Episode 8: How to Re-purpose Your Core Content

Do you have a podcast? Do you have a blog? Publish consistent video content? These are examples of pieces of core content. What if you could take that core piece of content and convert it into multiple pieces of content, including social media posts? You can my friends and in this episode, I'll teach you how. 

You’ll learn how to convert a video to a blog post and vice versa, plus how to create multiple social posts from one piece of content. Buckle up, we’ve got lots of DIY marketing to cover!

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Okay, are you guys ready to dive in? Because I am, I am. This is a juicy topic. This is a topic that I'm passionate about. It's a big difference-maker in your business -- we're going to talk about repurposing your content. Oh, and the reason why this is so important is because we're busy. I mean, we're busy people… we own our own businesses, we're running businesses, we're managing marketing, or whatever we're doing -- we have a big job. And, you know, we just only have so much time. And I always hear this constantly from people, they'll say, “I just don't have enough time, enough hours in the day to create content.” And there's two reasons: One, because they're trying to create a lot of content. And two, they say it just takes them too long. And so they just end up not creating enough content. And so, you know, we have all these places where we can be putting content out there… we have our websites, we've got podcasts, we've got YouTube, we've got social media, right, we've got emails… all these places. And when we're just trying to constantly create new content, or unique content, all over the place, it is overwhelming. And what can happen, that I like to call is -- content fatigue. It's where you just kind of get exhausted coming up with ideas, and you feel like you can't come up with enough new ideas. And you're trying to create unique ideas all over the place. And what happens is, is one, you literally run out of ideas, or two, you feel like you're being redundant, or, you know, you've already covered this topic before and you just can't do anymore, you just cannot do any more content. So we're not going to dive too deep into content fatigue, because this strategy that I'm going to teach you today is a way to avoid content fatigue. Because we're going to repurpose content. We're not going to reinvent it, we're not going to create, you know, tons and tons of unique stuff. I'm going to teach you how to take core content, and actually repurpose it so that you have multiple posts for your social media and different ways that you can actually share these concepts that you're sharing. 

Okay, so let's dive in. I'm going to go through some tips and some strategies. But first, I want to make sure that we're all on the same page in regards to what content is. And so, you know, I always talk about it, your content needs to offer value. So we're not talking about your promotional content, where you are legit selling something. Now, there's a time and a place for you to sell in your content, there's sometimes you're going to need to promote a sale, or an event, or a service that you are launching out there. And we're not talking about that content. We're talking about your core content where you are offering value, your insights, your advice… this is the reason people follow you. This is the reason they want to stay in touch with you. This is the reason that they are eventually going to become a customer or a referring person for you. Okay, it's because of this helpful content that you're putting on your blog, orr if you have a podcast, it could be in your podcast. If you're doing videos, it could be in your YouTube channel. You know, one of those places. So these are your core pieces of content. Now, I'm going to tell you a secret. Today, I'm using one of my strategies for this podcast. So this actual, like, process that I'm going to go through with you and these tips, I actually put on a blog post already. And now I'm coming back to this concept, excuse me, because I get asked this all the time. And I thought, you know what, this podcast is fairly new and this is something that I would love to offer. Because again, it is helpful, and it makes a huge difference. So let's dive in. What do you say?

Let's say that you've got a blog, okay, so you're writing blog posts, you're writing articles, and you're sharing them. Now, these articles could be on your blog, or if you're on LinkedIn, I hope you're using the article feature in LinkedIn where you can actually write articles on LinkedIn. Now, what you can do a lot of times is, you know, people will write these posts, they'll write these articles, and then they go and share the link on their various social media channels. And they'll just, you know, kind of say, “Hey, I wrote a new blog post... my latest post is up,” and they share the link and they're done. Right? Well, I think that's fine. I think you should do that. I think you should absolutely put it out there. But I also want you to know that that's only one social media post. You can take the concepts in your blog post and you can break them down. Okay, so a lot of times people will write a blog post, and it’ll have like, you know, five tips in it, it’ll say, like, you know, five things you need to know about XYZ. Well, take each one of those things, create a unique social media post with a graphic, and now you have five different social media posts. Those tips are still valuable, they still make sense, but they're just spread out a little bit, right? And so you now have five Facebook posts, you have five Instagram posts, or you have five different tweets, right? That's one example of how you can kind of break it down, especially if you're doing like one of those list post styles. So take the concepts in your blog article, and just break it down and then create the different social media posts. And now you've got multiple social media posts, including the original one that you actually shared with the link in your kind of, “Hey, I wrote my new blog post,” right? So that's one example of how you can repurpose your content. You can also take that blog post, okay, and you can take everything you described in that blog post, and you can go and create a very short video about what's in your blog post. But I want you to focus on why you wrote the blog post. So a lot of times your blog posts are answering a question, or they're providing a solution to a challenge. So I want you to focus on… think -- put yourself into your ideal customer’s shoes, and think about what they're feeling and what they're saying and what they're asking when you actually create this video, and I want you to be relatable. And then I want you to just let them know that you've got this article that you have published, and that you will put a link for it. And that, you know, it's got these different tips, you could say, just give them a high level, you know, synopsis of what's in the video, and then let them go read it, right? So that's one way you can also create an additional supporting posts that actually you can put out, you can put it in your email, you can put it in your YouTube channel, you can put it in… you can upload that video to any social media platform, essentially, as long as you are within the constraints. For example, you know, Instagram, you could do it in stories, or you could do just a one minute video.

Here's the other thing you can do. Okay, you can actually take that blog post, okay, the article that you wrote, and you can actually do a long video. You can actually go through the entire blog post in a video and go through all the concepts and just upload that into your YouTube channel. So some people, you know, some people want to read to this day that I get, I get asked a lot like, do you know, do people even read blog articles anymore? And I'm like, absolutely, because I hear all the time, people that say they hate watching videos, they’d rather read it. And so you're actually creating two different formats of the same content. And you're allowing people to consume the content how they want to consume it. So here's how this works: The algorithms, okay, the social media algorithms, if somebody typically watches videos, or clicks on videos, then the social media channel is actually going to promote videos to that person versus links to articles. They know what people are interacting with, they are getting to know how those people like to consume content. And so if you create both formats, then you're actually giving yourself more options to reach more people just in the way that they want to be reached. The other thing is that some people tend to go to places like YouTube to search and to learn, and they want to watch videos about stuff. And so your video may come up and you have this entire, you know, helpful video about all this content that you put into your article. And those people that want to find that stuff on YouTube can find it on YouTube. And if somebody loves to read articles on LinkedIn, they're going to find your article on LinkedIn. So by creating different formats, and letting yourself, you know, share the information in written form and video form, you're just, you're giving yourself an opportunity to reach more people in the way that they want to actually consume the content. I hope that makes sense. So I love, like, you know, taking that concept and doing it. So here's the other cool thing... If you don't like writing articles, and you're like, you know, email me, you're talking about blog articles, I don't like blog articles, I don't like writing... Maybe you like videos… this entire thing I just described to you applies to videos. So let's say you're starting with videos, okay? You're creating these really great, you know, long form produced videos, you're sharing all these insights… you can actually still convert that and make that a blog post. There's two ways that you can do it. One, you can actually go in and do a summary, kind of a written summary of your video. And basically, like for all the details, you know, here's the video for you. And you can first upload your video into YouTube. And then you can embed that YouTube video into your blog posts. You know, whether you're using WordPress, or something, Squarespace or other website platforms, almost all of these platforms are very user-friendly when it comes to embedding a YouTube video. And so you can put the YouTube video up on YouTube first, then write a summary, kind of just some short little snippet about the video so that people, kind of, help them to determine if they want to watch it or not. Again, put yourself into their shoes, help them understand what questions you're answering. You don't necessarily have to go into all the detail about what's, you know, all the written format of it. And then you embed the video and they're going to watch it. I use this strategy for myself, you know, I've done videos before and then I've just kind of written short little synopsis and then embedded the video in my blog post. And it just, again, kind of lets people, you know, find it a different way. Here's the other option you have, you can take that video, and you can actually write a long form blog post that supports the video, you can transcribe it. So a lot of people will use this strategy. I mean, I’ll be super honest with you, I've never used this strategy, but a lot of my peers use this strategy. The reason I haven't really used it yet is because my videos tend to be very off the cuff, they're very full of, you know, kind of random thoughts. There's some others in there, there's some items in there, whatnot, sure, I could edit them out. But I just, for me, I use the strategy I just explained to you because it's easier for me to actually describe my content into a video forum. But it's certainly something I'm considering, especially the more and more I hear about my peers and the success stories they have with doing this. So what they suggest is that you use a transcribing app, or a transcribing service, there's plenty of them online, and you basically have the video transcribed, you then get all of the content in your video in text format. And then you have a starting point and you can edit the text. Okay, I wouldn't necessarily say that you want to just throw the, you know, the transcription in there, and just make that your blog post. I mean, you probably want to edit some and whatnot. Plus, you need to check it because sometimes those transcribing tools, you know, don't necessarily get it correct, right? So you've got to edit the words, the typos, the words that they got wrong, but it's a great place to start. I mean, so many people tell me they just think writing is time consuming. And they're just much better at explaining something on video. So you would, you could use the strategy of transcribing, editing, and then you post the blog post. Now, here's what I would say, if you're going to do that, you could also, if you're going to transcribe, then you could just write, you could put the blog post in there. And then you just simply say, here's the transcription. And you just, it's all below it. So you can either do an article with text only, or you could do kind of a combination of the two strategies I explained where you've got the video and the transcription, I would just kind of let people know that, “hey, here's a transcription version of it” and just put it below the video. So that like, you know, again, this all applies. Now let's keep going. If you're doing the video version, you can obviously upload that video raw into your social media platforms outside of YouTube. If you're on Facebook, you definitely do not want to just share the YouTube link because Facebook and YouTube are absolute competitors. And you better believe the algorithm is going to squash that YouTube link. So instead, you want to download your video or upload your video into each channel separately. But what I also like is driving traffic to your website. If you're putting this video and you're embedding it on your website, then on Facebook, what I would like you to do is I would like you to use the original strategy I described. I want you to break this down, I want you to create a summary version or summary video. And then I want you to use that to promote this longer video, but drive the traffic to your website. We ultimately always want to drive traffic to our website. So I know this is like, you know, kind of all over the place, right? Here's the deal, I've got an actual worksheet for you guys, that you can download that goes along with this. So everything I'm describing to you, I actually, I have laid it out into a worksheet for you as well. So you know, have no fear, take a deep breath, right? It's all kind of, I know some of this is so much. It's like, “Oh, I gotta take notes….” Nope, I got you covered. Okay, worksheet is in this podcast for sure. So I hope you understand that really, what I'm really encouraging you to do is I want you to create core content. And however, whatever format makes sense for you, if it's going to be written, it's going to be written in a blog post. And then you're going to repurpose that content and you're going to maybe create a video, you're going to create different social media posts that go with it. If you have a podcast, then I want you to create a podcast article that talks about the same content, and I want you to talk about it. Now, if you're starting with video, then I want you to find a way to create a blog post that supports this video or embeds it or transcribes it. And the same if you have a podcast, you can do one of two things... you can record a podcast and talk about the exact same content and do it separately. Or you can just take the audio from your video and make that your podcast. So a lot of people do that. In fact, I know a lot of creators will actually do Facebook Live videos, and then they just take the audio from their Facebook Live. And they use that and they put that into their podcasts. So that's certainly a strategy, you're not recreating the content. And then of course, the same thing applies if you're doing a podcast, you're obviously going to use social media to support, you know, this, this podcast as well. So you might give a couple snippets, you might even create a little short video that has like a 30 second clip from the podcast. And that's how you're sharing it. So, you know, you don't have to go create unique content for YouTube, unique content for Facebook, unique content, you know, for LinkedIn, for your blog, all these places, and it all be separate. I want you to think of it as I've got a core concept, I've got a core thing I'm teaching, and now I'm going to break it up, I'm going to repurpose it and create different formats for that same concept, that core content that I'm creating. But then I'm also going to break up what I teach into smaller nuggets. And I want to use those nuggets in social media. So, you know, on Instagram, I could put like a quote from it and put it on Instagram, I could do some stories. And you know, on Instagram, I can create little graphics and put them up on Facebook, LinkedIn everywhere, this works everywhere. Okay, so we start out with the core content, we create different formats for our core content, and then we create nugget versions. So we break it up into nuggets, and we use that in our social media posts. Alright, so now we've got this, this one thing we've worked on, we've written our notes, we've figured it out. And we're going to, we're just going to give it all this life, okay, we're not going to have to create all this unique content. Now, if you're using email, which, dear Lord, I hope you're using email, okay, email marketing is powerful. It's still very, very powerful in business. You are going to take this core content of yours and you're going to put it in your email, and you're going to send it out to your audience so that they also know about it, because not everybody's going to see your social media. Some people are staying in tune with you in your email. So you may be saying, “Well, what do I put in my email?” Well, it depends. You can actually, if you're doing the strategy that I described, where you've got a video version or a blog version, and maybe a podcast version, I want you to actually let your audience decide how they want to consume the content. So I want if you have all these different formats, okay, which would be... you know, this is a pretty complex style, when you have all the different formats, your email can literally talk about the core concept. Again, put yourself in your ideal customer shoes… what questions are they asking? How are they feeling? Like, why did you even create this content in the first place? Talk about that, let it be relatable. And then I want you to just put in your email, very simply listen to the podcast, or watch the video or read the full article, boom, right? And you have these different ways that you can let them decide how they want to consume your content. Because again, some people want to watch a video, some people want to listen to a podcast, other people want to read an article. And everybody's different. And there's no perfect version of the content, you need to decide what works for you. And then you need to figure out what your audience wants, right? But there are different types of people that want to consume content in their own special way. And if you can find a way to meet each one of those types, then you're golden, you're maximizing your reach by doing that. Now, I will go ahead and just simply say, what I described is not, like, easy... it's not by any means, not like this, flip the switch, and it's all done. So if you've got a virtual assistant or a marketing coordinator, or somebody that's working with you, this is easily something that they should be able to take on. So I want you to focus on your main format that you are the best at either writing, creating a podcast or recording a video. And then I want you to make that core piece of content, and then if you have an assistant or a VA, or that, you know, a virtual assistant, then I want you to give it to them and make sure they understand your process. And then they can do all these varying formats. Now obviously, if you're going to, you know, take the core concept and record, you know, you write an article, and then you're going to record a video and you're going to record a podcast, then you are the author, you have to be able to do that, right? And so you're going to have to create that initial stuff that these people can help you with publishing it in the various places, they can help you with making sure that it's maximized, you know, throughout everywhere, and they can create the supporting nugget, social media posts that go along with it to support it, okay? Now, if you don't have somebody who's helping you or working with you, this is going to be a little bit more effort on your part. So here's the deal, you don't have to start out by creating all of these different formats, I want you to start somewhere. And the most important thing that you start with is creating consistent content on a regular basis. So you have to decide what's doable for you, whether it's weekly, every two weeks, or every month, I think you have to absolutely be providing that something every single month. I think you want to strive to get to at least once a week on a regular, consistent basis. So start out with your core format, the one that comes natural to you, the one that you're able to do and do, you know... I'm not going to say easily because nothing is technically easy, but the one that feels best to you, the one that is the most efficient for you, whether it's writing, recording audio, or creating a video, start there. And then I only want you to focus on, you know, creating these nugget posts that go with it so that you can kind of maximize, you know, give the content the most legs you can give it, okay, start there. And then as you get better, as you get more efficient with batching content, then I want you to spread a little further, I want you to use those strategies I described, embedding it into the, you know, the blog posts, taking it and reformatting and transcribing, right, I want you to work on that. But you need to start somewhere. And so everything I described to you, I started out with the maximization style, right, that does not mean that's where you have to start. If you're just now creating content or you're not consistent yet, or this is still all new to you, because you've been so overwhelmed, then I want you to start with one core format, and then repurpose it with the nuggets and get it out there on social media. And then as you grow, you need to be maximizing it with the other formats, okay? Now, if you have email marketing, I want you to also be emailing no matter what, okay, so wherever that core format is, wherever makes the most sense to you, that I want you to make sure that every week or however often you're publishing this content, you're also emailing your list and letting them know you've got this new piece of content for them. Okay, so, whoo, I know that feels a little doozy ish. Like, it's kind of media, it's kind of juicy. But it is absolutely a time saver, instead of you trying to, you know, record a podcast this week. And then, you know, you also do a YouTube video. And then you're also writing an article. And they're three different things. That would be amazing. But that's also just like a lot of work. And honestly, it's not really the most efficient way to do it. And again, they’re, you know, the people that are listening to your podcasts, well, what about the blog post, you just wrote? Why don't they want to know about that too, don't they deserve to hear that content as well? So I want you to think about using the various formats for the same core concept, okay? And then, of course, sharing it on social media, using the nugget style that I talked to you about. Now I mentioned, you know, creating visuals for them... I would suggest that you use a tool like Canva, that’s C-A-N-V-A, go to Canva.com and get on there and create, you know, they've got these great templates for you and you just edit the text on them. You can either use a quote from your, you know, your core concept, or just create, you know, something that makes sense, or go to a site like Pixabay. And go there and actually find some free pictures that you can use and that makes sense to support the concepts you're talking about. You know, you want to be able to add a visual to the text that you're putting out there on social media for sure, because it's going to just perform better in the algorithms. And when you're creating those small little videos, the short videos, I want you to think about either using iMovie, which is on your Mac or on your iPhone, or if you're not a Mac user, then I want you to think about using it, even if you aren’t a Mac user, because I love this tool. There's a tool called Animoto. A-N-I-M-O-T-O, Animoto. And it's a really, really slick tool, where you can create these little short little videos with text on them and everything else that can, you know, help you make those little short promotional videos to promote your core content. Okay, so those are some of the tools you can use to create the supporting social media nugget posts for you. So there you have it, you guys. So again, I know this is meaty, and it's juicy, like I said, so I've got a worksheet for you. I want you to check it out, it's going to help you go through this process, and to start to repurpose your content. So it's a worksheet and a checklist so that you guys can actually sit down either yourself or work with your VA or your assistant. And you guys can start utilizing this strategy of repurposing your content and get more out there and get more bang for your effort. Because we are busy, we got to be scrappy, and we don't have all the time in the world. And again, I don't want you to get content fatigue. Okay, you've got great ideas. Let's get them out there and let's reach as many people as possible. Alright, you guys. That's all I've got for you today. Tune in next time. See you later!