Repurposing Content for Blogs and Vlogs
Video link
Useful Links
Example of weekly journal blog
My favourite journalling app
What I’m going to share with you here is a brilliant way to always have a bunch of content on hand to share and repurpose across multiple platforms.
a 5 min daily agreement
There are many ways to repurpose content. One way is to keep a daily journal or diary which you agree to update for 5 minutes each day. If you struggle with writing then simply jot down the events of your day as well as insights in Diary form, a log, take notes of what you are reading, what current box sets you are wading through, movies you are watching, and the like. You can write in a journal, diary, or notebook. It is your diary/ journal/notes that you are going to repurpose.
I use a combination of digital and paper to keep notes. For digital, I use the Day One app which I have synched between my iPhone, desktop, and laptop. I also have a bullet journal that I use to keep rough notes on the fly. I update once or twice a day with logs, thoughts, insights as well as tiny, sometimes mundane, life events.
What I find is that by having a tiny, no pressure, 5-minute daily agreement, I tend to spill over into more time anyway whereby at times I'll end up writing 300-400 words in a single sitting. Also, what often happens is that I will have insights and come up with new ideas as a consequence that I can use for vlogs and blogs and other social media posts.
A second 5-10 minute agreement which I recommend is to take one photo a day minimum. It may be you set up a 365 project on Instagram. You can see mine here. https://www.instagram.com/lashmar365/ Even if you only take one photograph a day you will have, at the end of the week, 7 images to include in your blog post.
Write with abandon
It may be that you feel that writing a journal isn't for you as you have nothing important to share or your days are quite boring. My experience is that as you write you will begin to slowly see that your life is anything but and is made up of heaps of tiny little moments each day that you can share. Thoughts, feelings, things you have read, things you have watched on the net and TV. Don’t edit yourself. Write with abandon. You can edit it all down later if need be.
Share this stuff in links. Google loves this as you are, in effect, taking care of its customers. What this is all about is creating a great deal of content with apparently little effort. The simple act of writing is often enough to get the juices flowing and I promise you will be surprised at how many other ideas and insights you have as a consequence of this small practice.
5 minutes a day is a small amount of time but you will be surprised how quickly content stacks up if you approach things in this way. When we are starting out as photographers or writers or both we get into thinking we'll post content when we've had more practice doing it. The fact of the matter is we are never going to be ready to do it unless we go for it.
Look for a way in
In this day and age, we really have no excuse for not having enough content as well as the means to distribute it with minimal effort. The smartphone is more powerful a computer than the president of the United States had at the Whitehouse in the 1980s. That’s profound. Think about that for a second. There are always reasons not to do it. What we have to do is look for a way in.