my private consulting clients kept bringing the same problems to our meetings. When something worked for one client, I tried it with the next client. If a step didn’t work, I tweaked it so the whole system worked flawlessly. Over time, I realized what I was teaching them could be gathered together and taught in a logical way — into a system or framework that could be easily shared with others.
• Second, I began to gather everything I knew, and designed a framework that made sense. I wasn’t looking to create a full workshop — I simply wanted to write a short e-book for my paying mastermind group members about how to set goals, create project plans, manage their time, and stop procrastinating. Once they read the e-book, they wanted to learn more and asked me if I could teach a fuller version as a workshop.
• Third, I designed my One Action Now workshop. I taught this workshop for three years, both privately to my mastermind group members and publically to other small business owners outside my group. I also taught it as a paid class at national industry conferences. That way, instead of teaching one client at a time, I could teach a group of students, thus leveraging my time and increasing my income. Over those three years, I added to and tested my system. Plus I got feedback from students about what worked and didn’t work for them, which allowed me to perfect my system.
• Fourth, I wrote my full One Action Now paperback book. Book sales led to more people joining my paid workshop and my mastermind groups – a virtuous cycle!
• Fifth, I license my One Action Now workshop and provide train-the-trainer workshops, so that other small business consultants can teach my One Action Now workshop to their audiences. This is the “ultimate leverage” — my content gets out to a bigger audience but I don’t have to do all the work.

It took several years for One Action Now to form because I wasn’t intentional about my goal. Now, when I create a new paid offer, I’m already designing the next few related paid offer and get the whole set of offers launched quickly. Planning and a strong goal is the key!

This is just one example of how to leverage paid content into more paid offers. There are dozens of ways to do this. Be creative — you can mix and match your offers so that they revolve around your unique intellectual property, which helps you to stand out in a crowded marketplace.

What’s next for you?

Think about all the information, wisdom, and skills you have. Think about what people need to know and/or what they ask you about all the time. (When someone asks, “Can I pick your brains?” pay attention! It’s a clue.)

You’ll soon realize you DO have much to share with the world, you simply need to gather it, organize it, and leverage it to increase your income.

Got questions? Add a comment below. I’ll be writing more companion blog post about leveraging your content and expanding your reach. If you’d like me to narrow in on a topic that’s important to you, let me know.