As most SEO specialists have learned, you must create quality content to grow organically. The same thing can be said for businesses that are building a social media presence or a new newsletter following.
But as people consume more and more content each day, they become less receptive to basic content that doesn’t provide a new perspective. To counter this issue, you must make sure that your content is native to each platform you publish on.
However, that doesn’t mean that you need to start from scratch. There’s a way to take one content idea and turn it into multiple, which can scale across multiple platforms and improve your brand awareness.
It takes time to write a brand-new blog article every day, especially when you’re an in-house team with a low number of resources and budget. The biggest challenge here is building a content strategy at scale.
So, how do you create a lot of great content?
You start with video.
If you have a video on a relevant topic, it can be repurposed into various individual pieces of content and distributed over a period of time across the right channels. Let’s walk through the process.
What Is Repurposed Content?
Repurposed content is the act of taking one big, valuable piece of content you’ve created and then taking the research and insights you gained and using them to make new content.
To be clear, repurposing content does not mean taking a blog post that did relatively well and rewriting it fifteen times for different venues. Instead, you need to take something that’s comprehensive and use its components to create other smaller pieces of equally valuable content that all complement your original offering.
Business Casual Copywriting’s Joel Klettke, an authority on repurposing content, calls the big, valuable pieces of content you start with “cornerstone assets”— he describes them as “the largest most comprehensive resource you will create.” He lists guides, whitepapers, and ebooks as examples.
As a side note, creating cornerstone content has been named #1 link building in a recent SEO survey: 40% of respondents said creating data- and research-based content is their most efficient link building method.
The best type of cornerstone asset you create is called “evergreen”—it’s content that stays relevant long after it’s created. Writing about breaking news might net you more views immediately after publication, but if your content is very situational then it date’s itself—and quickly becomes irrelevant.
So, when creating your cornerstone asset, try to choose topics that are both relevant and timeless.
After you’ve created your cornerstone asset, you can then take your new insights and expand them into smaller pieces of content. Each new piece of content will touch on aspects of your cornerstone content, without covering the same depth or breadth as the original.
CTAs on these new assets might link back to the cornerstone asset, or they might push your readers deeper into your sales funnel.
Using video to scale content
Did you know that the average person types at 41 words per minute (WPM), but the average person speaks at about 150 WPM? That is about 3.5 times faster speaking rather than typing.
In fact, this article was transcribed.
For every article you write about, you must do extensive research, write out your first draft, edit, make changes, and more. It can consume an entire workday.
An easier way to do this? Record yourself on Loom or another video software, save it, and send the video file to an audio video transcription service. There are so many tools, like Rev.com or TranscribeMe, that do this for relatively cheap.
Of course, even if you’re relying on text-to-speech, there’s still editing time to take into account, and some would argue it will take MORE time to edit a text-to-speech transcription. There isn’t a “best way” to create content, however, for those who aren’t strong writers but are strong speakers, transcription will be a powerful way to move at a quicker pace.
The step-by-step process
Once you write out your content, how do you ensure that people read it?
Like any other content strategy, make sure that the process of planning, creating, and executing is written down (most likely digitally in a spreadsheet or tracking tool) and followed.
Let’s break down how to get the most out of your content.
1. Grab attention with your topic
Sometimes, content ideation can be the most challenging part of the process. Depending on the purpose of your content, there are various starting points.
For example, if you’re writing a top-of-funnel blog article where the goal is to drive high amounts of organic traffic, start by performing keyword research to craft your topic. Why? You need to understand what your audience searches for and how to ensure you’re in the mix of search results.
If you’re creating a breakdown of your product or service, you may want to start by interviewing a subject matter expert (SME) to gain real-life details on the product service and the solutions it provides to your target audience. Why? Note what they’re saying are the most important aspects or if there is a new feature addition for the audience. These points can be tied into a topic that might pique the target reader’s interest.
2. Create an outline for the blog
When you’re building out your blog structure, record a video similar to how you would write a blog article.
In this case, by creating an outline for the article with the questions that you ask yourself, it’ll be easier to format the transcription and the blog after you record.
At the point when you’re working out your blog structure, record a video like how you would compose a blog article.
For this situation, by making a diagram for the article with the inquiries that you pose to yourself, it’ll be simpler to organize the record and the blog after you record.
When you’ve figured out what medium to work with, plan out how you’ll use your research for supporting content. Copywriter Steven Peters has some useful ideas, such as:
- Turning stats into infographics or tweeting them out.
- Reframing an ebook’s chapters as a blog series.
- Summarizing key takeaways into a FAQ sheet.
- Curating lists of research.
- Creating a SlideShare presentation.
- Writing guest posts based on your findings.
- Teasing your results in an email campaign.
3. Pick your poison (distribution strategy)
Now that you’re ready to begin recording your video, decide where your content will be distributed.
The way you’ll distribute your content heavily influences the way you record your video, especially if you’re going to be utilizing the video as the content itself (Hello, YouTube!).
For example, if you run a business consultancy, the videos that you record should be more professional than if you run an e-commerce surf lifestyle brand. Or, if you know you’re going to be breaking the video up, leave time for natural “breaks” for easy editing later on.
By planning ahead of time, you give yourself a better idea of where the content will go, and how it will get there.
4. Your time to shine
There are numerous free video recording software available, including Zoom and Loom.
With Zoom, you can record the video of yourself speaking into your camera, and you will get an audio file after you hang up your call.
With Loom, you can use the chrome extension, which allows you to record yourself in video form while sharing your screen. If you have additional content, like a PowerPoint presentation or a walk-through, this might be the tool for you.
Regardless of the way that you record, you need an audio file to transcribe and transform into other content formats later on.
5. Transcribe your video
The average writer transcribes one hour of audio in around four hours, but some of the best transcribers can do it in as little as two hours.
To put that into perspective, the average one-hour audio file is about 7,800 words, which would take the average writer around three and a half hours to write.
Additionally, you have to add research time, internal linking, and many other factors to this, so on average it’ll take around an hour to write 1,000 words of a high-quality blog post.
Transcription shortens the length of this process.
When looking to transcribe your audio, you can send files out to transcription tools including Rev or TranscribeMe. Once you send them the audio file, you’ll typically receive the audio file back in a few hours (depending on the demand).
6. Alter transcription into blog format
You’ll receive the transcribed content via email, broken out by speaker. This makes it much easier to format post-transcription.
If you properly outlined the blog prior to recording, then this editing process should be simple. Copy and paste each section into the desired area for your blog and add your photos, keywords, and links as desired.
7. Chop your video into digestible parts
Here’s where things get interesting.
If you’re using your video for social media posts, shorten the video into multiple parts to be distributed across each platform (and make sure they’re built to match each platform’s guidelines).
Additionally, quotes from the video can be used to create text graphics, text-based social posts, or entire articles themselves.
Think of the watering holes that your target audience consumes information on the internet:
- YouTube
Each platform requires creating a different experience that involves new, native content. But that doesn’t mean you have to start at zero.
If you have a 10-minute-long video, it can be transcribed into a 2,500-word blog that takes about 10-15 minutes to read.
Boom. You have another resource to share, which can also include proper keywords so it ranks higher on the SERP.
Let’s say you end up editing the video down to about five minutes. From here, you can make:
- A five-minute video to post on YouTube and your blog
- Ten 30-second videos to post across several social media platforms
- Twenty 100-word posts on LinkedIn
- Thirty 50 to 60-word posts on Twitter
Woah.
Not to mention there are other platforms like Reddit and Quora, as well as email marketing, that you can also distribute your content with. (Turn one of the 100-word LinkedIn posts into the opening in your latest newsletter, and attach the full video for those who want to learn more!)
By starting off with an all-encompassing video, you extend your content capabilities from a regular blog article into 50+ pieces of content across multiple social media platforms and search engines.
For example, Lewis Howes (and many other brands and marketers) is famous for utilizing this method.
As you can see below, Howes had an interview for his podcast with Mel Robbins, which is scaled across YouTube and podcast platforms, but he took a quote from her in the interview and scaled it across Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
When you build out your content calendar, simply copy and paste certain sections into an excel spreadsheet, and organize them based on date and platform. Make sure they make sense on the platform, add an extra line or two if you need to, and work your magic.
This will save you hours of time in your planning process.
8. Distribute
Now that you have created your various forms of content, it’s time to make sure it appears before the right eyes.
Having a consistent flow of relevant content on your website and social media platforms is a crucial part of empowering your brand, building credibility, and showing that you’re worth trusting as a potential partner.
As you repurpose older content as well, you can repeat this process and pull together another 50+ pieces of content from a previously successful article.
9. Promote Your Content
And of course, once all is said and done, you need to promote your content. Share your asset with your followers, message other influencers operating in the same niche, and make sure every piece of supporting content links back to your cornerstone asset.
Improving organic search visibility
“Discoverability” is a popular term in marketing. Another way to say it is “organic search visibility”. Your brand’s search visibility is the percentage of clicks that your website gets in comparison to the total number of clicks for that particular keyword or group of keywords.
Normally, you can improve your visibility through writing a piece of content that reflects a target keyword the best and build links to that page, which improves your rankings for that keyword and long-tail variations of that keyword.
However, as you begin to grow your business, you may begin heavily relying on branded search traffic.
In fact, one of the biggest drivers of organic traffic is branded traffic. If you don’t have an authoritative brand, it’s challenging to receive backlinks naturally, and therefore more difficult to rank organically.
One of the biggest drivers of brand awareness is through social media. More than 4.5 billion people are using the internet and 3.8 billion are using social media.
If you want more people to search for your brand, push relevant social media campaigns that do just that.
But even further than that, we are seeing more and more social media platforms such as Pinterest, YouTube, and Twitter showing up as search results and snippets.
And this SERP for the keyword “Moz“ has the most recent Tweets from Moz’s Twitter.
Writing content that ranks will continue to be important — but as Google keeps integrating other forms of social media into the SERPs, make time to post on every social media platform to improve search visibility and make your brand discoverable.
But, duplicate content?
Duplicate content can be defined as the same content used across multiple URLs, and can be detrimental to your website’s health. However, from what we have seen through multiple conversations with marketers in the SEO world, there is no indication that websites are getting penalized for duplicate content when reposting said content on social media platforms.
Conclusion
Of course, once all is said and done, the one big idea you’ve repurposed is only worth as much as your promotion. If nobody reads your cornerstone asset, then what’s the point?
So, share your asset with your followers, spread it on Facebook, and shout it from the high heavens. Do whatever you can to get your audience and other influencers to take notice.
At the end of the day, you’ll be glad you invested in one piece of high-quality content that people remember, as opposed to squandering your budget on numerous bland articles that are all indistinguishable from your competitors.
Say goodbye to the time drain of creating one piece of content at a time. The most effective way to create a successful content marketing strategy is to share thought-provoking and data-driven content. Take advantage of this process to maximize your output and visibility.
Here are some final tips to take away to successfully launch a content marketing strategy, using this method:
- Consistently analyse your results and double down on what works.
- Don’t be afraid to try new tactics to see what your audience is interested in (Check out a real-world content strategy I helped get results for here).
- Analyse the response from your audience. They’ll tell you what is good and what is not!
