"When am I going to get it all done?!" 

Whether it’s blogging, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, Twitter, Tiktok...as small business owners, it can feel like there are a million things we should be doing to promote our businesses.

In fact, it’s one of the most common hurdles when it comes to writing a book – with everything else you’re supposed to be doing, how on earth can you find the time to write a book?

Well, what if I told you that your book isn’t just an investment in your credibility that will pave the way to new clients, partnerships and opportunities, but that it can also become the secret weapon in your content marketing strategy?

What most entrepreneurs don’t realize is that your book isn’t just a book – it’s 30,000 to 50,000 words of content that can be used to consistently promote your business.

Once you’ve written your book, you have a vault of content you can leverage for:

The content in your book could even be used as a launch pad for a new podcast, online course, coaching program, and the list goes on.

And the best thing about this strategy?

The hard thinking work is already done...well, it will be...once you’ve written your book.

The content’s there, and you don’t even need to be the one copying, pasting and scheduling – with some clear instructions, a good VA can do it for you.

So where do you start? Read on for the 4 steps to leverage your book in a 12-month content marketing strategy.

Step 1: Turn every chapter into a new piece of content

Have you considered that every chapter in your book...every subtopic, in fact...can be used as a blog post, article, video, webinar, and more? If you organize your chapters the way I recommend in Chapter 4 of Entrepreneur to Author, you can take that even further.

Chapter 3 of Entrepreneur to Author is based on the 2016 book called Book Blueprint by Grammar Factory founder Jacqui Pretty. Jacqui recommends organizing every one of your chapters like a mini-book.

What does this mean?

If you look at most nonfiction books, you’ll see they have:

When it comes to the chapters themselves, each chapter then has:

If you’ve done this well, and have covered the what, why and how in each subtopic, you have two options – each chapter can stand on its own as an independent piece of content, or each subtopic could be its own piece of content.

What does this look like in practice?

Take a look at the table of contents for Part 1 of Book Blueprint:

There are two chapters here, each of which have been broken into subtopics. You could then create up to 10 pieces of content from this:

And, because this content is well structured and in-depth, you don’t need to do any more writing – you could use the content directly from the book and hit ‘publish’ today.

If you struggle to get this much out of every chapter, don’t panic (I get a little crazy when it comes to creating content). Instead, see if you can find 12 ideas from across your entire book – that way you have one piece of content a month for a whole year.

Step 2: Translate the same content into different formats

The low-hanging fruit in this strategy is simply to copy the content from each chapter (and/or subtopic) and publish it as a blog post.

But why stop there?

You could also use the exact same content in these ways:

Different people engage with different types of content. Yes, some people like to read, but others prefer to listen while others prefer to watch. If your content’s available in a range of different mediums, you have a better chance of reaching all of them.

It doesn’t need to take a lot of time, either. If you’ve written a book, you already have the content – you just need to put aside one or two days to record audio or video versions of it.

Step 3: Pull out key takeaways for social media

The next step is to pull out interesting facts and statistics, thought-provoking questions or the one key learning. Add a call to action, and you have ready-made content for social media.

These don’t need to be fancy or complicated – just something to catch your target market’s interest. Some examples:

How do you use these?

Here are some ideas:

Step 4: Automate it

Now I don’t know about you, but I’m not very good with consistency. When it comes to my marketing, I’d rather batch it all at once and then know that I’m set for the next three months, six months, or even 12 months.

The great thing about this strategy is it’s perfect for automation.

Think about it – you already have all of your content. It’s all in your book. This means all you need to do is schedule it and you’re good to go.

Here's how you do it:

When it comes to scheduling social media updates, it’s a good idea to schedule each update to be posted several times – this gives you the best chance of reaching your target market. If you only post it once, on the other hand, then it will likely just get lost in the noise. Ideally, have a series of regular posts going out between one blog post and the next (so if there are four weeks between blog posts, over that four-week period you’ll continue sharing the first blog post).

Hootsuite is the tool most people recommend when it comes to social media scheduling, but another great option is Edgar.

Why?

When you schedule a post in Hootsuite it will go out at the scheduled time and then will disappear, never to be seen again. If you want to schedule it again, you need to manually schedule it a second, third, fourth and fifth time.

With Edgar, on the other hand, you can schedule posts in advance, but it also saves every post you’ve ever published in a library under a certain category. You can then create a weekly social media calendar, telling Edgar to publish posts from different categories on different days, and Edgar will go through your library of past posts and choose one to publish, without any further effort from you.

For instance, you could create a ‘Blog posts’ slot in your calendar at 11am on a Monday. If you have 10 updates in the ‘Blog posts’ category, every Monday at 11am Edgar will automatically publish one of them for you to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

As you add more new content to that category, Edgar will simply have more to choose from. This means your old updates never get lost – they’re constantly being leveraged and spreading the word about you and your business.

Your content marketing on autopilot

If you follow these four steps, you’ll have:

What more could you want?