A Recipe to Keep Your Content Belly Full

Every Christmas Eve I cook a large ham.

Garlic mashed potatoes. And a mix of peas and pearl onions.

It’s way more than we’ll eat. But that’s okay.

I’ll do more with that ham.

Leftover meals to freeze. Ham for sandwiches. Ham for breakfast.

And my favorite: Ham and green pea soup.

Belly. Full.

Can you say the same for your content belly?

Once you make your first content meal, think about the other ways you’re going to use it.

Here’s a recipe to get the most out of your content projects:

Step 1: Create

Create your first piece of content in the format that’s easiest for you. For some people, that means typing out some thoughts. For others, that means shooting a quick video or holding a webinar.

Your goal is to create the best possible content you can at the moment. Keep in mind that your work is never really finished as you’ll make content marketing updates in the next step.

Step 2: Revisit

After you’ve created and published your first piece, you’re going to review the content, along with any feedback you’ve received, and look for areas to improve. Note those changes for the next time you deliver the content in this format. You can incorporate the changes immediately in the next step.

Step 3: Repackage

In this step, you’ll look for ways to take your first piece and create more content from it by repackaging it into multiple formats.

These formats include:

blog posts
images
infographics
videos
podcasts
social media updates
guides
webinars
cornerstone content

Here’s an example of how this process works:

Each year, at Constant Contact, we revisit our core email marketing training: The 15-Minute Email Marketing Challenge. The first session of this five-part series is: How to Plan Your Email Marketing in 15 Minutes or Less.

This session kicks off the foundation of our email marketing system for small businesses. Let’s look at how using the three steps above helps us get the most from our content.

Step 1: Create a live webinar

We pull together the story and outline for our webinar session. During this step, our goal is to create the best possible session with the information available to us at the time.

Leading up to the session, we also create two to three blog posts that have independent value and touch on an aspect of the live session. The posts allow us to promote the live session and recording.

Here are some examples from the planning webinar:

Step 2: Revisit the webinar for improvements

After the session, we look for areas to improve based on the live feedback we received. Was there something we could have explained more clearly? Something we need to remove or update? We’ll apply these changes the next time we run the session and in the next step.

For example, we discovered we spent a bit too much time discussing why plans fail, rather than staying focused on why people fail to stick with their email marketing efforts.

The reason, of course, is because they don’t have an email marketing plan at the start. We’ll make this point stronger the next time we run the session.

Step 3: Repackage the webinar into content guides, cornerstone content, and social posts

Next, we’ll transcribe the webinar and reformat the content for a guide and a piece of cornerstone content for our blog.

We can then pull tips and pieces from this new source for other formats such as social content. During this repackaging process, we’ll optimize each new piece of content based on the format.

Appetizers or main dish?

The above is just one example. But of course, you can start with the main dish and break it into smaller pieces. Or start with an appetizer and build it up. The key here is that you move from thinking of content as one and done to a content feast.

How will you keep your content belly full?

Create the first piece of content, revisit it, then repackage. This three-step process allows you to get the maximum amount of meals from your content and keep your content belly full.

Hope this is helpful!

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