Chances are, if you have a business or you are a marketing professional that works in content creation and delivery, the time and ability to create new content easily is one of the struggles that you will have on an almost daily basis. Content is important in helping your business look alive and functional across the internet to potential clients. This article addresses ways to explode your content across the internet and also provides ways you can use it in person – all while spending the least amount of time and doing the minimum amount of work necessary.
Here’s the deal - it can be really difficult to continually come up with new content. It can also be really easy, however. A lot of business owners and marketing professionals find themselves lost and unsure of how they can produce enough content to be relevant and have people kind of notice them while still making that content really good. There seems to always be an issue when it comes to finding the time to create this content.
Wapiti suffered from a lack of content until about a year prior to this article. I just didn't want to take the time to come up with something new or something relevant. I was busy trying to find new clients and busy growing my actual clientele. My web content lagged behind - which isn't good if you're telling other people you can do a good job for them. I suffered because of this and leads were hard to come by.
With this article, I wanted to kind of give you a clear path to turning any single piece of content into multiple pieces. For the sake of this article, I present five different ways you can use a single piece of content to help your business grow. Furthermore, I show how you can take your favorite content delivery method and ONLY focus on it while still creating content for all of the other methods.
Create New Content Easily - Start With Your Favorite Method
Find your favorite content delivery method in order to ensure you stay engaged and continue to create new content. If you can create a well done piece of content, it can be repurposed into many other pieces of content.
There are many forms of content creation. For this article, I want to focus on the following 5 content creation methods:
- Audio/Video - Podcasting, Vlogging, Radio, TV, etc.
- Writing - Blog posts, articles, guest writing, etc.
- Email Marketing - Building complete emails.
- Social Media Posting - Quick snippets that tell a story or sell a product or service.
- Public Speaking - Similar to #1 but an actual public speaking engagement.
For example, if you are in the Wapiti marketing funnels, you'll notice that every time we release a new podcast, we have a matching article on our website. Our podcasting platform takes the audio of my podcast, adds a cover image and turns that podcast into a YouTube video (I added an example of one). We then take that article and fashion an email from it. Last, we create multiple social media posts from this content.
By turning this single piece of content into multiple parts in this way, we are able to load up our marketing funnels with tons of useful content.
New Content Creation Is Not A One-Trick Pony
If you create a blog post or an article and fail to use that content elsewhere, you're failing. If you put out an article and send out the quick "hey, I made a blog post" on social media, you're failing. There are so many ways to use your content that makes it actually useful to readers and not annoying.
Audio/Video & Transcribed Content
As mentioned before, I'm a talker. It's much easier for me to just grab my microphone and talk than it is to create content in any other way. Because of this, it is the best use of my time when I create new content. I typically know what I want to say and once I start talking, I'm able to get all the details out quickly and efficiently. If I sit down to type out content, it can take me anywhere from two days to two weeks of trying to figure out how to write what I want to say (as compared to a 20 minute podcast episode).
So, for these reasons, I choose to start with podcasting. Another benefit to my podcast comes from my podcast hosting platform which creates the YouTube version as mentioned earlier.
Ultimately, the transcription of my podcast is actually the anchor of all my content. It is the starting point of all of the other marketing pieces. I am able to take each transcription and add it to the site as an article. From that point I can create my internal and external links.
Email is all about simplicity. You have a short time to catch the attention of the reader and if you get too crazy with the content in it, the reader will just delete your email. Using the full transcription is definitely not a good idea. Often times, you don't want to use any of the transcription.
One of my favorite ways to couple emails with content is to "tease" the content and offer a click through. For example, I will create an email after finalizing this article. It will probably have a strong title like, "Fast, easy content for your website, social media, and more!" (don't hold me to that). The content will briefly tell the reader about this podcast and article and ask them to click through to learn more.
The idea of this email is to have it resonate with the people that would be most helped by it. Some may feel they have it all figured out and delete it - and that's ok. They may want to open the article I wrote on the 4 most important marketing steps for your restaurant instead. That's why you produce lots of content in the first place.
Social Media
Social media works very similarly to email in that you can't take a full-length piece of content and drop it on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram for someone to read. With Twitter, you literally cannot post a full transcript as they impose character limits on your posts. Regardless, it's poor practice in general no matter the venue you choose.
One fun use of social media with your content is to "repost" the content each month but select a different part of each article/blog post to highlight. For example, find 5 or 6 quotable pieces in your content and use them as the description while posting a link back to your content. With social media, it's always likely you hit a completely different audience each time since less than 10% of your follower will generally see any one post. The new content highlight will make it fresh for anyone that had seen it before.
Public Speaking
Last, although these are not in any particular order, you can use this same content for public speaking engagements. If you are a public speaker, this is a great starting point for your content - especially if you're able to get a crisp, clean copy of the recording from those events. Also, I can recommend a personal digital recorder that I use: Zoom H4n PRO Handy Recorder. Just put it in your pocket and use one of the lapel mics to record yourself.
Another great way to cycle the content is to create a podcast to practice what you might say at a speaking engagement. For example, if I had a public speaking engagement and wanted to talk about about the SEO Basics for WordPress, I can start with the podcast and use that as a dry-run for my upcoming engagement.
Wrapping it Up
Ultimately, content creation is all about lead generation. You're hoping to say the right thing that someone else is wanting to hear in order to gain their trust and, with time, their business. As I've mentioned before, however, you should have a larger purpose to what you do than just making more money and that purpose should shine through in your content strategy as well.
With a single piece of information you can create many points of contacts with your clients, leads, and people that don't know they need your business yet. The key is in finding your favorite way to create content. Once you have that initial piece put together, the rest is easy. This will ultimately help you create new content easily and quickly.
