This week I want to talk about garbage. Actually, I want to talk about recycling and refuse.
This weekend I was watching an episode of 60 Minutes and they were talking about the amount of plastic floating in the ocean. Every single year eight million metric tons of plastic waste enters the oceans and it usually enters the oceans through gateway waterways, through creeks, through rivers, etc. It's amazing how that stuff makes it all over the world.
I've also seen commercials for this one group called 4ocean.com. They're trying to clean up the oceans and they convert that plastic into bracelets which you can buy. Now again, you're wearing recycled plastic but you're donating to help clean up the ocean.
Garbage Day
Every Tuesday at our house is garbage day and I take out the two big rolling bins; one is a recycle bin and one is a garbage bin. Now the thing about it is the recycle bin is twice as big as the garbage bin and really we only take out the garbage once every two weeks. My wife and I don't make a lot of garbage but we do with recyclables because there's glass, plastic, paper, or the mix of all that.
Most garbage ends up in a landfill, and different garbage decomposes at different rates. Here's an example, and if you want to find this article that I got this from, “The Decomposition of Waste in Landfills: A Story of Time and Materials“.
A paper ticket only takes two weeks to decompose. An orange peel, six months. Cardboard, five years. A tin can, 50 years. Batteries, 100 years. And plastic, up to 450 years. That's why recycling is so important because if you recycle there's a chance it can be reused. Not all of it is, but at least there's an opportunity.
Recycling is a process. When the bins full of your stuff ends up at the recycling plant, they have to do four things:
- They have to sort it. Is it recyclable, If it not, then some of the stuff ends up in landfills.
- Next, it has to be cleaned. All of the garbage on there and the labels and all that stuff has to be removed.
- Next, it has to be broken down. It has to be turned into raw material again.
- Then it can be recycled or remanufactured.
One thing to note: Paper is probably one of the biggest landfills uses but it decomposes faster and is a lot more recyclable than plastic, While we're talking about that paper, I also like to think of it as the content we post that should be recycled to the internet, and not your recycling bin.
Is Your Content Rubbish or Recycled?
Let me ask you this: When you create content, are you consciously thinking about ways to recycle it in the future? Just like when somebody manufactures a product or something you eat out of it, is it manufactured in a way that is environmentally friendly? Is your content environmentally friendly to the internet? Can it be reused over and over again?
Now granted, you know about the news. Obviously, today's news is tomorrow's meh, right? But in the case of a lot of the content that we can create, we can create what's known as cornerstone content, stuff that will stand around and hold up the building for quite a while. So, as you're creating content are you creating things that you can reuse over and over and over again, and creating less and less of things that you're just going to throw away?
Recycling
I talked about recycling when it comes to plastic, but how do we do that with content? Well, there are two different things you can do: you can reuse it or you can repurpose it. Reusing content means that you create a post or a blog or a podcast or an article or an e-book or something. You create something that can be reposted time and time and time again. Twitter is one of those platforms where you can take the same content and post it over and over and over again because most people are not going through and searching for that specific content unless it's a news story.
There's a plugin on WordPress called ‘Revive Old Posts‘ and you can use that plugin to basically repost to Twitter over and over and over again. The premium version will allow you to post it to multiple other social media but I don't recommend that as much as I do on Twitter. There are certain times where you can go back to Facebook and maybe repost an article you posted a month ago or three months ago.
One of the things that I do for clients is I create 30 posts, one for every single day of the month, and then the following month we'll go back and repost those again because the chances of somebody consuming all 30 are pretty small and maybe they'll see something a second time and it'll spark some interest.
The other thing that you can look at is a software called Planable, which you can find at Brianloves.com/Planable. This will allow you to take one piece of content, say from your blog or your podcast, and share it out to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn. You could post it to groups, you can post it to pages, you can post it to certain profiles, and if you have subpages or brand pages on LinkedIn, you could share it there. Think about how you can take that content and use it over. Is it still relevant the next month?
Repurposing
The second piece of this puzzle is repurposing. So how can I take this content and repurpose it? Can I take these series of blogs or podcasts and turn them into an e-book? Or can I create an infographic from them? Finally, can you turn this into something to sell? Can you turn it into a book that you could put on Amazon? I've seen books of just reposted blog posts. Or, maybe it could be turned into an online or live course. You could easily create a course from it. Simply just read into a microphone and record it, add some graphics to it, and now you've got something that has been completely repurposed and you can sell it or use it as a lead magnet.
Here's the thing, I want you to start thinking about your content in the form of assets. Are you creating assets or are you creating rubbish? Not that your content is bad but it just gets thrown away, so think of the assets as your words. You can take the text and read it in or repurpose it into an e-book. Think of the graphics, can you turn it into an infographic or something like I've done with Bacon-isms and literally take texts that I say in my speeches and add a graphic to it and put it up online. I'm repurposing the content I'm creating in my presentations. Again, are your posts something that you can go out and repurpose?
Final Thoughts
As you're creating content, think about its shelf life. Can you create cornerstone posts that will last for months or maybe even years? Then maybe tack on timely updates that kind of build around that cornerstone foundation. The bottom line with all of this stuff is to measure the results. See what gets read more and do more of that, and the things that are getting ignored, do less. But the bottom line is recycling saves energy, it saves the planet, and recycling your content is going to save time.
I would love to hear your thoughts on this. Comment below and share your thoughts, ideas or questions about showing the concepts presented. Have you had to overcome any of the presented concepts? What worked and what did not live up to expectations? Do you have any ideas or advice you could share?
To learn more about this and other topics on Internet Marketing, visit our podcast website at http://www.baconpodcast.com/podcasts/
