One of my stellar clients needed to come up with a ½ page write-up of her business for an advertising opportunity, and her deadline was quickly approaching. She wasn’t feeling creative and already had a bursting book of client appointments – no time for whipping up fresh content.

It was a topic for the last 10 minutes of one of our sessions together. She sighed, thinking we were running out of time and this would have to get pushed off. I jumped into her well-written and beautifully designed website and said, “wait, you have it all right here!” 

In just a few minutes, I highlighted sections of verbiage I especially liked and copied them into a Word document. I edited, edited, edited… and voila – there was her ½ page advertising piece. 

She couldn’t believe that task hanging over her head was done so quickly. 

The moral of this story is not that I’m an editing whiz (although I am, TBH) – it’s that, like Dorothy’s red shoes, “you had the power with you all along” (said in my best Glinda voice). 

If you’ve been in business for years, chances are you have great content here and there all over the place – blog posts, newsletters, websites, fliers. Like the scissors and tape that you suddenly need to wrap a birthday present,  you probably have no clue where they are but you know they’re SOMEWHERE in your house. You search for 2 minutes, give up and go to CVS to buy more. 

So, if you can take time to organize your gift wrapping supplies to stop those 10pm visits to CVS, you can take the time to organize your content. 

Set up folders in your cloud filing system (I’m a diehard Dropbox user). Label the folders by the top level category of what you’re writing about. For example, some folders can be created to catch: 

  • Value Proposition
  • Ideal Client
  • How I Work
  • Best product
  • How-To’s 

Now go through your website, copy and paste paragraphs that cover a specific repeatable topic/category and put them in a file to be stored in one of those folders. Go through blogs and email campaigns and Facebook posts and PowerPoint slides and LinkedIn posts and sweep up snippets of text that coincide with a particular content catcher bucket. (For those of us living in the northeast, it’s a great snow-day activity). 

It may sound tedious, but once you begin, you’ll wonder why you hadn’t thought of this before. It’s like a scrapbook of your best content, wonderfully organized and ready for repurposing. 

Looking for some help with content? Whether it’s cooking up fresh messages or dusting off an oldie and giving it a new spin, I’d be delighted to help you. Why not email me now and tell me what’s your biggest frustration when it comes to content marketing? I’ll bet we can have a very productive conversation!