Hi Reader 👋 -

Happy Wednesday. I have a house full of sick people: two of my kids have influenza.

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My first thought is, "Wow, they're miserable, I hope they feel better soon." 🤒

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And my second thought is, "I'm a freelance writer, please don't get me sick, I have client deadlines to meet."

(But, when life happens, my clients are wonderful and understanding.)

However, in the interest of preserving my brain cells, I'm going to dig into a topic I talk about a lot: content repurposing and distribution.

1) Reflection:

I have content all. over. the internet. Seriously. In addition to this newsletter, I have Substack, Medium, eBooks, my blog, and my social profiles (LinkedIn being the main one).

Professionally, this has been invaluable. At this point, most of my client work is inbound. I've "gone viral" a few times (including just last week). And I meet a lot of really interesting people through content.

​Content distribution — getting my work in front of the right people — is everything. But my people are all over the place. And I'm only one person! So I have a few systems in place to make my life easier.

• I plan and organize my content (in Trello)
• I repurpose constantly and automate my process​
• I block off time in my week to work on content. It's just as important as my client work

This year, for extra fun, I'm doing NaNoWriMo. If you're not familiar, it's a challenge to write an entire novel during the month of November. I'm not doing that BUT I'm challenging myself to write one Medium article per day (though I'll space out the publishing). So far, I've written every day!

2) Product:

I use Buffer to schedule my content, but my product suggestion is: use something. Don't rely on posting on the fly because it won't happen. And don't use a platform's native scheduling tools because they're usually terrible. Plus (assuming you use more than one social platform), you're managing your content in multiple places.

People say all the time, "I post whenever I have ideas." That's interesting. And also (usually) inconsistent. If you want to truly use content for business fuel, you have to be consistent.

If I have an idea, I drop it in Trello and come back to it at a later date. I usually have at least 2 weeks of content scheduled in Buffer at any given time.

3) Tip:

One of my sources for content ideas is meetings.

I meet with clients and I also appear on podcasts. In these, I'm sometimes answering questions or otherwise talking about my experiences.

I get a transcript for every meeting (I use Otter.ai) and then I review the transcript after, mining it for content ideas. You can read more about this process here.

That's it for this issue of Tinkering! See you again in two weeks.

Cheers,

Anna Burgess Yang

​LinkedIn | Threads | Medium | Substack​

Want more ideas?

→ I wrote this article on Medium (Don't Apologize For Your Business Decisions) and it got a "boost" from Medium editors, which gave it more reach. So that was fun.

→ If you're looking for content inspiration, check out my free e-Course: The Endless Idea Collector​

If you're enjoying this newsletter, please forward it to a friend. Sharing is caring. Or you can buy me a coffee and fuel my writing habit.