How to produce better content, faster by repurposing
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Let's say you want to produce more content. You're ambitious - you want four 1,000 word blogposts a month. So you put together a set of topics, a calendar, and get to work. You might do it in-house, you might outsource it, you might do a mix.
Either way, you're going to run into the same problem: it doesn't scale.
If you're creating four completely different blogposts a month, there's no economies of scale. There's no one task across the four that gets repeated; the fourth post is going to take the same amount of time, effort or money as the first one did.
That might be fine - but there's a bigger scaling problem on top of this (and one that lots of companies forget about until it's too late): your approval process.
Every company has a set of people who need to sign off on new content. This process is invariably longer and more painful than you expected it to be, partly because feedback can be extensive, partly because things can sit in approvers' inboxes for ages as they get distracted by other things (IE, their actual jobs).
This process puts a hard limit on how much content you can produce. Your approvers only have so much time and energy - they can't be signing off on a million things a week.
So the long and short of all this is that producing more content is not just a matter of creating a calendar and telling people to get to work. You need to work a little bit smarter than that. Here’s how.
Repurpose
Remember those hypothetical four blogposts per month? Here's a better way to approach them: write one big guide per month. Get that guide in front of your approvers and get it signed off.
Now you can split that guide into four sections; then turn each of those four sections into a blogpost each. They’ve all already been signed off, so you don’t have to put them through your process again. And the incremental effort is very small compared to the initial effort of making the guide in the first place.
But don't stop there. Now, look at your social media channels. You can split this even further - mine your long guide for short insights that you can post on Twitter, Linkedin and any other social media platform you use.
(This is a lot more engaging than the excruciating habit many companies have, where they just post a link to their new content once, then forget about it).
Each section is probably going to be great fodder for a newsletter-style email as well. That's a series of four emails, right there. If you want shorter emails, you could probably just grab one of the subsections from your 1,000 word sections. Massage it a bit, and it's a helpful tip email to your database.
And don't stop there either. Do you have access to a nice microphone, and a spare hour or so? Great - your four sections just turned into four 10-minute podcasts. Then you can share those podcasts on your social channels, and start the whole process over again.
A real life example
There's an agency in the USA called Refine Labs - take a look at their CEO's content on Linkedin.
Every week, they do a one-hour Zoom call where they take questions from companies in their target audience. Their CEO answers these questions, and also just kind of riffs on whatever has been on his mind.
That turns into a podcast called State of Demand Gen. Then they cut that into a zillion different pieces. Each one becomes a Linkedin post with text and video - and I'm sure it gets repurposed elsewhere too.
It's a different way of doing things
Moving to this way requires a bit of a mindset shift. Rather than looking at the channel (like your blog), and figuring out how to fill it with content, you need to start looking at what your ideal customers would find interesting or useful, then creating content to fit that.
This means that you're not constrained by the limits of the channel, but rather by the limits of what your customers find interesting or useful. You don't have to try and find four topics that fit into a thousand words each. You can go as long as you want! As long as it's relevant, of course.
It is a bit more challenging, and does come with (what looks like) more risk. It's very deflating to create a 4,000 word guide that falls flat. But it's very rare to create a 4,000 word guide with zero value.
That's another benefit of the repurposing approach - if you slice and dice an unsuccessful piece of work a bunch of different ways, you'll eventually find the bits of it that do resonate with people. You can then expand on those points in your next long piece of work, and so on and so forth.
How to get started
The key to getting started with this is to make a clear plan for what you're going to create, and how you're going to repurpose it. You don't want to blast out a massive piece of work with a vague plan to "slice it down a bit." That's a surefire way to never get it done.
Rather, you want to have a clear check list of other ways you are going to use your big piece of work.
Once you do that, you can probably get started right away without even creating a new big guide, eBook, white paper or whatever. Just have a look at what you already have. Apply the checklist we just talked about to it, and get to work.
You'll very quickly develop a whole heap of content, and be able to get quick feedback about what resonates with people.
It's faster, easier and lower cost than filling a blank calendar with blog topics from the top of your head.
Let me know how you get on
Sam
PS: I can (obviously) help you with this if you like. Book a 30-minute call to talk it through.
PPS: Here's an example of some long-form content that can be repurposed: this guide I recently wrote invoicing/accounting/tax software provider Hnry. This is a long guide that helps freelancers with pricing. They're releasing a section every week, so check back over the next little while.
PPS: Some good discussion over on Linkedin, about Drift's (to me) nonsensical home page. Have a look and let me know what you think.
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