STOP! Don’t Put Out Any More Content Until You Learn This Strategy…
By Ido Lechner, Magic Media Founder & Head of Strategy
Are you spreading yourself thin trying to publish content to multiple platforms? If you’re finding it difficult to keep up with producing work for LinkedIn, Medium, Instagram, YouTube and so forth, you’re not alone.
It’s easy to run out of juice when you’re distributing your attention across several channels.
That’s why we shouldn’t aim to produce 5 pieces of content for 5 different platforms. Instead, we should aim to hit two birds with one stone.
A solid content strategy takes this into account. Following a plan to spend less energy producing one piece of content isn’t for the sake of making your life any easier… its so that you can produce more content and put yourself out there on other social media channels.
That’s why you should check out Gary Vaynerchuk’s content model. It’s how he makes 30+ pieces of content from a single keynote.
The GaryVee Content Model:
Back in 2016, Gary published a video discussing the ‘hacking of mothership content into micro-content.’ He’s always been into the concept of repurposing his work across different media channels, and you can clearly see how the content model slides originated from this video.
Repackaging content at scale has paid off for GaryVee in terms of the reach he’s been able to cultivate both for himself and his brands by extension. That is perhaps the greatest benefit of this strategy; not the amount of time it saves but the ability to tap into new audiences. Since most people stick to making single-channel content, they aren’t able to replicate it elsewhere. This concept allows you to proliferate your work online to gain visibility.
While there’s certainly something to be said for originality, it isn’t everything. You should absolutely be posting derivative content if it helps you put more out there, just take a balanced approach to creating and recycling.
How to Take the First Step:
The first step to following Gary’s content model is to determine your ‘mothership,’ or pillar content. This is going to be long-form content, the work that takes you the most time to produce.
Prior to putting this strategy into action, most people tend to focus on developing micro-content because they aren’t aware that reformatting content will help them reach new audiences. With pillar content, you can take only the best parts of your long-form content and crop them into bite-sized portions to feed your audience.
Think of it like Baked by Melissa’s cupcakes; even if you don’t like paying a dollar per bite, you can’t knock their success.
Once you’ve determined what your pillar content is, you’re ready to start producing… But remember: you’re going for long form content now. The days of creating one image for Instagram and a separate medium-length article on Medium are over. Your goal now is to make long-form content and chop it up.
You can then figure out the best pieces to crop by asking your audience directly and observing their behavior. For instance, GaryVee often uses other people’s timestamps on YouTube (the way we had told you “skip to 7:12 to hear him talk about this” under the video above) as an indication of what nuggets would make for good micro-content.
Be on the lookout for feedback from your audience, its the best way to maximize this strategy’s effectiveness.
To Conclude
In case you’re interested in seeing this content model in action, here’s the start of this Medium post on Instagram. Check out how we used this concept ourselves to publish byproducts across different platforms.
Do you have any tips on content creation/strategy? Share it with our community below! We can’t wait to read your insights.
