Earlier this week I wrote about turning frustrated users who need urgent support into community managers. I said that this is an important part of your content strategy. I believe this not only because it allows for your content, and your overall support system to be responsive to your user’s needs but because it’s an efficient way to generate content.

I love the saying “work smarter, not harder” as it translates to me into “work smarter, not longer” as I already work too many hours. One of the easiest ways to live up to this saying is making your content do multiple jobs.

Faster Paths To Successful Content

I recently read a great set of slides on content strategy from a presentation at WordCamp Phoenix 2014 called, Content Into Cash: How to Leverage Content to Attract Clients, Streamline Workflow, and Increase Profitability by Jennifer Bourn. In it she covers strategies for repurposing content into different mediums as a way to build content on a site with a lot of particular examples of how to do this. It’s a great presentation that I recommend everyone look through, as also discusses tricks for headline writing, complete with a link to a pretty awesome guide to improving headline writing.

Jennifer’s recommendations about repurposing content rang true to me. She talks about turning blog posts into PDFs and eBooks which is a great idea. But I take this idea in a different direction, as I like to turn individual support tickets, into standalone educational materials. Last month I wrote a tutorial for Pods–the WordPress development framework that I’m the community manager for–about handling SEO with Pods Advanced Content Types. The fun thing about it was that the rough draft of the tutorial was a response to a user’s support request in our forums.

Now what would have been something that helped one user, and maybe more if they found it by searching our forums is now a tutorial, a screencast and a set of code examples. All of this based on something I didn’t even know Pods could do before the user asked about it.

Content First, Delivery Second

Beginning your content strategy by thinking in terms of the best medium is a great way to miss opportunities. Instead of starting with a question like, “Do I need a blog, or a screencast series, or an eBook?” start with “What content serves my users best?” The best way to find out, I’ve always believed is to engage them in genuine conversation. Knowing that you can repurpose any content, be it a blog post, or one on one support interaction into what ever medium you need later, frees you to focus on creating the best content and finding the best medium or mediums to deliver it in later.