Thread by @jessievbreugel

You don't need more content, you *just* need to do more with the content you already have.

Here's the time-saving strategy every creator needs: The Content Flywheel.

⬇️ ⬇️

Disclaimer:

The problem is that supply of content is growing, but demand is static.

To realize growth as a creator, the answer can’t be to increase content production proportionally to the growth goals you need to achieve.

This is why repackaging your content becomes crucial.

TL;DR //

Here’s the 6-step process to create your own Content Flywheel.
1. Copy & Paste ©
2. Excerpt 📍
3. Update 🆕
4. Reformat ✂️
5. Curate 🔍
6. Multiply ✖️

Part 1 — Create Once, Publish Twice

Pretty obvious.

You’ve already done the heavy lifting: you’ve created your piece of content, decided the best platform to share it on, publish it and wait. You hear a little bit more than crickets.

What’s next?

Take the piece of content as it is, and put it in more places. You post the article you wrote for your website, also on Medium, and into a Linkedin article too.

As creators, we think that our whole audience sees everything we put out, so we're afraid to repeat ourselves.

Uh-no.

Like yourself, your audience has other things to do. Don’t be afraid to repeat yourself and re-publish your content on different platforms.

Don’t forget that different platforms have different audiences, so it’s a great way to further stress-test the strength of your ideas.

As long as you know your content helps your audience solve a particular problem, you’re doing them a favor.

Being a creator is building your own content library. One-piece at a time.

Part 2 — Care About the Good Stuff

Excerpting involves grabbing individual pieces from the content to use elsewhere. You can take a snippet of your article to use as a long-form Linkedin post, share each of the images on Instagram, tweet the best quote, etc.

Writing on Medium is a great validator of your content. The parts your readers highlight are great to repurpose as single tweets as it’s already validated it means something to your audience.

To see if you can find a new use for each individual piece you extract, you need to have a system for it.

For my Twitter content, I use the following template in Notion, but you literally use any method that best serves your needs.

Go through your content and make note of each individual piece of it. Again, being a creator is building your own library. Categorizing it is also part of the game.

Part 3 — Amp It Up

Being in the game for a long extent of time probably means you have a shitload of content. Content that’s been validated by your audience. No engagement is feedback as well. You know what worked and what didn’t.

How?

By looking at the engagement: likes, comments, shares.

Yes, to a certain extent, those are vanity metrics, because they don’t pay your bills. Yet. But, they do show what content resonates with your audience and which content didn’t.

You’ve already got a goldmine of content that could have a second life with a little extra love.

There are 3 things you can do:

• High performing content: give it a second run
• Low performing content: give it a second change
• Outdated content: make it useful again

I hear you think, there’s no real reason for updating the blog I wrote 6 months ago.

Wrong.

Your content is being scanned by search engines all the time, to see if the content is still up-to-date.

When you update your content regularly — once a month, for ex. — your fresh content triggers a visit from the search engine spiders. These indexes your site, realize it’s been updated, and might move you a little higher in the rankings.

What can you do to update your content?

1. New headline: The most important part of your content, improving the headline brings in a lot of new traffic
2. New image: Besides the headline, the image is something first seen by visitors
3. Add information: Don’t be afraid to add new information when you learn new things

4. Replace outdated information: evergreen content outweighs temporary content. So, the more you can make your content ever🟢, the better it performs
5. Change the layout: switching up the visual representation of your content helps with readability and increases the reading time

Still not convinced yet?

Hubspot found that updating their old content led to a stellar 106% increase in Hubspot’s organic traffic.

Part 4 — There’s More Under the Sun

Bring your content to life in a new medium.

Some content performs well as a blog post, and for other content, video is a better channel. Common sense tells us that for a how-to-guide a blog post or a video is a better medium than a podcast.

In terms of your content, there’s only 1 way to find out: experiment

You:
• Turn a video into a podcast
• Turn a podcast episode into a blog
• Turn a keynote into a Twitter thread

If you want to get adventurous, host a Twitter space to talk about a topic of your interest

Anyway, you get the idea. There is honestly an almost infinite number of possibilities, but here are 10 common ones.

Finally, reformatting your content will certainly lead to new content ideas — a true win-win situation.

Part 5 — Be Like Netflix

Curate first, then create.

Netflix initially only published others content. They collected data on what resonated with their audience and what fell flat. Then, they started producing their own content.

You should do the same.

Curate others’ content to share with your own audience. It comes down to bundling existing content as a new piece altogether.

Here's how ⬇️

You might create:

• Create collections by theme ( “the best blog posts about personal branding”)
• Create collections by demographic (“Podcasts creators should listen to”)
• Create collections based on time (“Best performing threads of July”)

A great example of a creator that curates the content of others, is @growthcurrency.

Every week, he sends out the best content he found of other creators, in his newsletter Growth Currency.

https://twitter.com/growthcurrency/status/1415284626092871682

Another stellar curator is @Kjellvdv.

He regularly features the most prolific writers and their practices.

https://twitter.com/Kjellvdv/status/1413199965753540615

Part 6 — One plus One Is Three

By now, we talked about the first 5 steps:

Copy, excerpt, update, reformat and curate.

The final step is the most powerful one: multiply.

Take an idea that worked and find ways to remix it.

It’s the cycle of options that are combined and repeated, that makes it in fact powerful when used together.

One article can serve different audiences:
• you update some of the information
• you adjust the headline to attract new audiences
• you publish it on another platform

And finally, the article can be used as a starting point to host a webinar or live event, addressing the questions your audience might have.

Do you see?

It’s a mindset 💰💎

The moment you repurpose your content for the first time, you begin to see opportunity in every corner.

Repurposing content is great:
• It increases the content’s reach
• It extends the content’s life
• It’s fun to do
• Makes you an expert even more
• Allows you to solidify your position as an expert

What are you waiting for?

Start building your Content Flywheel ⬇ ️

That's a wrap.

If you liked this content, share the first tweet, so it can help other creators create the best content possible.

https://twitter.com/jessievbreugel/status/1417558250938003456