Ep. 252: How to Use the Content Pyramid to Repurpose Content

Repurposing Content for Social Media

Who should listen: This episode is for anyone who struggles with finding enough time to create the content they need to keep their audience engaged.

Key point: If you consistently produce content in your field of expertise, then, over time, your audience will come to know, like, and trust you as a respected authority in that field.

Action item: Start producing content. Create one piece of long-form content, and then repurpose it to maximize its value to you.

You’ve probably heard about worms that, when cut in two, will regrow into two fully formed worms.

Regardless of how you feel about worms, you’ve got to admit that’s pretty cool.

Well, you can do something pretty similar with your long-form content (also called pillar content).

You can take a piece of pillar content, like a blog, and cut it up into smaller pieces. Distribute those pieces across various social media platforms, and you’ll have two, three, four, or more pieces of content that will generate additional engagement.

It’s called repurposing, and it’s pretty cool too—especially since it will save you a ton of time developing the content you need to keep you in touch with your clients and potential clients.

And in today’s Silver Dollar episode, we explain a model called the content pyramid that will help make repurposing your content easy peasy.

But first, let’s quickly revisit the idea of why producing content is so important.

Why you need to produce quality content consistently

If you listen to Stay Paid on a regular basis, you know how much we emphasize the need to create high-quality content on a regular basis.

It’s perhaps one of the most effective ways you can promote yourself as an expert in your field.

The consistent production of useful content is an excellent way to have your audience know, like, and trust you as an authority. And once you’ve reached the status of an experienced specialist within your sphere, your contacts will look to you when they need expertise.

What is a content pyramid?

As is often the case, there are different ways to describe what a content pyramid is. The company Great Content provides a simple, clear, and useful definition:

Fundamentally, the content pyramid is a way of organising [sic] content to ensure consistency, brand reinforcement, and the extensive transmission of marketing themes.

During our conversation, we primarily focus on the third use of the content pyramid—the “extensive transmission.”

If you search the web, you’ll find a slew of images made to represent various types of content pyramids, each a little different from the next to best suit the designer’s definition. This one is from Gary Vaynerchuk (GaryVee), entrepreneur and advertising CEO, and it’s pretty straightforward:

As you can see, the idea of repurposing content is to:

1. Start with a piece of pillar content,
2. dissect into several smaller pieces of content,
3. and then post on social platforms most appropriate for showcasing the smaller pieces.

Pillar content

There’s no need to be intimidated by the idea of pillar or long-form content, especially if you think about it as documenting your activities rather than filling a blank screen on your laptop with lots of words.

The easiest way to do this is to record yourself going about the normal course of your business day while explaining what you are doing along the way. Essentially, you’re documenting what you know best and have a passion for.

Of course, if you have a knack for writing and can find the time, repurposing blog content affords you the same kind of efficiency. You can sit down and write a 2,000 word blog, or a top 10 list, or an FAQ document. These would all easily lend themselves to being divided up into smaller chunks that you can then share.

Short-form or micro-content

This is the fun part because you get to see one piece of content multiply into many pieces of content, which, when compared to the original pillar piece of content, all represent less time, less thinking, and less effort, but more content!

There are so many ways to repurpose your content. With a little formatting, you can turn your pillar content into:

• 60-second video clips
• 15-30 second Reels
• Audiograms
• Carousels with bullet points
• Memes
• Images
• Quotes
• Stories
• GIFs

You can edit your video directly on your smart phone, or you can use a service like Canva or Headliner. Regardless of which you choose, it’s not difficult to edit and repurpose video content. Do it once or twice, and you’ll get the hang of it quickly.

Remember that you want to be omnipresent with your marketing. To stay top of mind, try to pull as many different types of content as possible from the original pillar content.

But do this purposefully . . .

Distribute across social media

Think about your content and the types of audiences that different social media platforms attract. Then decide what you want to post and where. We offer a few suggestions about what type of content works best on the different types of platforms.

What’s important to remember is that all your short-form content is a way for you to drive traffic back to your pillar content. For that reason, it’s a good idea to provide a call-to-action that directs your audience to the original piece (e.g., “Listen to the full . . . “).

Listen for your next steps

In addition to being able to reach your audience in multiple ways, repurposing your content also gives you the opportunity to collect feedback specific to the channel you used to distribute it.

We suggest you check the comments you receive and use them as guides for creating additional content. Comments you receive from users on LinkedIn are going to be different from the comments left by Instagram users. And if you want to make it super easy for yourself to identify what works and what doesn’t, tell people to leave timestamps of what they liked (or didn’t) in their comments.

With all these opportunities to repurpose content, you really have very little excuse for not creating a pillar piece. The return on your investment will be well worth your time. 😀

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