Why It’s Okay to Repeat Yourself to Save Time in Your Side Hustle
Content Creation Takes Time
Are you struggling to think of content for social media? For blog posts? For sales emails? Have you tried just saying the same thing time and time again, but in a different way? Believe me, you don’t need to post original content every single time. In fact, nobody does this. Don’t believe me? Scroll through the feed of your favourite social media influencer and you’ll see that they’re putting out the same message time and time again. Okay, maybe there’s a few different themes, but on the whole they probably cover just a limited number of topics. When you’ve got a niche you have to. Your side hustle is just about one topic. You can’t talk about anything and everything. If you did, then people would probably stop following you. If they clicked on your reel for a make-up tutorial and you started talking about a healthy vegetarian diet the next button they’ll be clicking is unsubscribe.
Why Social Media is Made for Repetition
The beauty (or perhaps the problem, depending on how you see it) with social media is that not all of your followers see all of your content. That blasted algorithm only shows it to a small proportion of your followers. A quick Google suggests that it’s only about 10%. And even if it didn’t, can you honestly remember what everybody you follow posted last week or even yesterday? Probably not. So as much as we all like to think we’re the centre of the universe actually most of our audience isn’t paying that much attention. No one is going to call us out if we repeat our message over and over and over again.
Now I’m not saying just repost exactly the same reels and carousels that you did last week, but take the message you conveyed, tweak it a bit, add a different picture, convert a reel into a carousel post, (you get the idea) and then put it out into the world again.
The Depressing Stats for Email Subscribers
Maybe you agree with me when it comes to social media but you’re a blogger or you’re sending sales emails to your list and you know that they’re going to see everything that you send them. Sadly that’s not true either. If you haven’t done so recently, take a look at your email open rate. The average is about 20%, which means that only one out of every five people you send an email to will open it. And opening doesn’t even mean reading. Just that they click on it. How many emails do you open, glance at and close or delete?
Then there’s the click-through rate. If you’re reading this because I sent you a link because you’re on my email list you’re one of a very small minority. That’s because click through rates are even smaller than open rates, about 10%. So that’s one in five people open your email and then only one in ten of them click through to read your blog post.
Sorry if all of this is a bit depressing, but hopefully it’s bringing home to you why publishing the same message time and again is not a problem. It’s not lazy either, because in fact your audience needs to hear that message at least seven times before it sinks in. So if only 10% of your social media following sees your content and they need to see your message seven times before it sinks in, then to get everyone in your audience to see your message and act on it you need to post the same message seventy times!
A Few Suggestions for Repurposing
Before I finish let’s look at a few ways you can reuse your content to save time in your side hustle:
Scroll back through your social media feed and create new posts or reels on the topics you’ve used before. You could use a different hook for a reel. Just change the video, but use the same wording. Make a reel topic into a carousel post. Use the subject of a carousel post to go live on Instagram or Facebook.
Take a topic from a social media post and expand on it in an email to your list or in a blog post, podcast or YouTube video.
Use a piece of long-form content such as a blog post or email and pick out golden nuggets to use in social media posts. ChatGPT will do this for you. Just tell it to act as a golden nugget miner and paste in the text you want it to use. It can even read pdf documents.
So there we have it. Lots of good reasons to repurpose your content, which is going to save you loads of time in your side hustle. And a few ways to do it. If you have some more examples please share them in the comments as I’m sure others would love to hear them.
If you’d like to read more about how AI can help you save time in your side hustle then take a look at this post that I wrote recently ‘Ways to Use AI to Save Time in Your Side Hustle’.
And don’t forget, if you want even more help with finding time for your side hustle I have lots of great offers over on my courses pages.