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It’s a weird paradox: everyone can great content and get ahead with it. You no longer need a professional camera, an army of writers, and editors, or paid distribution channels.
The business and marketing bros tell you it’s a massive opportunity you can’t afford to miss: “anyone can be famous, just show up”.
LOL, no!
Since ​everyone is expected to be a media company​, the standards are much higher than ever. You need to churn out excellent content with a near-zero budget and never enough people to cover production and distribution.
That one 11-year-old makes billions on TikToks he shoots with his iPhone, so what’s stopping YOU, the seasoned professional?
Well, the a lack of time for one.
This is the no. 1 issue that keeps popping up in my ​strategy sessions​: my clients know they need to put out more content on more than one platform, but WHEN?
I won’t sugarcoat it: yes, it takes a lot of time to create content and distribute it. The biggest mistake I see is spending more time on creation than distribution.
This is the exact opposite of what you should be doing. Repurposing and reusing are your best friends.
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Why should you repurpose and reuse your content?
- Social media organic reach is abysmal, so on average, less than 1% of your audience sees your content the first time you post it.
- Different people respond to different formats. Help your ideas spread by distributing them in various formats: videos, infographics, carousels, text, audio, and so on.
- It’s impossible to create even one outstanding piece of content every damn day. So it’s better to reuse and repurpose than to publish meh content just because it’s new.
- Repeating your key points makes them stick. Don’t be afraid of repetition — ideas aren’t exactly like viruses, they need more than one contact to stick.
Let’s see how you can make the most out of every single piece of content you produce.
12 ways to reuse and repurpose content
Reusing content is the easiest way to shave a few hours off your weekly schedule:
1. Re-publish social media posts that are 2-12 months old
Re-publish them as they are or with minimal tweaks. Focus on those that gained the best traction (you can see them in your analytics board on any social media platform) but give the posts that tanked because of an unfriendly algorithm a second chance too.
2. Link to your long-form content on social media
You’re most likely publishing at least one piece of long-form content every week: a newsletter, a blog post, a podcast, a video.
Link to it on your social media platforms and make sure you add an incentive for people to subscribe to your newsletter/blog/podcast.
Even in ​a zero-click world​, it’s worth to try and de-platform as many social media followers as possible.
Get 3-10 social media posts from a single long-form piece of written content
This email you’re reading right now could become:
3. 2 LinkedIn posts: one about the need to repurpose/reuse and the other about how to do it.
4. A Twitter thread with a tweet for each repurposing idea
5. Another Twitter thread about the need to reuse/repurpose
6. The screenshots of those tweets can become an Instagram carousel
7. Two posts on Threads
8. A couple of inspirational tweets/Threads posts
Re-publish your content in a different format
9. Use snippets from a video podcast and turn them into YouTube shorts or TikToks
10. Publish the transcript of the podcast as a blog post (great for SEO too!)
11. Turn a newsletter or a blog post into an infographic and/or a carousel.
12. Add a plugin that turns every written piece (email or blog) into audio format → great to reach people who prefer listening instead of reading.
How I squeeze every ounce of leverage from my content (a work in progress)
If working in the content business has taught me something, it’s the fact that we waste way too much time creating new content and not enough making sure our best pieces get seen. So I’m constantly on the hunt for new ways to maximize the reach of everything I publish.
I’m refining this system quarterly. This is where I’m at at the moment of writing.
It all starts with the newsletter you’re reading right now — this takes me the most time, so I make sure it gets seen by as many people as possible.
One newsletter issue gets me three social media posts every week:
- A pre-newsletter tease on Wednesdays, a day before the issue gets out. I tell my social media followers what’s coming and invite them to subscribe.
- The link to the live issue on Mondays — I want to give you first dibs, so my newsletters aren’t open for anyone else to read until then.
- A repost of 2. several months later, once people have forgotten about it. This only works for evergreen issues, but most of them aren’t time-sensitive so I always have plenty of past issues to rely on.
One piece of content → 3 posts → 3 social media networks → an audience of ±28k people.
To make things easy to track, I use a basic spreadsheet with the following columns:
- Title
- URL
- Date published
- Last published on social media (so I don’t publish the same thing too often)
- Social media blurb (which I may use as is or slightly tweak).
3 posts down, 4 more to go. Here they are:
- I sales post where I promote a product/service. No more than once per week. I keep all my sales posts in a Google Doc, where I add the date when I published them last and the results — reach/sales. I have 4 different posts for each product/service I sell. 4 posts x 3 products (so far) = 12. This means that my followers only see the same post once every 3 months.
- One repost of a post that did exceptionally well in the past year.
- Either a podcast I’ve been a guest on, an interview I did, or something similar. I don’t have a new one every week, so post #3 is often something brand-new or a snippet from a previous newsletter issue, a couple of phrases that do well on their own, with little context.
- One meme, usually on Saturdays. I LOVE memes, so this is my self-indulging post. Whenever I spot a good meme in the wild, I save it, so I almost always have something to post in my library.
This takes me 1-2 hours every week. Of course, it doesn’t include the time I spend writing the newsletter itself.
It wasn’t always this way. But now that I have quite a large library of content, I can work on distribution far more than on creation.
As my audience grows, it’s important to get my old content in front of their eyes as well.
Plus, none of the above is set in stone, except for Wednesday’s post when I tease the upcoming issue. I like having the freedom to write what I want/what I deem important.
You may find this surprising, but
Across ALL my social media profiles, the posts that work best in terms of reach/engagement are links to my previous newsletter issues, accompanied by a short summary + CTA.
Yes, links on social media! [Pauses for gasps.]
They work if you have something to say, NOT something to sell, even if all social media algorithms work very hard to bury them. Contrary to popular belief, people still value nuanced takes and they do read long-form content if it’s worth their time.
More importantly, nuanced, in-depth content sparks conversations, which all algorithms reward.
TL;DR: Writing good content still takes a lot of time but it’s worth the investment. A single piece of content can fuel your social media channels for months, even years to come from.
After a year or so, you should be able to spend most of your time distributing, not creating content.
Not there yet?
Take a look at your own content library
Trust me, it’s larger than you think.
- Blog posts
- Landing pages
- Podcasts
- Videos
- Social media posts
- Comments
- Emails
What can you re-publish? Which long-form pieces can be split into 1-10 standalone pieces? What can you re-format?
I’m willing to bet you have more than a month’s worth of content sitting in dusty folders/clouds somewhere.
Do the inventory, I promise you won’t regret it!
Adriana’s Picks
- Turns out rice WON’T save your water-damaged iPhone, ​says Apple​. In fact, it can harm it. Who would have thunk?
- The European Commission ​is looking into​ TikTok’s potentially addictive algorithms, age verification, and privacy issues that may impact young users.
- Want to be more persuasive? Use “because”. Seriously, that’s it, you don’t even need a valid reason to add after “because”, according to ​one study​.
That’s it from me to today!
See you next week in your inbox!
Here to make you think,
Adriana
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