One Idea, Three Channels: Stop Reinventing the Wheel Every Time You Post
You don’t need more content ideas. You need to stop treating every platform like it needs something different.
Here’s a confession: I spent the first several months of trying to build an online presence treating every platform like a completely separate publication.
Instagram needed visual content. Substack needed long-form writing. YouTube needed video. Each platform a distinct medium with its own distinct demand for new material, none of them sharing anything with the others.
The result was that I was either burning through ideas at an unsustainable rate, or — more often — staring at a blank screen for each platform in turn, unable to think of anything that felt right for this particular format, even when I had plenty of thoughts generally.
The idea wasn’t the problem. The isolation was.
The concept of content repurposing is not new. Marketers have been talking about it for years. But the version I see most commonly taught is either too mechanical (chop a long video into ten short clips and schedule them) or too vague (just put the same idea in different formats!). Neither version captures what I think is actually happening when content repurposing works well.
What I’m trying to get to is this: the idea is the unit, not the post.
One idea — one genuine, developed thought that you actually have and care about — can live in multiple formats without feeling like it’s being recycled. Because the truth is, a video is a different experience of the idea than a written piece, which is a different experience than a short Instagram post, which is a different experience than a workshop module. The idea doesn’t repeat. It transforms.
The paint palette analogy is a useful one here too (I keep coming back to palettes, I know).
A single colour on a palette can go into multiple paintings. It’s the same pigment, but in each painting it’s doing something different — mixing with different neighbours, hitting different surfaces, existing in a different light. You’d never say “I’ve already used cadmium yellow so I can’t use it in this painting.” The colour is not used up by its previous appearances.
Your best ideas work the same way. The thought you had about why creative people clog rather than block — you can write it as a long Substack post that explores it fully. You can summarise it in an Instagram caption with an image of a cluttered palette. You can use it as an introduction to a teaching session. You can film yourself talking about it for two minutes. You can answer a student’s question with it. You can put it in an email to your list.
The idea is not used up. It’s being distributed.
What this requires practically is a shift in how you think about the relationship between formats.
Instead of: “What should I post on Instagram today?” (which generates a new, isolated idea from scratch)
Try: “What’s the idea I’m most alive to right now? And what’s the native format for this platform?” (which takes existing thinking and finds its best local expression)
The difference sounds small. The output is very different.
When you approach it the second way, you’re always working with thinking you’ve already done — which means you’re not starting from zero, you’re translating. And translation is much faster than origination. You already know what you think. You’re just finding the right form for this audience, in this medium, at this length.
There’s a children’s book dimension to this that I’ve been working through.
I have an idea for a character-based children’s book series. The character has personality, a world, visual qualities I can describe clearly. That same character could live in a picture book. In a children’s drawing course. In a content series on social media where the character goes on adventures. In a wallpaper pack for subscribers. In a workshop where kids learn to draw the character.
Same character. Multiple channels. Each one extending the reach without requiring a completely new idea.
This is what I mean by “one idea, three channels.” It’s not a specific formula (though you can build one). It’s a way of thinking about ideas as having multiple valid expressions rather than a single correct format.
The practical starting point, if you’re trying to build this habit:
Take the last substantial piece of thinking you did — a long post, a workshop session, a voice memo that ran long because the thinking was really going. Identify the core idea in it: the one-line version of what it’s actually about.
Now ask: what’s the Instagram version of this? (One image, one caption, one clear thought.) What’s the email version? (A personal story that leads into the same insight.) What’s the video version? (Two minutes talking directly to camera, beginning, middle, end.) What’s the teaching version? (How does this idea become something that helps a student do something different?)
You probably have three or four posts already, from the thinking you’ve already done. You just haven’t looked at it that way yet.
Stop generating from scratch every time. Start distributing what you already have.
Take one piece of content you’ve already made — a post, a recording, a sketchbook page — and ask what its three-channel version would look like. You’ll probably find the work is 80% done already. The translation is the small part.
CP52 Stage: Stage 5 — The Audience (finding your people)
Series: Making It Work Online
Image note: One idea radiating outward into multiple formats — a diagram on a whiteboard, or a single seed becoming multiple plants.
