The Hack That Generates An Abundance Of Content With Minimal Time, Effort & Money…
Hey Medium, as someone who is deeply invested in various products, services, and causes that I care about a lot, I, like all of us, want to ensure that the world knows about them.
Free, organic reach and awareness, available primarily through “social media: platforms are where the majority of connected to the internet human attention lies — especially for the products, services, and causes I want people to know about.
These platforms allow one to build brand recognition and brand equity by providing valuable information, as well as testing messages that could be further amplified with paid advertising dollars.
However, despite my optimism about the outcomes social media can achieve, I faced two distinct obstacles:
One of the major struggles for me was the constant need to create content.
Literally, create and produce new pieces of content in different modalities for various platforms, day in and day out.
What works on Twitter doesn’t work on YouTube, clearly — one is short text and the other is longer video.
The more content that is produced and distributed the more chances people have to know about what I want them to know about.
A home run can be scored by hitting it out of the park or running base-by-base.
The latter is far more realistic.
Not only is producing new pieces of content in different modalities for various platforms, day in and day out difficult but increases each platform you add to distribute your message.
It’s also a lot of pressure on yourself to come up with new ideas this frequently to get brand recognition or that the market thinks is good enough to create brand equity with them.
Don’t get me wrong, I still created and posted, I just became overwhelmed and that resulted in not creating and posting as much content as I wanted.
Further, I wrestled with the challenge of generating fresh ideas for daily content.
It seemed like a never-ending cycle of brainstorming and creativity that drained me mentally.
There is only so long one can do this before they hit a wall.
And that is ultimately what happened over COVID.
I stopped podcasting and sending my email digest.
Both the sheer volume of content on these platforms already being created by others, combined with a lower frequency of content creation, and thus posting, from me meant that I was spinning my wheels.
At this stage, I had recorded about 130 episodes of my podcast, which ranged anywhere from 15–30 minutes recorded in my car on the way to the gym.
So, I decided to reboot my podcast and take a single piece of content, a podcast episode, and repurpose it into many variations and modalities.
The plan was to post-produce my existing content, leveraging it into many lengths and formats that I could then post on all the platforms I had an account on that was still active with people.
This would take care of the need to have to come up with new content ideas all the time as what I would talk about in my podcast went into depth about many micro-concepts.
And it would take care of creating different modalities for various platforms, like Twitter and YouTube.
However, as I began implementing the plan, the process of manually post-producing podcast episodes into numerous variations and modalities still consumed a significant amount of my time.
Admittedly, post-producing podcast episodes took less mental and emotional creativity, but it became tiresome, and I realized I needed a more efficient solution.
So, I developed a methodology and software that would automate most of the post-production tasks.
All I need to do now is:
• Convert the audio recording into a video;
• Chop the video into 20 smaller videos;
• Write the sales copy for all 21 videos;
• Transcribe the audio recording into words;
• Proofread the written transcription;
• Write the sales copy for the episode based on the transcription;
• Use the transcription to get 4 major themes;
• Take those themes and write 4 blog posts;
• Convert those 4 blog posts into image carousels;
• Pull 10 quotes from each blog post;
• Convert those quotes into images;
• Write the sales copy for up to 40 images;
• Add those quote images to video backgrounds; and
• Write the sales copy for 40 videos with the backgrounds.
Then post the:
• Audio and written episode sales copy to Spotify for Podcasters that distribute to 8 podcasting platforms;
• Horizontal video and written episode sales copy to YouTube;
• Smaller vertical videos with written sales copy to Facebook & Instagram Reels & Stories, Tiktok and YouTube Shorts;
• Transcription to Medium;
• Blog posts to Medium, Twitter as threads, Facebook, Instagram as posts and LinkedIn;
• Blog post image carousels Facebook & Instagram Reels & Stories and LinkedIn;
• Text quotes to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn; and
• Image quotes and written sales copy to Twitter, Facebook & Instagram Posts & Stories, and LinkedIn.
This methodology and software streamlined the entire process and allowed me to generate a wealth of content from a single recording in record time.
Doing these two things finally, both saved me time that I couldn’t shave off before, but it also still alleviated the burden of constantly brainstorming new content ideas.
Now, I could create an abundance of content in less time, with less mental strain.
Score!
The foundation for all this content, the podcast episode was a consulting session for a prospect for my marketing agency.
Not only do I get all that content, but it allows me to subtly qualified leads while also providing them value that strengthened my brand to either make future conversions to my services easier if they are qualified or referral requests easier if they are not qualified!
Additionally, the recorded consult offers insights into needs, allowing me to stay connected and adapt to the ever-changing landscape and develop new products and services by being directly connected to the market.
In the end, this post-production approach to “creating” content enabled me to achieve far more content output while investing less time and mental energy.
It revolutionized my content creation process and empowered me to expand my brand’s reach, talk to new audiences and get more attention to the things I want the world to know about.
Now if you’d like to know how this could work for you and what you are doing, the next instalment will be posted it here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1777826909340335
