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Using Borrowed Content To Serve Your Audience and Build Your Business

We’re here today to continue over on the third part of how to create client-focused content for your brand. For those following along all week, we’ve been following the wedding poem, “old, new, borrowed and blue.” 

We’ve covered old: repurposing, revisiting, and reintroducing your old content. And we’ve covered new, and that is, what new content are you sharing. I’ve given you an excellent system and way to continue on that path of sharing new content every week. 

Why we use borrowed content

Now we’re going to move on to borrowed. This is one of my favorites because it’s a way for you to get a little spicy if you want to; it’s a way to share your firmly held beliefs. (And yes, even if you’re a peacekeeper personality, I promise you still have pretty strong opinions!) And this one also is a bit misconstrued at times. 

I frequently rant about people who just share somebody else’s meme or quote and then just post and run. Even if it’s a great quote, it’s a massive waste of time to post and run and won’t serve you. It definitely doesn’t help your audience to do that. And we’re all about creating client-focused content, right? 

The reason I don’t like it and the reasons I rant against it are: 

You’re not making it your own

You’re not telling anyone why those words, memes, or even the thought or sentiment resonated with you. And that’s a huge missed opportunity. This is one of the content pieces that can be both really audience-serving and self-serving for your business if you do it well. 

What does doing it well look like? It looks like finding an article or a quote that resonates with you, sharing it with your audience, and saying why it resonated. It helps if it aims toward something that you’re already teaching, of course.

Creating authority

Even if it’s not something that you’re teaching, something you can do easily in your business is to start making your authority known. As an excellent example, I shared an article that Jay Acunzo wrote. He has a really great podcast. He’s been in and around the content-creating space for a while. And I subscribe to his newsletter, which comes out every other Friday, and he had a really great article a couple of weeks ago. I referenced it in a podcast I recently recorded and I gave him credit entirely–the article will be linked in the show notes. I’m giving credit where credit is due. But it also tied it into what I was talking about: how to set up content within your business and create your own benchmarks. 

Because I tied it into something that I am teaching, it lends authority to what I am teaching while still giving credit to the idea’s originator. And that right there is key. 

So if you’re simply sharing someone else’s words, someone else’s quotes, I think that’s okay. But to make it your own, you have to give something of yourself in return. And that means, why did the borrowed content matter to you?

When I share somebody else’s thoughts and ideas, I want to make sure I can tie them into what I’m already teaching. Otherwise, it becomes a very squirrel-like situation because you’re just giving people a whole new idea that’s completely separate from what you’re talking about. 

This is how we can borrow content and do it in a very client-focused, audience-serving methodology. It’s a great way to break up your old and new content. You’re making it not all about you. 

Building and growing your audience

It’s also a perfect way to build an audience. Because sometimes, when you tag another that you’re giving credit to, they then retweet or reshare your content and say, “Oh, this is a great perspective.” Or, so and so is loving my article, and people will then click on you to figure out what you were about; it may be a really great way to build your audience. 

That’s how it serves your business by setting you up as a leading authority, who is taking in the ideas around you, making them your own, and then turning them around to help your audience even further. 

Alright, so that is how you guys can do borrowed content. We have at this point covered new, old and borrowed. Tomorrow, we’ll be covering blue. That’s probably the one that’s going to be the most surprising to you. Following this method of planning your content in a balanced way that focuses on your audience and the clients that you are serving is going to help you build more authority in the marketplace.