5 ways to give your content legs
If time is money, then making the best use of your time is all about getting more bang for your buck. Killing two birds with one stone, stretching your ideas, and giving your content LEGS! And this is what we’re talking about today.
1. Split ideas into more than one piece of content
The first way you can make more than one piece of content is to split your ideas up. When writing blog posts, planning your videos, or sharing your images, ask yourself, “can this actually be more than one piece of content?” Each item you cram together is going to dilute the power that each item holds in and of itself.
Written: Split topics into parts and spread out the sharing of that information.
Photographic: Share images one at a time. You might be dying to show your audience a whole luscious gallery of images from a recent event, but—hear me out—what if you scheduled them out one by one and use them as opportunities to unfurl a beautiful narrative, or to share the value propositions for your company’s brand? If that event has a blog post or article with more of the images, you can use each photo you post to social media channels as an opportunity to drive traffic to that place where they can see everything at once.
Video: Dedicate each video to a topic rather than attempting to cram all that info into one video.
2. Masterpieces and micro pieces
Another example of splitting your content up is taking a masterpiece and sectioning out micro-stories that stand alone as strong-enough pieces of content. And then using those tid-bits to point users back to the masterpiece from which they were extracted.
For example, the masters of your podcast land in your audience’s podcast app every Monday. How about on Wednesday and Friday, post snack-sized sound bites to drive traffic to the whole episode. I use Wavve to make these.
3. Fit-for-Platform
When planning your content, be aware that some ideas are perfect for only one platform while others can be adapted to feel as though they were created for each platform.
When I was in ad school, we learned that an advertising concept is strong if it could be communicated only in print. As a video producer, all of my ideas were complicated stories to be fleshed out as TV commercials or web videos and I was consistently being redirected to refine, refine, refine my ideas into something so simple and powerful that they could be communicated first as print and later as TV commercials or radio spots if that was necessary.
This really trained my brain to think in terms of how to tell one story in many different ways depending on the way your audience is accessing the content at that moment. It’s about reaching them not with just great content, but content that is in context for them.
4. Recycled Content
The easiest way you can amplify previously published content is to publish it again.
Another option is the ICYMI (incase you missed it) method:
Day 1 | Publish a piece of content. Amplify it through your other channels.
Day 2 | Publish an ICYMI post to drive new traffic to the piece you amplified yesterday
Algorithms mean that most of your Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter followers probably didn’t see it the first time anyway and if they did, seeing it again reminds them that they wanted to view it before but didn’t have time. Or they want to read it again. I have never been annoyed by seeing content twice.
Another way to recycle content is to go into your archives and backlog of previously published content and share it again. You can simply share it as if it were new or create a new piece of content that’s an updated version that drives traffic back to the first time you spoke about that thing. For this reason, I don’t show publishing dates on my written content.
5. Treat your blog like a Wiki
Any time I use a phrase or talk about something I’ve talked about before, I turn that into a link to the original content. I do this for many reasons:
If users are wondering what you mean about something, and you’ve already defined that in the past, you don’t want them to leave your platform to go searching for that information. Fill your content with internal links.
This is also useful if you want to show the richness of your expertise. Whether users click on those links or not, it still displays the vast amounts of information users can hope to access on your platform. It says, “We’ve been at this for a while and you can trust us”.
Tip: when I create these links, I make sure that they will open in a new tab for users. This means they don’t go down a rabbit hole and forget where they started. I ESPECIALLY do this when the link drives them outside my own site.
Those are 5 ways you can stretch your ideas, give more life to your content, get more bang for your time-is-money buck and give your content legs.
