Best Book Launch Tips: Catalog Your Content to Make It Easy to Reuse

Chances are, if you’ve written and published a (business) book, you’re an experienced content creator.

Over the years, you’ve written articles or blog posts, curriculum, newsletters, training materials, assessments, keynote speeches, or workbooks. Or perhaps you’ve created video content or recorded podcasts and webinars.

Whatever the medium, I find it impossible to imagine a world in which you’ve written a business book but have not also, along the way, created a lot of other valuable material in developing your ideas, voice, and expertise.

The good news: while the content you’ve created in the past may not be new to you, many of the people who follow you online have never seen/heard/read it.

While you may have created content that would print on reams of paper, you likely don’t have it organized in a way that is ready for sharing across the web. You may have it shoved in drawers, collected on floppy disks, or stored on a dusty external hard drive.

As you prepare to launch your book, I encourage you to organize your previously created content so that you can systematically repurpose and share it online. This is a valuable activity that will help you in establishing yourself?as a thought leader. Though it may seem like an overwhelming and tedious task, you will position yourself to be more consistent in your online efforts.

Your content library doesn’t need to be fancy. My team uses a multi-page spreadsheet on Google Drive to organize our clients’ content social media strategies and content creation efforts.

The content library can be one page of your larger system in organizing your online presence.

Just create a spreadsheet and add title, type of content, link for any blog posts, articles, or videos you have on the web. If your content exists elsewhere, on a hard drive or in a paper file, indicate that on your spreadsheet as well.?Categorize your content and consider which categories are most relevant to your current book project. If you include a category, you can also sort by category to identify areas for future content development.

Once you’ve organized your past content, you can implement a system for planning future content — an editorial calendar. And you can use the content in your library as you plan and share content through social media channels.

Tell me something!?Do you have a system for gathering the content you’ve created? What has worked for you? What other ideas can you share?

I am the founder and CEO of?Weaving Influence?and the founder of?Hometown Reads.??If you are clarifyng your brand strategy and how to build online influence or preparing to launch a book, I'd love to talk with you. Email me?[email protected].