Successful content marketing doesn’t happen overnight. It’s easy to be fooled when seeing your idols or competitors with millions of followers on their pages, along with millions of views, millions of likes, or millions of shares on every piece of content they share. However, the deep dark secret truth is that their success took time. 

Many people try to aim for that ONE viral video, or that ONE viral tweet in the hopes it will change their business, or their lives. There’s no denying this may happen, but it’s few and far between; it’s probably more rare than winning the lottery! Having one piece of content reach millions looks good on a graph, but it’s a short lived success and only ONE graph. You’ll end up trying to replicate that same piece of content and start wondering why it doesn’t do as well as the first one. Especially if it’s topical and relevant to the time. This kind of temporal content is something you want to use sparingly but is often the trap a lot of businesses fall into.

What you need is content that can continue to generate traffic overtime. So the question isn’t, “How can we get 1 million likes on this one post?”, it’s “How can we make sure our content achieves long term traffic? How can we minimise the time spent on creating content for different audiences and platforms?”

This is where compounding content comes in.

Understanding micro content & content distribution platforms

It should go without saying but the more platforms you’re active on, the more chance of people seeing your content and being introduced to the brand. However, this does require tailoring your content to meet your audience’s expectations and making sure you’re using the most effective platforms to showcase your content. 

It also requires understanding your audience’s content consumption habits. For example, (at the time of writing this) audio consumption is on the rise – so you may want to start looking at how to extract audio from your videos and upload them to the likes of Soundcloud and Spotify in the form of podcasts. 

Now, understandably you’re probably thinking, “That takes WAY TOO MUCH TIME. A piece of content for each platform?!” But this is the magic of compounding content. You only need to use one piece of content to generate an entire week or month’s worth of social media and blog posts.

So, let’s say you’ve recorded a brand video. Here’s just some of the ways you can efficiently and effectively distribute it:

• YouTube 
  Uploading the full video to YouTube as your ‘hero’ video. You can have this as your channel welcome video, as well as embedding it to your website and other spaces. 
  
• LinkedIn 
  Not only can you share the YouTube link, but you could actually upload the video directly to the platform itself (this is generally recommended to increase engagement), but you could take a quote from the video and expand on it in written form, you could take that quote and create an infographic, you could even take a shortened clip from the video to create a post of its own. 

• Instagram
  Just like LinkedIn, you could create multiple posts by taking quotes from the video, both in video and written form, along with using smaller clips, or even behind the scene shots for your Instagram stories. 

• Soundcloud
  This is where things get interesting. Depending on the nature of your videos, you could also extract the audio and release them as a podcast or audio blog online. Platforms like Podbean and BuzzSprout allow you to post to multiple audio platforms from one website. 

• Blogs
  It’s very easy to transcribe your videos, whether they are talking head videos (someone talking directly to camera), podcast interviews or tutorials. Platforms like rev.com make this very affordable and quick. As soon as you have a video finished, you also have yourself a fully transcribed blog piece. This can of course be tweaked to suit, but the bulk of the work has been done for you. 

• …and you get the idea

Here, you really begin to see how powerful just one piece of content can be when it comes to building your content strategy. It means that your audience is able to engage with you and your brand however they prefer to consume content. Even platforms like LinkedIn have seen many people grow huge audiences through valuable pieces of bitesize information and clips. 

Learn your audience’s content consumption habits

Wherever your audience is, you need to show up. If your audience analysis shows that they frequent the gym on a daily basis, create a podcast they can listen to whilst they’re there. If your audience is more likely to read blogs than watch videos, ensure that you’re creating more readable content than visual. 

Your content isn’t about you – it’s about them. They’re the ones who will be generating traffic to your website by sharing your content. It’s about giving your audience the best way to consume your content at their ease. So even if you don’t personally listen to podcasts, but your audience do, it’s your responsibility to ensure that your content caters to them. Your content isn’t made for you to consume, after all. 

Creating content in many different forms also allows you to see which you are best at, and which you are most comfortable with. You might only post video but be uncomfortable on camera, or be better at copywriting than presenting. Use it as a chance to discover your skills, and perhaps see which elements of your content you can outsource versus take control of. 

To understand this concept better, let’s say 50% of your audience are avid Facebook users who enjoy watching, sharing and commenting on visual content such as images and videos. 

• Scenario one: You feel more comfortable writing blog posts, so you continue to do so. You still get some good engagement, but you know you’re missing out a huge section of your audience.
  
• Scenario two: You may be shy or hate it, but you create videos. Despite feeling nervous in front of the camera, the videos see a huge rise in comments, shares and traffic, meaning along with your blogs, you are helping a huge portion of your audience consume and enjoy your content in a way they prefer. 

The Facebook algorithm will remember each person’s activity and decide to show them not only more of your content, but show them the kind of content they enjoy. For brands posting enough content in different formats, this means you could have a portion of your audience consuming your written and blog content that they love, while the other portion continue to enjoy your videos just as much. 

The same will go for millions of other users on the platform. It’s a tried and tested strategy that never fails to ensure long term success. 

Futureproof your content with frequent audits

Because of the nature of temporal content versus evergreen content, you might find that in order to reuse similar content, you need to go back and make sure you change any outdated references within it before resharing. This is why building an evergreen content library will guarantee that you never run out of topics to share and won’t decay overtime. You can also build on the pieces of content that have done more successfully than others.

Your road to success online starts with a solid understanding of how to create and distribute your content in the best possible way. Understand this, and success will follow you for longer than simply overnight.