You’ve gotten your book published, you’ve written a zillion articles and delivered countless speeches.  Good, that’s a great library to pull from.  You obviously need to constantly communicate with your followers, to provide them with valuable content to keep them engaged however this can be incredibly time consuming.  So what’s a thought leader to do?

Repurpose, repurpose, repurpose.

Chances are you’ve got a lot of valuable content.  It’s also highly likely that you don’t have it cataloged in a way that makes it easy for you to see what you have without hunting and searching all over the place for it.  The first thing I would do is create a simple spreadsheet that itemizes all of your content.  Note the format it is in (text, video, audio, etc) and a few key words as well as the overall theme of the piece.

Next I would audit the spreadsheet to see what you have and how it might be easily converted into a different format.  For example if you’ve got a lot of blog postings but not a lot of video you can turn your posts into video very easily.  If you don’t have a lot of “tweets” go through your books and articles and pull out 100 tweets that you can set up to post automatically.

Do you have a lot of video of your presentations and workshops?  Why not edit them down into several 3 to 5 minute vignettes.  The variety of things that you can do with your existing work is almost limitless.  Repurposing what you have takes far less time than creating new content daily or weekly.  You still need to continue to create on an ongoing basis but make sure the work that you’ve already invested time and energy into is being leveraged effectively.

Remember your followers need to hear from you frequently and that everyone has different preferences when it comes to how they prefer to consume content.  Given that we’ve been writing articles, white papers and books for far longer than we’ve been using video you probably do not have a shortage of work that can be converted to other formats and broadcast to your current and future fans.

You already have a message now make sure you are delivering with the right frequency and in multiple formats to engage and build your audience.  You can even leverage content from your audience by asking them to submit videos, stories, comments and such that illustrate the impact your work has had on them, their teams and their organizations.

It’s not as overwhelming as it sounds, start by creating the catalog of your content and it will become apparent what you have that can easily be repurposed.  Your work is your greatest asset, leverage it!