How long does it take you to create your content, from ideation, production, publishing and all the way to promotion? Hours? Days? Weeks? This is my guide on how to create content efficiently.
The time invested in your content development is the reason that you should maximise its effectiveness. Reach more audiences, on more platforms, more often.
The secret to efficient content creation.
Take, for example, your strength in content creation. It might be a podcast, video or blog that you are currently creating; something at the core of your content development. You’ll go through your normal process to produce it anyways.
But here is the secret. Don’t stop there.
The worst possible thing you can do is move directly to the next project. It’s inefficient and wasteful. You will miss a whole new potential audience who use other channels as a preference to engage with content. Or, you will miss the opportunity to send frequent messages to those that are using your preferred channels.
Maximise the value of all those hours you have sunk into your content by reusing that single piece of content. Or, turn one long-form piece of content into many short-form snippets of engaging promotional material.
Why you should follow my advice?
We have witnessed the shift of influential publications and talented content creators all vying for prime positions. It makes it far more challenging to break through the noise. Today, in order to reach the same number of people, you need to do much more. More channels, more often.
It’s not all doom and gloom however, you can be smart and effective in the way you deploy your resources. We’ll show you how to create content efficiently.
How to create content and maximise its value
The main content formats are written video and audio. No matter which you start with, you can always get to the others formats and thereby – tripling the amount of content you produce.
Reach new audiences and channels with your Podcast
If you start with a podcast, we always recommend that you record your podcast with video. That way you instantly have a way to publish to video channels such as YouTube and Vimeo and reach an audience who prefers consumer content there.
You will also have, engaging, visual promotional assets that you can edit and distribute across social media; short-form clips of great quotes and thought pieces from your guests. Your goal should be, not to necessarily grow your podcast, but to get your personal brand, company, or ideas in front of as many relevant eyeballs as possible.
Transcribe your podcast and post the transcription for those trying to find content like yours on search engines. Take the transcription and turn it into thought pieces, blogs and articles, interweaving quotes from your guest to enhance its authority.
You have 20, 60, 120 minutes of content every time you publish a podcast. Ensure that you maximise the time and effort you put into it by pushing it into new channels.
Promote your videos beyond YouTube
Video content is highly visual, so the process of turning it into written and audio content can be more challenging.
Here are some ideas to make a video and turn it into a podcast.
It will need to be tweaked in order to publish it as a podcast. Where visuals would have once provided context, you now need to provide add additional descriptions. Take your script alongside your storyboard and read both the voice over and provide descriptions when required.
If you have a video in which visuals are central, your podcast can be a spin-off, taking fans through the production of your video giving great context to your audience on your methodologies.
If these are not viable, you can always focus on written content with supporting visuals. Transcribe your video and upload it to your website with images supporting the copy. Your content is then searchable in full by search engines and can attract a new audience who would not have found you otherwise.
The topics that your videos explore can simply be written as stand-alone pieces. It is far easier to write something that you are very familiar with, than an entirely new topic. If you have written a script for a video – write it as an article at the same time. You’ll find it an efficient process with all your research and supporting visuals completed.
Clips of your video are suitable for all kinds of visual channels, such as Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube Stories and many more. Take your complete video and cut it down into snackable parts. Grow audiences outside your current channels with little effort.
Turn your written content into audio & video
Although many of us like to write, most social platforms are skewed to support visual elements. Long, structured, paragraphs can lose the interest of users quickly. Or, out of preference, they prefer to listen or watch content.
Just like this written post for example – it does not need to stay in this format. Try reading this article aloud. It could easily be a perfect podcast. Can you see quote-worthy extracts that would be perfect as a short-form video? Absolutely!
We already know from the above sections that it’s easy to take a podcast and turn it into a video. So, record yourself reading your article. You have long-form videos to publish on channels such as YouTube. You have video quotes of your articles to publish on social channels. You are not longer restricted to your website, but you can publish your brand and ideas everywhere. It should not be a matter of “if” you publish to other channels, but “when” and how regularly. That is how you grow a large audience and that’s how you become efficient with your time.
Content Archival Revival
The final thought is the most important on how to create content efficiently.
Once you have hours and hours of content, what do you do with it next?
If you transcribe your audio and video content in full (so you can maximise its value) you can store content in a searchable library. That means you can go back to that podcast episode you created 2 years ago where someone mentioned a topic or subject becomes relevant again and republish it. Boom!
Hours of content already ready and waiting to be given a new lease of life. You’ve got a massive back catalogue of content, so isn’t it great that you can publish it without any effort.
Reach more people, more often and with less effort.