How would you enjoy doubling or tripling your readership overnight?

It would be amazing!

In this post I’m going to show you a simple content strategy that I learned from Taco Bell. It doesn’t matter whether you love or hate Taco Bell, the fact is they’ve managed to attract a diverse audience by adding new offerings to their menu with the same ingredients. Here’s how…

Taco Bell has a dirty secret that every fast food joint shares: Their menu of 40 different items is only made up of 4 core ingredients. The ingredients by themselves aren’t impressive, it’s the way they combine the ingredients that keeps people coming back.

Look at your business. What can you re-purpose to deliver more value to your audience? Today I wanted to focus on newsletters. Newsletters have been around for ever. They started out on paper delivered to your business or home then moved to email. Email newsletters are still an effective tool to keep in touch with your audience but there’s a catch.

They’re missing one BIG thing.

Newsletters aren’t timeless. You send out the email, it gets read once, then it either gets buried in your inbox or deleted. And it dies.

The shelf life of a newsletter is only a few minutes. Your audience can’t bookmark a newsletter like they would an article online. The articles aren’t indexed on your site and Google so they can’t be found by people searching on that topic. And new subscribers have no way to catch up on past issues.

The best fix for this is creative re-purposing. What content from your email or print newsletters could benefit your customers on your website?
Here’s a few ideas:

• If your newsletter contains news and events, create a community section or news tab on your website.
• If your newsletter contains industry articles or trends, post them to your blog or resources tab on your website.
• If your newsletter contains product or service related content, that the content to your product pages for additional reading.

Not every part of your newsletter needs to be re-purposed on your website. It’s a great strategy to have exclusive content to keep your audience interested and attract new subscribers. But one rule remains unchanged. Your content needs to be good. Really good.

You’re not just writing for your customers anymore. Anyone searching online could stumble onto your content. Take each audience into consideration when writing.

Start by re-purposing your best content. Listen to the feedback you get from customer comments and what content gets shared by your customers. Use those insights to continually improve your content and your audience will grow from just those on your list to anyone searching for your website!

In a few days I’m going to highlight another way to re-purpose content that improve your lead generation so stay tuned!

image by  stevendepolo