The beauty of “re-purposing”

You may have noticed a transition in my advice over the past 2 and 1/2 years. The shift has been from talking about selling services to selling repeatable programs and products in addition to services. That way, you are building something of sustainable value, and making something once to sell it thousands of times.

In my case, I now design web-based programs and sell information via the web. I don’t have an advertising model, but rather sell information to targeted niche audiences. In 8 months of building, I now have 6 cash-flow generating sites (and a few duds, too).

Anyway, just because a product or site is a dud doesn’t mean that you can’t turn lemons into lemonade, and that’s the purpose of this blog.

Here are two examples:

1. I created a site that sold book reviews to parents. It bombed. But I had 22 wonderfully written book reviews/summaries. So I started marketing those on another site I have that caters to parents. They now sell as a bundled group of reviews, not as a subscription. Results are positive. A bomb has turned into at least a marginal success.

2. I’ve done some research on my marketing books, testing a variety of prices. During that time, I found that my profits are higher at the $200 price point for a marketing manual, even if fewer total people buy what I have to sell. I was going to raise the price from the current price of $50 now to $200, but then decided to combine all of my books into a marketing boot camp product that includes one-on-one support and tele-conferences. The price for that will be $495- $895 (tbd). So again — once you have a repeatable product or service, you can repurpose it and perhaps make even more money.

With websites that go for ad revenues, I suppose the same principle is true. You can take an existing website and:

– Change the focus; and

– Develop another website targeted to a new audience but based on similar principles.

Repurposing is an important strategy! What has been your experience with it?