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last updated:
January 31, 2020

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Let's get you a message so tight you can bounce a quarter off of it. Around here, we serve up science-based storytelling strategies the creative set.  Even while raking in more than 1.26M in agency work since I've been at it, I firmly believe working from a place of rest (not hustle) IS possible—and I want the same for you. Words matter. Best be sure they work (and oui, with math) ... and know how to party while they're at it. 

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Reading time: 6 min.

Heads up! No one out there (except maybe your mom) is so close to your editorial calendar that they’re reading all the content you’re putting out there—I know, I know I know. 🙂

So, in this blog & video, I’m talking you through my strategies to create more content in less time: here are 5 ways to repurpose content in 1 marketing-focused day out of the week by leveraging hero content.

Let’s go!

repurpose-content-editorial-calendar-ashlyn-writes

In last week’s video on my YouTube channel, I talked up creating an overarching marketing plan and strategy with what I call my Quarterly Champagne Campaign System.

Today? I’m going a layer deeper and talking about how you can repurpose content to actually fill up that editorial calendar. 

You’ve heard me talk about my batch days ad nauseam (sry bout that) … and on Mondays, I hold my “Marketing Monday” routine. This is a piece of that puzzle.

If you’ve ever felt the overload of having to be online in all the places all the time, we’re ending that.

I mention my launch copy & content checklist in the video—grab it below. 🙂



Strategy No. 1: Commit to hero content.

I get asked a lot about marketing/launching and how to build up leading up to a launch, since most of our clients are ~in~ a launch.

Step uno of repurposing content is pointing to whatever’s coming down the pipeline with what I call hero content (also called pillar content). Once this pilar piece of content is made, I can stretch it out and use it across other channels in my editorial calendar. 

Someone recently asked me how I’d tackle content if I was just starting out. No followers, no subscribers, no blog. THIS, ladies and gents. This. This is where I’d start: I’d take ONE topic every week before an upcoming campaign and I would tackle it in a blog post. Then, if you want to add in an audio, video, or a live component, go for it.

Here’s why I still believe in blogging (which I’ve been doing since 2009—g’ma, I know): content has to be an owned asset that YOU control. I don’t want my content living ONLY on Instagram or Facebook. I want to drive people back to my homebase and look out for number one. 🙂 So I’ll always give it a home base on my blog aka my own kingdom (queendom? sure.).

You may be interested in: The Top 8 SEO Copywriting Tips You Need to Apply in Your Business

I talk about my Quarterly Champagne Campaign in a lot of videos and in my Primed to Launch™ program—it rules the roost over here as my 4 big launches a year. Those are ALL planned in advance.

After they’re planned?

My job THEN becomes figuring out what that hero piece of content needs to slide in every week. 

Think again about hero, hub, and hygiene content; it’s the content marketing philosophy that your hero content is that pilar piece, and hygiene content is more shoot-from-the-hip, like stories, posts you pop up just for fun, GIFs or memes you share on your FB page or in your stories (they’re in the moment, not super thought out, not stale, more on the spot/dynamic content ). Hub content is somewhere in the middle: SEO’s not lunbelievalby important here (like it is for your hero content), but hub content isn’t ~completely~ off the cuff. 

hero-content-hub-content-editorial-calendar


Strategy No. 2: Batch create your editorial calendar’s hero content. 

I swear—when I started working for myself and I didn’t have to respond to the whims of anybody else in the office and was amazed how I could group things together to be efficient.

You may be interested in: A Week In the Life | 3 Weekly Routines for Success

So.

Whatever your hero piece of content is, commit to putting time on the calendar and knocking out the majority of the outline. For me, this looks like drafting or at least brainstorming the outlines for my hero content in one setting—at least 4-6 weeks at a time. As a rule of thumb, it takes me about 1 hour to sketch out, research, and write one piece of hero content. I’m doing 4 a month. This for sure takes 1 business day a month, if not more.

When it was just me in my business, I would sit down at the beginning of the month and write 4 blog posts, 1 for every week, in one day. Now that I do YouTubes and film things, it looks a little different, but I still set aside 1 FULL Marketing Monday each almost-month to get ahead the next 4-6 weeks.


Strategy No. 3: Break up the hero piece of content on multiple channels.

Next step. So every single Monday, I sit down, look at the week coming up in my calendar, and I take that piece of hero content (for me it’s my YouTube video), and stretch it out on multiple channels to fill in my editorial calendar: teased on Instagram stories, a full Instagram post, an email marketing campaign, a blog, 3 Facebook posts, about 5 different pins, and a Tweet—all that from one thing. 

Someone asked in our annual survey how I get it all done—^^^ this is how.

From that one piece of hero content, I churn out multiple other pieces of content like dominoes. Since this piece is driven towards sales goals, I know that I can ghost in other areas but I have to get this piece out, right?

You may be interested in: How to Write Your Email Newsletters Like a PRO

If you’re in Primed to Launch™, you have access to that 60 in 60 exercise, to create 60 content ideas in 60 minutes. THIS is where you use that sucker, right? With 52 weeks in a year, I want to give you a little wiggle room with 60 ideas to play with. It’s January when I’m recording the video above, and I have our hero content figured out through November—it feels really good.


Strategy No. 4: Repurpose your other content, too.

The next part is fleshing out that content calendar with hygiene and hub content. 

There are SO many other ways that you can repurpose content and quit reinventing the editorial calendar wheel. Here are some ways you can do that:

  • If you have been creating content for 1-2 years, make sure that you’re going through and updating and reposting past content, especially if it’s evergreen.  Boom. That’s an extra blog post every week.
  • Repurpose old Instagram captions or email newsletters that you’ve sent out. I’ve definitely done this. If I read a captio and I think, “that was pretty good, I still believe that”—I’m going to repurpose that caption, use it as inspo, and rework it with a fresh image.
  • Do podcast interviews? Take pull quotes from that and share them on your channels. 
  • Go back in your archives and build an audio or a video component to anything you’ve already done. (Psst—when I first started my YouTube, most of those initial videos were to go with blogs that did really well in the past.)

I love creating and writing new content, *but* I like being a mom more—my time is precious!

If something was helpful to somebody 12 or 18 months ago, I can rework it and it can be helpful to a new group of people.

Or sometimes we need to hear the same thing more than once. Amen??


Strategy No. 5: Put your editorial calendar into a project management system.

When it was just me in my business I used a Trello board to track my editorial calendar. I also used CoSchedule to schedule things out.

Here’s what it looks like now: things are a little more robust since it’s not just me on my team anymore, and we’ve moved to Asana: First, I map out the editorial calendar, what videos are going out, and on what topics.

Here’s what that looks like:

hero-content-examples

Then, I hand those over to Kristen, my integrator. She takes those, and she puts them into Asana so it functions more like a task manager. All the people that are touching that big piece of content can check off their job.

content-calendar-example-asana

I still like to use a tool called CoSchedule to see this all planned out— you can see a few videos about this here. I’ve been back and forth on it in the past, but it’s the best solution I’ve been able to find. I am so visual—I find that I need to see everything laid out in ONE calendar. 


Recently someone asked, “Ashlyn, how can I turn out consistent content and create personal boundaries with social media but still engage, educate, and equip without completely unplugging?”.  This is it: putting in the big rocks, making sure that they are doing the heavy lifting, and then letting the other stuff fill in.

If you want more information about how I teach you to build a content plan like this, you can get more information about my Primed to Launch program here. If you found this blog helpful, take a screenshot and share it on social media—I would love to be able to shout you out and say thanks.

I also want you to comment below if you found a takeaway that you’re going to use within your content marketing plan. Now you know how to repurpose your content. But what about the step before that, actually figuring out what that big overarching marketing strategy looks like? I’ve got a 10-minute tutorial to walk you through what I do—watch it here!

 

Reading Time: 7 Minutes Reading time: 6 min. Heads up! No one out there (except maybe your mom) is so close to your editorial calendar that they’re reading all the content you’re putting out there—I know, I know I know. 🙂 So, in this blog & video, I’m talking you through my strategies to create more content in less […]

1/31/20

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