Many years ago, before I started my web marketing agency, I was a youth pastor at an inner city church in Seattle. Every week I had to put together the sermon or lesson to present to the youth group. Because it was the same group of kids, give or take, the lesson each week had to be new.
I always loved when I got the opportunity to speak somewhere else or to a different group because it allowed me to use a lesson I already had put together. I didn’t have to come up with a new topic to talk about or start at the beginning with all the preparation that such speaking entails. Instead, I was able to take what I had already done and improve upon it for a new audience.
In my current life as a web marketer, I spend a lot of time every year creating presentations and speaking at conferences, organizations and businesses. It’s actually one of my favorite parts of my job. I’ve always enjoyed teaching, and the presentation format is a great visual tool in which to do that.
But like speaking to church youth groups, there is a good amount of having to develop new topics and presentations for each speaking venue. Occasionally, there is an opportunity to do the same presentation in a new place, but not always. Which means there are a lot of times that you give a presentation once and it’s gone.
All that time, energy and effort went into one presentation for one audience.
Expand Your Reach Through Mass Publication
If the goal is to get your content in front of as many eyeballs as possible, there are some great options out there. First, publish your slide deck on SlideShare and/or LinkedIn. This allows it to be available for public viewing. You can post a link to the slide deck on Twitter or even send it to your presentation audience.
The downside of SlideShare is that presentation slides, without the presentation, often have little value to someone who missed the actual presentation. It provides a great recap for those who were there, but not much else.
If you want to go one better, video record your presentation, publish it on YouTube and send links to it in your blog or social streams. This allows those who were not able to see the presentation when given get the value of it directly from you.
By publishing your slides or the presentation itself, you are able to expand the reach of each of your presentations. But posting presentations for the masses is still only hitting piece of the audience pie. To amplify your reach even further, you need to take that presentation and turn it into an entirely different format.
Amplify Your Reach By Making the Old New Again
Presentations tend to be (and should be) very visual. Less text, more pictures. The slides are just a way to keep your audience visually engaged while they consume the content you are presenting. The slides can contain a few nuggets of information, but most is lost without the video aspect. But not everyone wants to watch a video of someone speak. Many people, like me, would rather read a post than watch a video.
The way to amplify your reach of this content is to turn your presentation into a blog post. And you’ve got the ready-made visuals (the slides themselves) to liven up the blog post visually!
Depending on how long the presentation is, you can often turn one presentation into one or more full-length blog posts, complete with images throughout. And if you’re anything like me, what you type out for your presentation will often be very different than what you said while presenting it. This makes your blog post an additional asset to those who have already seen the presentation itself, and can be a great accompaniment to the presentation video.
[inlinetweet prefix=”” tweeter=”” suffix=””]If your content well ever runs dry, dip into you presentations and turn them into posts.[/inlinetweet] It extends the life and reach of your existing content, while amplifying the value for a completely different audience.
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