How To Turn A Brochure Into a Blog Post
This podcast audio served as the source for the blog post “Harvesting Blog Posts From Print Collateral.”
The transcript was rewritten to produce the blog post, which is the cornerstone of the Shortcut Content system.
Transcript:
Shayla: You are listening today to the Shortcut Content Podcast and I’m talking today with founder Dave Young. And, Dave, brochures and print collateral is how we used to advertise our businesses, so tell me how we can find blog posts and content using those things.
Dave: Well, old print collateral and it doesn’t have to be old, but if you or your company have gone to the trouble to create a brochure or some kind of a flyer that helps people understand what it is that you do in your office, you can often take that same content and repurpose it into one or two or even more blog posts. I’ll give you a good example. I live in Tucson and one of my favorite charities here in Tucson is the Sonoran Glass School. Now if I was the Sonoran Glass School and I’ve gone to the trouble to choose the words and the pictures to lay out this brochure, what I can do is recognize that there are ideas in here. There are ideas that can be turned easily into blog posts. And so when you’ve gone to all the trouble to put your thoughts into, “How are we going to make a tri-fold brochure and get some good information about our company in here?” well, you’ve gone to a lot of the editing work any way.
And what that means is that you have created something that you can hand to people and help them understand a little bit about what it is that your organization does. I mean, we didn’t even practice for this, but if I look at this brochure and I look at it and say, well, the very first page here is Make Your Own Glass Art. So the Sonoran Glass School has a thing called Make Your Owns. And you don’t even have to take a complete class from them. You can go in and set a time and you can go in and actually make hot glass items. They have a list of things you can do. You can make an ornament, a tumbler, a bowl, or a vase. That’s just in the hot shop; that’s where you see glass blowers putting glass on a big long pipe and turning it into something.
So if you wanted to create posts just from that page, you’ve got a whole list of things that all you have to do is go in and describe how it is that you would do this. You would probably grab one of their instructors and say, “Alright, walk me through the process of making an ornament in the Make Your Own part of the hot class shop.” And, again, there’s the hot class, the flame shop, the warm shop, and each one of them has an entire of list of things that you can make.
Of course, there’s an About the Sonoran Glass School, you’ve got their community programs, they do a lot of youth programs it talks about here, so we could create the blog post from that. That would be pretty easy. They have partnerships with colleges, they’ve got public outreach, and there’s the second page of the brochure and that’s two pages out of six and we’ve harvested at least a dozed ideas just from the first two pages of this tri-fold brochure. And, of course, there’s four or five more pages in the brochure. So anytime that your organization has gone to the trouble of creating a document that is limited by its size, it could be a newspaper article, or a newspaper ad, anything that is like, we’ve got to print it on this piece of paper, so we have to really edit this tightly and we have to chose our words carefully, that means you’ve come up with a lot of ideas, you’ve crammed a lot of things into this and it’s going to be pretty easy for you to actually go in and say, okay, well let’s take that particular idea and expand it into a blog post for this week. It should be a pretty easy idea to go back in and harvest old ideas and turn them into new blog posts.
Shayla: So check out your brochures you have laying around your business. You may have years or multiple years, it seems like, of content just sitting right there. And if you need help translating that into content, you can always reach out to Dave. You can find his information at ShortcutContent.com.
Thanks, Dave.
Dave: Thank you.