Creating content helps you with the rest of your marketing efforts. Make sure you're getting as many eyeballs on what you create by repurposing it and sharing it on a wide variety of places.

What you'll learn:

→ where content can be repurposed.
→ where to share your content.
→ types of posts to create.
→ ways to share via email.
→ why you shouldn't worry about sharing too often.
→ how to repurpose your existing long form content.

Want to skip ahead? Here are key takeaways:

[4:40] What type of content should you create? The bigger priority is figuring out what content you can create consistency and set a regular schedule.
[5:48] Make a list of the platforms you currently market on. This list could include Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, email etc. The key is to start where you are currently active and get consistent before you add more in. 
[7:25] Types of posts you can create. You can create carousel posts, short form video and static posts. Each type you'd create at least 4 so you'd have one per week if you're only posting long form content monthly.
[13:15] Break down your content into weekly emails. Take the same strategy as social media content and break your long form content into weekly emails. Highlight a point and then drive readers to your website for more information.
[16:53] Repurposing your existing content. Utilize the existing content you have on your website. You can update high performing content and reshare it to your audience. This is a great way to have more to share without having to always create new.

Resources

Learn More about VIP Days
EP 162 | How to Craft a Perfect Blog Post
Canva

Full Transcript

[Sami Bedell-Mulhern] Hello, hello, and welcome to our month all about content marketing. I love content marketing, because it's a great way for you to set yourself up as a subject matter expert, for you to be found organically and search for you to answer the common questions that your audience is asking or calling in on or that your donors are asking. And it's just a great opportunity to create something that you can then share across all of the channels that you are currently active on. So we're going to kick off this month by kind of talking about repurposing content, ways that you can take the content that you have and new content that you make to really just broadcast it over and over and over again, so that it can save you time and effort. Whether you're starting with a long form blog, post, a podcast, a YouTube channel doesn't really matter. It's just more that we care about a long form piece of content. So a lot of words or a longer video that you're going to chunk up or like I said, a podcast, these podcasts are about 30 minutes or so. So something that's a little bit longer that we can cut and chunk up into different things. We're also going to talk about ways that you can repurpose the content that's already on your website, so that you can keep things moving, keep things going and continue to share with your audience. This is always a popular topic when I share about this on social media. So I hope that you take this and build up your own content repurposing roadmap, so that you can track and pay attention to what the things are, that you're sharing out there, how you're sharing them, and how you can kind of automate or batch the tasks for things that you're creating. Once a blog post has been written. Odds are you have a variety of people that are helping you with all of these pieces. You might have a volunteer helping you with your social media, you might have a volunteer helping you write the content, or filament. So the more we can put all of these systems in one place, and everybody knows exactly what to create, and who's going to need the information to take that next step is going to help you stay consistent with your content creation, your content promotion, and help you really just keep things going. Here's what we know about content, it takes time for it to really pick up steam, so we have to stay consistent with it and keep going. And then you're going to start to see more and more action on your website more and more conversations with your audience with your community, more engagement that builds over time and continues to build. So it's time to get started with your content strategy. I've got you covered all month long. I am here for you, we have some amazing experts coming to talk about all things. But we're gonna start with really feeling good about how we're going to repurpose all this content so that you understand and feel good about putting this into effect, re reinvigorating your content plan or just, you know, really getting started and finding the right solutions to make it happen.

Okay, but before we get into it, this episode is brought to you by our VIP days, these are half day or full day sessions with me one on one where we can just get the dang thing done. You can pick your category or we can customize it to your needs. You can check out everything at https://thefirstclick.net/vip. But what we'll do is build an entire content strategy for you give you personalized keywords, give you personalized topics for your organization, chat with you about what your goals are figure out what's going to be the right types of content for you to be producing and create this whole repurposing strategy for you in a day, you'll walk away with content written for you with templates, with all sorts of things ready to go. So you're just ready to execute. You don't have to sit in strategic phase, you'll have all of that done personalized just for you. And we'll get it done and going for you. Now, we also offer VIP days for email marketing campaigns, as well as website strategy and support. So take a peek at https://thefirstclick.net/vip space is extremely limited because they are full day one on ones with you or your team. So make sure you snag that spot early so that we can get this rolling. And you can go into quarter three, ready to rock and roll. Okay, again, https://thefirstclick.net/vip. Let's get into the episode.

[Intro] You're listening to the digital marketing therapy podcast. I'm your host, Sami Bedell-Mulhern. Each month we dive deep into a digital marketing or fundraising strategy that you can implement in your organization. Each week, you'll hear from guest experts, nonprofits, and myself on best practices, tips and resources to help you raise more money online and reach your organizational goals.

[Sami Bedell-Mulhern] Okay, so I want to reiterate that it doesn't really matter what type of content that you're creating. Again, like I mentioned in the intro, we really want to focus on the long form content. So what is the long form content you're going to be creating that you're creating consistently, and that might be monthly? Hopefully it's weekly. But whatever it is that You can do well and get done consistently. So let's just for the sake of this episode, say that you're creating a piece of content every single month. Now we're gonna build our plan and strategy around, we'll just say, a blog post. So because similarly, like my podcast episodes, go up a show notes, which are effectively blog posts on my website, you could do the same with a YouTube video doesn't really matter, right? The idea is still the same. So where we're going to start with is how often are we publishing content? So we're going to say monthly, okay, then we're going to come, we're going to make a list of all of the places where we are currently active. So we're not adding anything in here, right? We're going to just get consistent with what we have. So what social media platforms are you active on? What are you doing email? Do you have an email newsletter? Are you doing SMS marketing, text message marketing? Are you on Pinterest? Are you on YouTube? Like, where are you currently, we're going to start there get consistent, and then we can layer up from there. So we're going to start with, I am writing a blog post once a month. And now I'm going to chunk that blog post up into a bunch of different types of posts. Okay, this is where we are at the most basic level. I just can't get over this cough with this cold, you know, so I apologize. Okay, so let's say that you're a pet adoption facility, because I love talking about pet adoption, for whatever reason, and you write a blog post that is all about things that you should prep for before adopting a dog. So it might have tips and resources on how to make sure your home is safe. What types of products should you have in your home before you bring the pet home? How much does it cost to have, you know, a pet of different sizes, you know, food costs and whatnot, how to locate a vet, like all of the things that you might want to have in place, right, so we're gonna say, this is a really meaty blog post, then you're going to make, we're going to make a list of all the different types of content that you can create from this one, blog posts. And if you're only publishing once a month, let's make those kinds of those pieces of content a little bit longer, like 2000 words so that we have stuff that we can talk about all month long. And so we're going to then create multiple pieces. So what are we going to create, we're going to create a carousel post. A carousel post is the posts that you've seen, they're largely graphic. And so you might have like five or six different slides, if you will, that all go together that kind of flow. So you're sharing different pieces of content. So you might have a carousel a week. So you might create four different carousels. And they would highlight different things. So for this blog post, one carousel might be an overview of what the whole blog post is about. One carousel might be all about just the financial aspects you might want to consider. One might be all about the best toys that you feature in that blog post. And one might be about things to consider. Maybe you have you talked in that blog post about breeds and what types of dogs are right for your house, right. So you're pulling a little snippet out of each out of that post that might appeal to a different person in your audience. But it's all driving back to your main blog post. Okay, so we're going to create four carousels. And we're going to you can do this in whatever tool you like, I'm a huge fan of creating these templates in Canva. Because remember, we're going to be doing this every month or every week. So if you can have those templates in Canva, then it's easy to keep your branding on point. It's easy to keep consistency in your graphics. So people start to expect and see, oh, like I recognize this. This is from this organization that I love. They give me great information. I want to dive deeper into this. And then it's just an editing text, drop it in a few images, you're good to go plus Canva has tons of great templates in there for all of the things that we're going to talk about today, whether it be video carousels, all of that, so you don't have to start from scratch. Okay, so we're going to create a carousel post. Um, we are going to create some sort of short form video, definitely want to check out the last episode of this month. I know it's a little bit of a ways away, but check out the last episode of this month because we're going to be talking all about short form content. If you have a podcast or a YouTube video, then it's great. It's really easy to create audio grams from that content, whether you have video or if it's just captioning.

If you don't, you can do just like a quick little direct to camera snippet. If you don't want to use your face. You could use it A background video or even just in Canva, you can create graphics that move that just use words and backgrounds. So it doesn't really matter. But we're going to create a couple 30 to 62nd clips that we can use wherever you are, again, depending on your platform, but if you're on Facebook, you can use them for real. So if you're on Instagram, you can use them for reals. And stories. If you're on Pinterest, you can use video pins, if you're on YouTube, you can use them as shorts, right. So the same videos can be used over and over and over again in multiple different places. So try to come up with again, we're going to just say for for each of these four snippets of things that you can pull out so that you can use have one a week. So now we're up to like two posts a week, let's just say you're only on Facebook. Now you have a carousel post, and you have a reel that you can use each week to promote this one blog post. Okay, and then we're going to create standard posts. So these are the easiest, these are what you're probably most used to doing. But again, we're going to create at least four, you might even create eight, if you can, which would get you up to four posts a week, just for one blog post. Now, these posts are going to either pull out specific quotes from the content that you've created with an image. So helpful image in the case of adoption, it's super easy, you can just feature for cute little pups. And talk about a tip that you have in there that's related. But again, you're going your goal here is to really entice people to get them excited to get them saying oh yeah, this is information that I need. This is something that's going to be helpful to me, something that's relevant to me and driving people back because again, there's different things that are going to resonate from that blog post for people that they're going to be interested in, that's going to make them click through to read the full piece of content. So we have what eight pieces of eight pieces of static, like an image and a general post. So again, those can be quotes, those can be just little stats, they could be, you know, an overview of the different like, like a grouping of content that's in that post, whatever it is. So now we have four posts a week for four weeks. So we've created 16 posts for just one channel. And then if you're on multiple channels, right now you've got stuff that's going out. I mean, if you're on four channels, I'm not going to do that math, because I'm not good at math. But you see what I'm where I'm going with this now we have a ton of content that we're sharing all the time, on our on our social channels, and ready to go. So now with those four posts, you know, we could maybe just add in one post. Additional to that, that is more of a direct ask that is talking about a fundraising campaign or something that we have going on, that's more more directed, specific to something that we need from our audience, right, because the 8020 rule, we want to make sure we're providing value all the time. Now the next place that you can use this content is in your email newsletter. So similarly to how you are breaking this out over four weeks, you could have four weeks of email newsletters going out as well. So if you're struggling to be consistent with email, this is a great way to really incorporate that into your strategy. And again, taking specific snippets of things. You know, having that gives you four different subject lines that tackle four different pain points where people snippets that are in the email, again, the goal is to drive them to your website. So we're not giving them the whole rundown of what the blog post is in the email. We're just giving them some highlights some snippets, maybe a couple of cute photos, and then pushing them to the website where they can read the whole thing and engage because once we get them to the website, right, we've, we've talked about this with blog posts, and I will link up our how to craft a blog post episode in here as well. We're using call to action. We're engaging with them on that page and giving them reasons to engage with us further and keep moving them down the pathway to making a donation. Okay, so you've got all of these things now. So you can write out your roadmap, write out kind of, okay, once we have blog posts, these are all the things that need to be created. You can assign them out, you can figure out the order flow, whatnot, create the templates to make it easy to rinse and repeat every time. So if by now you're sitting here thinking there's no way that I can push out 16 pieces of content on the same blog post, people are gonna get bored. People are gonna get antsy, they're not gonna like it. They're gonna, you know, get frustrated with us that we're only sharing the same thing. Remember that our organic reach on posts is not that great and not Everybody's opening every email and not everybody's seeing all of your posts. And not everybody has the same pain point. So let's say you put out a social post that's talking about the cost of adopting a pet. Maybe that's not something I'm concerned about. I'm not, I'm not worried about how much it's going to cost me, I'm good to go. They're not going to entice me to click through. But maybe I am looking for a comparison on different types of breeds. And what might be the best fit for my family. Now, even though it's the same blog post, I'm like, Oh, that is something that I'm concerned about. Now I'm going to, you know, pop on over and take a look. Or maybe, you know, week two, you've been sharing this stuff not relevant to me. Week three, a friend of mine says, you know, I've been thinking of adopting a pet and I say, oh, you know, I saw this article, but I can't remember exactly who did it, or where it was, shoot, I wish I would have saved it wasn't relevant to them at the time is now. But the fact that now you're continuing to share it, at some point, it might pop up in their feed again, and they can say, oh, yeah, that was it. Yeah, I got that, okay, I'm gonna send that off to my friend. There's all of these different ways that we engage with our content and where we are in the moment in the day and where we are going, and what what's happening for us to click through. So do not be worried, do not be stressed out, do not be nervous about putting out too much stuff about the same blog posts. Because remember, we're not just regurgitating the same post over and over and over again, we're not saying the same thing. We're not sharing the same images, we're pulling out different elements of that information so that it can appeal to the audience in the right time. Okay. So that's for creating new content that's for when we're reaching out and creating new blog posts and whatnot. If you already have a ton of content on your website, and we're going to talk about this again, too, later in the month, but I want you to really think about what are some of the the blog posts or the content that is really performing well for you? What are some of the things that happen annual annually? I've talked about this in previous episodes with your events, right? Could you create a very big robust event page that has all of the information on it features are bound sponsors tell stories tells impact, right, that's content, we can repurpose, and use again, we just need to update that page every year, maybe we have a blog post on our website, that is an annual review of the amount like the things that you've been able to accomplish, you don't need to do that brand new every time, let's just repurpose it, add a little bit more information for where we're at so far this year. And then we can share it again as new. So if you're starting to create new content every month, maybe you also then repurpose something new or something old, every two weeks. So now you have two new pieces of content that can go out for you. And that you can build off of share and create social media for and all you had to do for the second piece is maybe just make some updates. Maybe it's updates on the research or some new stats, maybe it's just anecdotal stuff, maybe you have a post that's like, you know, 30 recipe ideas for back to school, that don't break the bank, maybe you just update and say, Hey, newly revised for 2023 With 15 new ideas. So now you're just continuing to add and grow. So that's a great way to take you from one blog post a month to two without having to completely write from scratch, and continue to drive traffic to high performing content that people on your website or people out there are looking for. So that's another way to repurpose content. So time to get started and start building out your strategy. So I want you to really think about the channels that you're on, what content can you create around it. So remember, we talked about carousels, short form video, and your standard posts with graphics, and then start to map out a calendar, I just have an Excel spreadsheet that has all of my channels at the top. And then the days of the week on the left. And then I just kind of start plugging things in and putting things in places where I can where I can just show up, you know in the morning and schedule everything or I can schedule everything in the week, but I don't have to think about it and your whole team can just have access and people can plug things in.

That has worked really well for me, especially then when I want to go in and add other stuff. So you can then use that same calendar to add in what the other posts are the other categories of things that you're sharing throughout the week. For example, if it's an app See if it's a donation, if it's an event promotion, all of that good stuff. Now remember, when you're in heavy, heavy promotion, we're not necessarily going to be talking about the content that we're pushing out unless it's relevant to the event. So just keep that in mind. We don't need to overlay or all of these things. But just keep this as a guide and as a robber. So I hope that you will create your roadmap, get going get started, hit me up. If you have any questions, hello, at the first click dotnet. And remember that the benefit of this also is that if you're not already utilizing the Google Ad grant, which is Google's $10,000 A month ad spend for you, as a nonprofit, if you're not already using that, getting going with this content is also a great way to start in going down that road to that next path of building out that strategy with Google ads as well. So perks all around. Let's get our content going. Let's get our repurposing going. Let's make it happen. And I can't wait to see the things that you're creating.

Make sure you subscribe wherever you listen to these episodes so that you don't miss out. They come live every tuesday and this month, we are talking all things content strategy. Let me know if this monthly topic thing is something that you enjoy. But I can't wait to hang out with you. And all the places. We're on YouTube. We're on LinkedIn, we are most active on LinkedIn. And I just thank you for taking time to listen. Let's go get that content and I'll see you in the next one.