S2 Ep 19. How to turn one video into multiple pieces of content

Are you struggling to make enough content? Between YouTube, Facebook, your website and Instagram, there’s a lot of platforms you need to be seen on. 

Not to mention LinkedIn (your professional and company pages), Twitter, Pinterest and ReddIt. It can feel like you’re stuck in a never-ending cycle of content creation and distribution. And oh boy – it can be exhausting. 

But what if it was actually way less time-consuming than you thought? What if you could simply take one piece of content and turn it into many?  

Sounds like magic, doesn’t it? Guess what – it’s not. 

Today I’m sharing something video makers, content creators and marketing professionals have been clued into for years. 

The art of repurposing. Don’t worry – you don’t need to be a creative genius to master it! 

It’s actually incredibly easy and a great way to boost your engagement, enhance your reach and give your content a chance to be seen by your audience – no matter where they choose to spend their time. 
 
All you need is one brilliant piece of long form content – think a video, blog or podcast. That’s it, promise! I’ll show you what to do from there in this episode. 
 
To join me in the Define Your Ideal Audience, please head to https://www.moonshinecommunicationsacademy.com/define-your-ideal-audience

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Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:03

Welcome to today's episode on how to turn one video into multiple pieces of content. And why would you want to do that? Well, are you struggling to make enough content to feed your social profiles, website, and email news list? Between YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram, there is a lot of platforms that you need to be seen on. And not to mention LinkedIn, where you need to update both your professional and your company pages and don't forget about Twinter or Pinterest. I can tell you now it can feel like you are stuck in a never-ending cycle of content creation and distribution. And oh boy, can it be exhausting? So what if I told you that there's a way to make it less time consuming? Have I got your attention now? Well, what if it was actually way less time consuming than you had ever thought? And what if you could simply take one piece of content and turn it into many? It sounds like magic, doesn't it? But guess what? It is not. And today I am sharing with you something video marketers, content creators, and marketing professionals have been doing for years. And why am I the one to share this with you? That's a great question. If you're new to this podcast, I'm Sue Collins and I've been producing video content for well over a decade. Each week I discuss about all things visual communications, specifically to help you craft better content. Why? Well, because the world does not need any more dull content. No one sets out to make a boring video. And but that is exactly what can happen when you don't have all the info on how to make a great one. Sometimes just a few small tips can be the difference between a dull video and one that shines. So that's what this is all about, sharing with you the things I've learned in over a decade of producing video content in all different shapes and sizes. And the magic I'm sharing today is all about how to create one piece of content and turn that one piece into lots of pieces of content. It's the art of repurposing. Don't worry, you do not need to be a creative genius or an experienced marketer to master this. It's actually incredibly easy and it's a great way to boost your engagement, enhance your reach, and give your content a chance to be seen by your audience, no matter where they choose to spend their time. All you need is one brilliant piece of long form content. Think a video, a blog, or a podcast. And that's it. You just need one. I promise that's all you need. But as Blaise Pascal said, I'm sorry I wrote you such a long letter. I did not have time to write you a short one. And these are words that I stand by because it is easier to create a longer form piece of content than it is to craft a meaningful but very brief piece. If you don't believe me, just try to take a paragraph that you've written and distill it into a tweet where it still has context and makes perfect sense. It is so much easier just to write that whole paragraph. So once you have your long form piece of work, this is what comes next. And a word of warning: things are going to get very meta in this podcast because what's following is an example of how I take one piece of video content and divide it across multiple platforms. So let's get into it. This is how I repurpose my videos into a catalogue of content. My colleague Mike Hill and I film about four or five episodes of our Moonshine Moonshot YouTube series every month. I call this batching, and it's a very useful workflow. It just means creating a bunch of videos on the same day that we have to do one round of setup pack down compared to doing a shoot every single week, which can be exhausting for so many reasons. So highly recommend batching, very easy to do. So once we have the four or five episodes in the can, our editor gets busy in the studio putting them together. Then the topic and the content from each video is used to create a blog, and that blog is a written post for the website, and as each blog is based on the content of that video, it's straightforward to craft the blog as it's actually mirroring what was already said in the video. Another way you could do this quite simply would just be to get the video transcribed and use that transcription as the basis for the written blog. Then you can take those blog posts and turn them into a podcast script, which is what I record and publish each week. And that goes out on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and a bunch of other podcast apps that I can't think of right now. But here's another really good bonus tip. If you're new to the whole podcast creation thing, check out BuzzSprout. In their own words, they're a user-friendly podcast hosting for non-techie people. And no, they are not a sponsor, and I they have no idea that I'm giving them a plug. But BuzzSprout is fantastic. I've been using it for years and it really is very simple. And what they do is they take the podcast that I upload and they syndicate it to all of the other platforms so I don't have to repost it to all of them individually. So how good is that? And then next the team or I select quotes or paragraphs from the blog that can be made into quote tiles for Instagram or captions on Facebook or LinkedIn, those kinds of things. Well, in the meantime, our editor will create a suite of micro versions of each video episode. In other words, they'll cut the episode into smaller chunks or make short videos, which is music to any marketer's ears, because the first thing that they always ask for is can I have a version under one minute please? Anything else is too long, just make it shorter. Which is always a bit jarring for a filmmaker to hear. The story should be as long as the story needs to be effective to tell it. But I get that social platforms have parameters and you have to make content to suit the durations that they require, which is why marketers always want really short videos. So you put those versions, which can be anywhere from 15 seconds to two minutes long, and they are really fantastic to publish across social. There's also a really great platform called WAV, W A V V E WAV, that you can use to edit down your podcast so you can share little snack size snippets of your social channels, which is really useful as well. So before I unpack all this a little bit more, it's worth noting that I am using video as my master content example. Videos are my specialty after all. Plus, it's hard to beat the effectiveness of video as a content marketing tool. But as I mentioned earlier, a long-form blog or a podcast is going to work just as well for doing all of this. So there's no need to panic if you don't have a video or you're not producing video. And I also just want to mention as well, I keep talking about my team and the things that I do and the editor, etc. If you don't have a team, if you're just a soulpreneur, you don't have to worry about that. I used to do all of this myself as well. It's just that as Moonshine Agency's grown and we've brought on more team members, I have more support. But you can easily just get an editor if you're not doing it yourself, and you can cut all of these things up and create all this content yourself. You don't have to have a team around you. So if you haven't joined me on Instagram yet, it's a really great place to ask questions. So if anything's coming up throughout this podcast about your content creation, just plug in at Moonshine Communications Academy into Insta and you'll find me and you can DM me and ask me anything you need to ask. Alright, so let's get to work. First, you want to share your master video wherever you can. This is a really important step because once you've put in all that time and energy into researching, scripting, storyboarding, filming, and editing your video, you want to make the most out of it. And that means sharing it everywhere that it could possibly be seen. You should publish it to YouTube, you should share it on Facebook, include the link in your next company newsletter, and screen it at upcoming industry conferences at your next board meeting or company-wide forum. The more places that it can be seen, the better. And don't just think that you're limited to sharing it online or at live events either, because with the use of QR codes these days, you can easily create one linking to your video and you can add that to flyers, brochures, posters. You could even make coffee mugs and stick it on there. You can do whatever you want. So get really creative about it. But remember, if you're putting in all the time and energy to creating a piece of content, you want to get it out there as much as possible so that people can be enjoying it. The options really are endless, and this is just the tip of the iceberg. But I hope it's gotten your creative juices flowing and has given you some ideas. So let's talk a bit more about how to repurpose your content. And what I mean by that is taking the content you've already created and how do you put it out in lots of different ways. So we talked a little bit before, very briefly, about how to turn your video into a blog. So let's break that down a bit more. Google loves blogs. Actually, it loves any piece of content that can be effectively optimized, providing you pick the right keywords. You can actually help your business to get to page one on Google through blogging. But writing new content from scratch every week can get time consuming and tedious really quickly, and that's where video can help. You could use your video as the framework for your blog content. Rewatch your video a few times, take notes on your topic or your on-screen talent and what you talked about, and flesh it out into I don't know, 800, maybe 1200 word-long blog piece, and you can publish that to your site. So to make it even simpler, you could get your video transcribed on a platform like Rev.com. We use Rev.com, find it works really well, and that way you have a text file document to base the blog on. And that is really efficient and going to save you heaps of time. So one more thing, be sure to add the video and the podcast if you're making one to your blog post so that you give your readers a complete multimedia experience. Remember, some people like to read, some people like to watch, some people like to listen. So just create your content in as many variations as you can. So when you're creating a podcast, if you thought about starting a podcast, today is the day. If you're already producing great videos and blog posts, you've already done half of the work. Your blog or video can easily be converted into an audio file. I tend to take my blog article and change it up a bit, add some more ideas, more thoughts here and there, and record it in our podcast studio at Moonshine Communications Academy. And then I hand the recording file over to our editor who makes it sound much more slick with an intro and an outro and theme music. But if that sounds like even more work, don't worry, you can easily just rip the audio file direct from your video and publish that to a podcast app too. If you can add an intro and an outro because podcast listeners are used to that type of format, but it can be really simple. So if you don't have an editor, don't worry, just do whatever you can. You can even record audio to your phone and use that audio to upload to a podcast platform. So if you want to check out the Moonshine Moonshot series on our YouTube channel, you can find all episodes there. Just in the search bar on YouTube, put in Moonshine Communications Academy, and it'll take you right to them. Pick one of the videos, then go to the website, have a look at the companion blog and listen to the podcast. You'll really quickly see how they all mirror each other and they're variations of the same long form piece of content. So don't forget to subscribe while you're there either, because then you won't miss a future episode. So now you are ready to create the bite-size versions of video, blog, or podcast and publish that to social media. And this is the best tip because creating fresh new content for social is always time consuming. So why are there so many platforms with different specifications, word limits, hashtags, count recommendations? There is always something new to learn and keep on top of, which is why having a backlog of content to turn to can be incredibly helpful. Troll through your previous blog posts or videos and pluck out a few quotes that you can turn into social tiles, or extract whole paragraphs from your blog and use them as captions. Just ensure that you include a call to action telling your followers to read more via the blog post on your website. You can also slice and dice your master video into short, snappy micro content that's no more than say two minutes long. And it's also a good idea to peek at the raw footage from the filming day because you might have captured a heap of great content that never actually made it into the master video. And those offcuts can be really well used on social. So, you know, behind the scenes footage or blooper moments, and finally, you want to create graphic text posts using stats or comments from your video too. So you don't need to be an art director to design all of these other elements. There's a whole stack of free graphic tools like Canva or PickMonkey that can help you get really creative. So a reminder batch your content. This goes for everything you produce: podcasts, videos, blogs, or social posts. If you're starting with a master video series like we do at Moonshine Moonshot, be sure to film multiple episodes in one hit. We usually work to film about five per shoot, but you could aim for more if you've got the energy. It just takes a little bit more prep to figure out your topics before your shoot. And don't forget, if you're concerned you haven't got a big audience to produce all of this content for, that's a just yet problem. You haven't got a big audience yet. And if you're not sure how to find that audience, you can learn how to at my brand new Moonshine Communications Academy course called Define Your Ideal Audience. It's the first step in growing a great big audience for your work. You can find all of that info over at www.moonshinecommunicationsacademy.com. So here's the rundown of how you can take one piece of content and turn it into many. Create a video, get it transcribed, write a blog, turn that blog into a podcast script, cut your video blog or podcast into snack sized chunks and share it across your social channels. Prep four or five topics and produce them in one hit. Batch it, in other words, and boom, you've fed your communications need for a whole month, if not more, which will leave you with loads of extra time to focus on all these other new projects that get sidelined while you push through the day-to-day. So if you would like to dive even deeper, don't forget you can join me in the Define Your Ideal Audience online course, and I will show you how to create impact with your communications projects. Can't wait to speak to you again next week, and I'd love to know what questions you have. So jump over to Instagram Moonshine Communications Academy to DM me if you have anything, and also hit subscribe on whatever platform you're listening to. Till next week, speak soon.