Does content marketing – or marketing in general – ever feel overwhelming? You’re not alone. There are all these different platforms, with different users on each. And consumer behavior is constantly changing. Who knows for sure what will be big in the coming years: audio, written, or video content? Not to mention the ever-changing face of social media.
In order to hedge your bets, you should be creating content across all of these mediums. But how do you do that effectively, without feeling like you’re going crazy or don’t have enough time?
The answer lies in repurposing content.
In this post, I’m going to teach you how to create only a single piece of original content, and repurpose it across ALL major distribution platforms: video, audio/podcasts, blogs, email, and social media.
Again, you’re only required to create one original piece of content. It can then be repurposed into all of these other mediums.
Here’s the ultimate content marketing strategy and how to repurpose content in 2022:
Say it With Me: “Video is King”
So, that one piece of content you’re going to create? It should be a video. Yes, regardless of what industry you’re in, or who your audience is.
Here’s why:
Video builds rapport in a way that no other medium of communication can do. This is because humans love faces, body language, facial queues and ticks, unique speech patterns, and more. We are visual creatures, and the visual nature of video builds a bond of trust that no other platform can do.
But the other reason video should be the one thing you create, is because all the other distribution platforms can flow downstream from it when it comes time for repurposing. This is not true of any of the other content mediums available.
Keep reading to see what I mean…
The Content Marketing Value Hierarchy
Once you’ve recorded a video, 99% of the hard work of content creation is done.
(Need tips on how to “do” video? Read my articles on video marketing & YouTube)
The reason we start with video is because it stands at the top of what I call the content marketing value hierarchy.
The content marketing value hierarchy looks something like this:
video > audio/podcast > blog > Medium (optional) > email > social media
Again, all flows downstream from video. So go make a video and put it on YouTube! Then read on to learn how to easily repurpose it into amazing content on all of the other platforms in the value hierarchy:
Repurpose Your Video Into a Podcast
Good news. Repurposing your video into a podcast is stupid simple:
- Just use a video to mp3 converter. I use this one.
- Paste in the link to your YouTube video to strip the mp3 audio from it
- Download the mp3 file to your computer.
- Then, upload this mp3 file to Anchor.fm
Anchor is Spotifty’s podcast hosting/distribution platform.
Once you create an account, you can upload your mp3 file (which was stripped from your YouTube video). Anchor will then allow you to distribute your mp3 file as a podcast to all major podcasting/audio platforms, including Amazon, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and more.
Yes, this is all completely free, by the way.
Congratulations, you now have your very own podcast. See how easy that was?
Here’s the podcast I repurposed from the video I made on this very subject:
Repurpose Your Video or Podcast Into a Blog
Now it’s time to create a blog post. Or, more accurately, repurpose your video or audio into a blog post.
Again, this is super easy. You have two options:
1. You can repurpose it yourself – You can use software like rev.com to transcribe your video or audio file for you, and then go back and edit it into a blog post. If you’re a decent writer, this will likely take less time than you think. However, if you don’t want to spend your time on this, you can use option #2.
2. You can hire someone to do this very cheaply – If you’re simply repurposing a piece of content you’ve already created, 99% of the hard work is already done. So the fee someone will charge to transcribe video or audio for you is often very cheap. You can find freelancers who specialize in this exact service on Fiverr or Upwork. If the transcription still comes back a bit rough, you can also consider hiring a cheap editor on these same sites.
Repurpose Your Blog Into a Medium Story
Once your blog is posted on your website, you have another unique option available to you, which is to consider posting it on Medium as well. If you go this route, make sure you post on your blog FIRST and then “import” your blog as a story into Medium. Here’s how to do that.
This way, Google will still credit your blog for the original content, and it won’t get flagged as duplicate content.
The reason to consider using Medium is if your site is rather young or you don’t post much content. If this is the case, it can take a while to get Google’s trust and break out of the Google sandbox and get your site ranking. You can essentially bypass this period (potentially) by piggy-backing off of Medium’s domain authority. Plus readers will also find your story internally on the Medium network.
Repurpose Your Blog Into an Email
Now that you already have written blog content, why not repurpose it into an email to send your list?
With some simple copy and pasting, and perhaps some slight editing to make things more scannable/digestible, you can easily turn a blog post into an email.
Again, you also have the option of easily outsourcing this task to someone else. (Remember the content hierarchy? This is another reason video is at the top… it’s the hardest to outsource. While all the other “downstream” channels are relatively simple.)
This email can point people back to the blog, to your YouTube channel, to your podcast, or to a product or service that you are pitching in your content. It’s completely up to you.
However, remember the “rule of one” – you don’t want half a dozen calls to action in your email. So figure out where you want to send people, and what action you want them to take, in advance.
Repurpose Any or All of This Content Into Social Media Posts
Social media falls at the bottom of the content marketing hierarchy, because it is arguably the lowest value and the farthest from the point-of-sale, and also unequivocally the easiest platform to repurpose for and outsource.
The options are endless here now that you’ve gone through the previous repurposing steps:
You could simply post your video or podcast.
Or turn your blog post or email into an engaging piece of written content.
Or repurpose the previous content into infographics.
If you posted to Medium, they have a cool option where you can highlight any text in your article and immediately send it out as a tweet with just one click. You just have to sync your Medium account to Twitter. A single article could potentially make for many dozens of tweets.
Bottom Line
Repurposing content, and content marketing in general, is one of those things where most people make it way harder than it needs to be.
Most of the time, this is because they start at the wrong place in the content marketing value hierarchy. In fact, most people start at the very bottom, placing all their creative emphasis on generating original content for social media. I hope you see now why you should start with video (or at the very least audio or blogging) and work your way down the hierarchy from there…
If you got value from this article, please share it! I’ve found that many marketers are not even aware of this concept, and those that are have not explicitly talked about it or taught it.