I have a confession to make. I’m lazy. Do you think less of me?

Oh, and one more thing. I think you should be lazy too.

Before you get the wrong idea about me, I’m not knocking anybody’s work ethic. If you’re like me, you have limited time to string together words on a computer screen. And when I do set aside time to write, I want to make the most of my investment. So I put sloth to my advantage.

In marketing, we call this idle, dawdling behavior “repurposing.” Produce something once, then reuse it again and again. Super lazy. And super effective.

Let me give you an example. At Hinge, we publish a lot of independent research. We take great care to collect the data, analyze it and interpret it for our readers. We write everything up in professionally designed reports. Then we get lazily to work.

We use the findings to write blog posts, sometimes even incorporating the same language we used in the study. We use some of the material again in webinars. And speeches. And social media posts. We break it down into bite sized pieces and turn them into infographics. We mine it for short videos.

Why reinvent the wheel when it’s right there, ready to roll down any road you take it to?

As I discussed in last week’s Pivot article, I’ve co-authored three books on marketing. In that article I shared a story about Rhondalynn Korolak, an Australian-American CPA and an expert on cash flow. I lifted that story right out of our book, The Visible Expert Revolution. I pared it down a bit and tweaked a few words here and there, then used the passage to illustrate a point I wanted to make. It was perfect. And it saved me a tremendous amount of time.

But won’t people notice my despicable laziness? This is the biggest objection we hear when we teach this technique to our clients. The fact is your audience is just as busy as you are. 99% of the time they absolutely won’t notice. And the rest of the time, they don’t care. They understand the value of repetition. That’s how people learn. So if they see a message twice—even if it’s delivered identically—they not only accept it, they appreciate it.

Repetition is a feature, not a bug.

There’s another form of repurposing that we do at Hinge. We take old blog posts that have gotten a little musty, spruce them up a bit, then republish them. As it turns out, Google not only approves of this lazy habit, it encourages it. By keeping our library of content fresh and up-to-date, we ensure that people reading it are never disappointed. And Google rewards us with better rankings in their search results. That means more readers for our content.

In fact, this is one of the easiest ways to improve your SEO. You can write less new content by repurposing and refreshing the best of your old content. Of course, you still need to produce original work if you want to rank for new keywords, but the pressure is off to write something brand new every week. And if you are wondering if this works in the new world of generative search (such as using ChatGPT or Gemini in place of Google), rest assured that the principles are the same.

One last thing. While I heartily urge everyone to rip off your own work, do not succumb to the temptation to “repurpose” someone else’s. That’s called plagiarism. And it’s a fast road to reputational ruin.

Now that you know my sneaky, dark secret, roll down your sleeves. Pour yourself a refreshing drink. And sit back while fruits of your labor deliver a wondrous bounty again and again.