Rework your old content into new products in new platforms
Yesterday we discussed how creating products in many platforms can boost your profit.
If you develop a systematized approach to multiplatform publishing, you’ll cut production costs and increase your customer base—widening your profit margin.
What we did not mention yesterday is that this strategy can also greatly improve your customers’ satisfaction with your brand.
The Internet has enabled everyone to become a publisher, and if you aren’t offering the formats your customers want, then another publisher will.
It’s better to publish in a wide array of platforms to satisfy the greatest number of customers, leaving none to the competition.
There are many publishers already reaping the benefits of this approach, and some of them started with a single print publication.
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Boston Common Press CEO Chris Kimball is a master of multiplatform publishing.
Kimball has gone from publishing a single print magazine, Cooks Illustrated, to creating products in:
- Books
- A membership website
- Email newsletters
- DVDs
- A television show
- And the original magazine
These products come under one brand, America’s Test Kitchen, and the multiplatform approach helped ATK’s revenue climb about 20 to 30 percent every year between 2001 and 2006.
Don’t let appearances deceive you, though.
ATK‘s many products are not all unique, standalone packages of information. If they were, it would be incredibly expensive to continually create them.
Instead, ATK has core products, like its recipes and equipment reports, that are sold and later repackaged into other ATK products. They are like seeds that grow other products. You can sell seeds, or you can create something new with them.
That is how multiplatform publishing works.
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You create information that can be used in several different formats and several different topics. Then you sell it in a product and archive it. After you have a pile of this information, you start mixing and matching to create new products.
Every publisher has an archive, and before now archives were never seen as great sources of profit.
They were mostly a selling point for many overpriced and unsuccessful membership websites.
But the Internet has made your archive a potential profit mine, waiting to be worked and have new products pulled from it.
The chance to affordably make products in the latest online platforms is at your fingertips.
Read our Multiplatform Publishing Strategy Handbook and start mining your archive into new products in new formats.
Inside the book you’ll read how 12 publishers found success with this new strategy and how they are organizing their content to optimize the number of products they create from it.
