Are you an entrepreneur and feeling a liiiiiiiittle overwhelmed with the whole “content creation hamster wheel?” 🐹

Or maybe you simply have some very ambitious visibility goals… (Go, You! We love big thinkers around here!) You want to be on multiple platforms, build your empire online, grow and reinforce your brand everywhere – but not work 24/7?

If either scenario (or both!) sound familiar, this article is for you. 

With the help of my team, I’ve developed a pretty stellar content repurposing system. It allows me to generate over a month of content – for #alltheplaces where I show up – in just a 2 to 3 hours of creation time. 😲

Yup, you read that right… 

With proper planning and a very intentional strategy, I’m able to personally show up for about 2 to 3 hours… Then that time I spend triggers a repurposing process that generates all my content – for weeks, and even months. 

Sound magical? Well, it is… sort of. 😉  

But it’s a practical type of magic that you can conjure up, too. And I’m going to describe *exactly* how we do it – right here in this article. 

As always, you can press play on the video version of this piece below… Or you can read on for the details. You decide, Genius! 

Imagine this…  

You create one beautiful piece of content. 

And then – from that piece – you *easily* create every other asset you need – to round out your content on all the platforms –  for at least an entire week. 

Boom. 

Instagram posts? Done. 

Facebook posts? Done. 

Tweets? Done. 

Blog post? Done. 

An email to your list? You guessed it… Done! 

Sound like brand utopia? Well, it is… AND it’s totally possible for Y-O-U to get there. 🤓 

How do I know? Because this is *exactly* what I do to be visible. 

And, I teach this proven process in my group program – The Amplify Accelerator. 

(Amplify is a small, application-only group of driven entrepreneurs who are growing their online platforms. It’s a high-touch mastermind with the expertise and accountability of 1-on-1 time with me – plus an in-depth and step-by-step curriculum. These learnings help entrepreneurs dramatically upgrade their brains and brands – so they can grow faster now and in the future.)  

So, yeah… I definitely know this is possible for you – when you can harness the right resources and engineer the right process…

Preface: Visibility requires smart investment. 

As a preface of sorts, I want to tell you a bit about me and my team – to give you context about this content repurposing system that I use and teach. 

So, two things you should know about me… 

First, I have been an online entrepreneur for over eight years, and I’ve sure learned a thing or two (or 2,459 things 🤣) about efficient content production. 

As a brand strategist, I teach the critical importance of being visible –  of what I call “Being your brand.” You could carefully develop the most thoughtful, truth-based brand… but if people don’t experience it, it’s for naught. Because brands only truly exist when they come into contact with people. 

And frankly, to create big impact and income, you’ll need to come into contact with lots of people – in lots of places. 

Part of being a thought leader is being prolific. You’ll need to show up consistently with what you know and believe – and reinforce your messages through artful repetition. And to do that, you need an efficient content production and publishing system. 

Second, I want you to know this. —> I have a team of incredible humans who support me. 

My content system that I’m about to reveal to you? It involves the help of a very savvy and talented Content Manager. (The human being that currently helps me with all of this is Jana. You may have heard me sing her praises before. She’s been part of my team for a few years, and I like to say she’s “O.G. Team Kaye Putnam. 🤓)  

But Can You Repurpose Content – if You Don’t Have a Team Yet?

Now, is this system still in the cards for you – if you don’t have a team yet? …Or if your current team doesn’t include someone who focuses on content? 

Yes, absolutely. 

Just know that you’ll likely need to make adjustments to the sheer VOLUME of what you produce – based on the resources you can invest. 

So, real talk here… if I were still handling all aspects of my content myself, I would choose to be on fewer platforms – so that I would have less volume to create. But because I have the help of my team, I’m able to be in more places and to be more frequent in posting.

I share all this because I want it to be *crystal* clear that I have support. (And, if you don’t have a team yet, you may want to take what you learn here and scale it back so it’s realistic for you.)

And, I want you to keep in mind that – while many visibility platforms are technically “free” – prolific content visibility is NOT something that is 100% free. Either it’s going to require your time – or it’s going to take the help of a team you’ve invested in to make it happen. 

Okay, now that you’re in the know on that… Let’s dive right into this insanely amazing system I’ve been building up in your mind! (I promise, it’s as good as you’re imagining… Maybe even better! 😉 ) 

Pin this article to reference later! 📌

Pin this article to reference later! 📌

The 3 Phases of My Content Repurposing System

My system has three distinct phases. Before we look at the more granular steps and pieces of each phase, here’s an overview: 

Phase 1: I create the “source content.”

Phase 2: My team slices and dices that source content into smaller pieces of content.

Phase 3: My team executes on our templatized content distribution / publishing plan. 

And then… in addition to each of these three phases, I also leverage two additional strategies that essentially super-charge this process: 

Super-Strategy 1: Batching. (Oh, batching, how I love thee! 🤣) 

Super-Strategy 2: Content E-x-p-a-n-s-i-o-n. (We’ll get to that in a bit…) 

Let’s examine each of the three phases first, then we’ll look at my super-strategies. 

Phase 1: I create the “source content.” 

In my system, everything starts with a Youtube video. 

The video that’s embedded above – in this very article – is an example of this source content. (I’m already getting super meta here, I know… 🤣) 

Now, your source content doesn’t have to be video. Other “long-form” media can work beautifully with this system, too. More on that in a moment, but first… 

Let me share a few things about what recording videos is like for me – because I’m very intentional with both my energetic preparation and my process. 

First thing to know is this…

I batch-create my source content. 

If you watch the video above, you might note that I mention it’s actually video number nine of the day! Yep, I marathon-recorded into the double-digits that day, (…She says, brushing the dust off her shoulder… 😉)  

But seriously… batching allows me to focus all of my energy on one HUGE and impactful objective – creating what my team needs to generate months of content. 

And now some magic content math for you… ✨(Yes, this is a thing!)

• It took me about 2 to 2.5 hours to record ten videos. (Note I had previously spent time outlining each video’s main points on index cards, because I want to be able to hit the ground running on recording day, once I’m all gussied up for the camera! In the past, when I have tried to plan AND record on the same day, I wasn’t as productive.)
• I generally publish one Youtube video per week. So, 4 to 5 videos cover me for a month. Therefore this particular session generated enough source content for ten weeks – or a little over 2 months. 
• Finally, factor in that we don’t always publish videos during launch weeks, and this batch likely lasted me about one full quarter in 2020 (three months). 🙌🏽 

More on batching in a bit…. And now the second thing I really want to emphasize about Phase 1 is that…

Creating source content is some of the most intellectual “heavy lifting” I do in my business. 

This effort is just that – It’s effort! 

Choosing topics that are aligned with my expertise, my content strategy, and what my audience needs… articulating pieces of my framework… organizing my thoughts and notions … This is me showing up to teach what I know, share my original thoughts, and give crazy-pants amounts of value. 

This is me being the visionary of my brand. 

So, because this process is so high-leverage, and requires much thought… it’s critical that I set very focused time aside to record videos. So I ensure that I’m managing my energy for these sessions– BIG TIME! 

I plan ahead to ensure I’m rested and sharp. I make sure the time and space are free of distractions. This content creation time is “sacred.” And if I didn’t treat it that way, none of this would work…

(Luckily, teaching is my happy place. While it requires enormous energy from me, it’s also energizing at the exact same time 🤩 – because it’s my personal zone of genius.) 

Which leads me to an important detail… I mentioned this briefly above, but let’s look closer. 

Your source content might not be video. (Or it could be – if that’s what you enjoy creating, and how you feel most confident and natural showing up!) But your source content might take a different format than mine… 

✔️  If you love writing, you might create regular blog posts. 

✔️  If you prefer to show up and record a podcast episode, that might be where you start your process. 

What’s important is that your source content is high-value, meaty, and long form – so that it can be broken down into smaller bits of valuable content – and repurposed to other places. 

Okay, so… I record videos as source content. Then what happens? 

Now, my video babies 🐣 (sometimes it feels like they are my babies!) are ready for the magic of Phase 2 to begin… 

Phase 2: My team slices and dices that source content into smaller pieces of content.

The next person who touches this process is my video editor. I send him all of the raw videos from this batch. And, he works his magic and sends back two versions of each: 

• a long form video that will get published on YouTube; and 
• a short form version of the video – either a quick recap or a teaser depending on which works best. 

The shorter of the two videos will get published on my Facebook page, in my Facebook group, and sometimes to Instagram. So for each of these places, my team uses the video content to write “social share” copy to accompany the video teaser. (These might be similar, but formatted a bit differently depending on the best practices for the platform and the audience.) 

The main purpose of these “teasers” is to promote the longer YouTube video. We want people to click on over to Youtube… watch to learn… then like, comment, and subscribe. 

(Oh, hey, by the way… If YOU would love to get notified when I publish new videos, you can subscribe and hit that “notify” bell right over here on my Youtube channel! 😉 ) 

But I digress… back to repurposing… 

During this phase, my team also orders captions for the edited videos, and they will serve two very important purposes: We’ll upload the captions to the videos, and we’ll export them as a transcript. We use Rev.com (<— Affiliate link) because it’s affordable, fast, and most importantly it’s *very* accurate. (More on Rev below in the “Tools” section.) 

The transcript can now be used to help us create lots and lots (and lots!) of pieces of written content… but it’s all still gleaned from the video – that one piece of source content I created! 

Some will be “short form,” like: 

• Excerpts from the transcript… 
• Quick, punchy social posts (which might look like belief statements, for example)… 
• Quotes (from me – or maybe from a marketing psychology expert or article I may have referenced)… 
• Instagram graphics to visually represent steps in a process or elements of a framework…
• Micro-content we need for publishing…like blog meta-descriptions, keyword-optimized Pinterest descriptions, titles, subject lines, etc.

So, again, we’re just extending the life of that one piece of source content I worked hard to create. The opportunities for repurposing are pretty much endless!…

Phase 3: My team executes on our templatized content distribution / publishing plan.

All of the publishing I alluded to above can now happen – since Jana and the team have created the different pieces of written and visual content we need for the process. So, we are ready to distribute all the pieces to all the respective places. 

To optimize the long-form version of the video, we add a YouTube description and title, tags, calls to action, and additional links referenced. We optimize visually with a custom thumbnail image that also includes a short text overlay. (Note: These elements are essentially all bits of micro-content!) 

To promote each video, we will also send an email to my email list – which is about 27,000 subscribers strong at the time I’m writing this article. The content of that email is unique, because I like to send my “insiders” something special and fun. But, it’s derived from the video as well. (Jana often mines the video for a specific story or catchy angle to build that email around.) 

So, you can see my team really milks each piece of “source content” for all it’s worth! 🤣 

And, of course, this isn’t just about saving time. It’s also very strategic. 

Even if someone in my audience doesn’t watch the weekly video on YouTube, he’s likely coming into contact with a re-packaged version of it somewhere – on one or more of these different platforms where I’m active. So, I’m reaching more people, with more learning styles. 

Phases 2 and 3 are quite linked, and some of the steps of these two phases overlap. But the operative word here in Phase 3 is “templatized.” 

Yes, this where the system gets really elegant – and really efficient. 

Because we’re not re-inventing the wheel whenever it’s time to milk every ounce of content goodness from a Youtube video. We have templates in many forms, like:

• Asana boards and projects that document every step of the repurposing and publishing processes
• A master “big picture” content planning spreadsheet 
• Templates and formulas for social shares, video captions, email campaigns, and more
• A social media library in which we bank social shares, so they can be used again – or used as models for future captions. 
• Graphic templates that can be duplicated and tweaked for each piece and place 

Nope… There’s very little wheel reinvention going on over here at KPHQ! 😉 When something works, we work it! 

Okay, now on to… 

The Super-Strategies: Batching & Content
E-x-p-a-n-s-i-o-n

As I mentioned above, I also employ two important strategies that really take this entire system to another level. 

We touched on the first one above, which is… 

Batching. 

Creating content in batches reduces “context switching” costs – for both me and my team.

After I’ve got all the video source content “in the can” and to my team for all of the next steps… I can essentially walk away from this process for months. This allows me to fully turn my attention to creating curriculum for my paid programs, supporting my students, working on new initiatives, and resting when I need to. 

Basically, batching allows me to STEP OFF that “content creation hamster wheel” that we commisurated about in this article’s introduction! 😉 

Meanwhile, delivering the videos to my team in batches helps them to be their most efficient and focused, too. Jana, for example, has her hands in several places in my brand. If she had to drop everything once a day and write one email… or post one video… or create one Instagram post… I know I wouldn’t be getting the same quality or quantity of work that she’s able to deliver with our current system. 

The second super-strategy we’re using is… 

Content E-x-p-a-n-s-i-o-n.

Yes, I always add the dashes. (They’re a good visual representation of the huge power of this strategy.)

Because here’s the magic (maybe alchemy?) 😉 – of it all… 

Once the video source content is created, and my team has ginsu-knifed it all up into social shares, captions, emails, etc… We can now take those smaller pieces and e-x-p-a-n-d on them to create NEW long-form content. 

I know! This part is 🤯 🤯 🤯.

This blog (the one you’re reading right now!) is an example. We used the transcript from Rev.com as the basis for creating a SECOND type of long-form content – a blog post. 

(We call them “articles” because it’s more aligned with my Sage archetype.) 

Note this is a pretty advanced strategy – and one that I’d say is optional when you’re getting started with content. 

These blog posts / articles do take time – and talent – to create, so we only work this particular type of magic with my most popular videos. (Typically only about a third of them become blog posts.) But, I really like transforming some of them, for two specific reasons… 

First, it allows us to cater to another learning style – for people who prefer to read content.  It gives my audience members another entry point – but the blogs are still being created from the source content – which is my YouTube video. 

Second, having substantive, valuable written content on my website “makes Google happy” – meaning that it helps people discover me on Google through SEO.) 

We teach the nitty-gritties of this transcript-to-blog transformation in Amplify. But just know that – because we are actually *adding* additional details and examples to flesh out the original ideas that came out of my brain – this is more than just content re-purposing…

It’s Content E-X-P-A-N-S-I-O-N… (See what I mean?) 

And, then (I know, I know! But we’re not quiiiiiite done yet!)… 

This new piece of content (the blog post) will be sliced and diced to become assets like… 

• Instagram and Facebook posts 
• Email campaigns 
• Future ad copy 
• Sales emails 
• Facebook group prompts

… and more!

We’ve even been known to take a blog post… and break it into several parts that become… 

—-> (Are you ready for this…?) … Youtube video outlines. 😲

And the process can begin again. Which I truly just could not love more. 😍 I just love me a business strategy that produces compound results. No extra time required from me, but with infinite results. 

Freaking magical, right?

Tools We Use for Magical Content Repurposing

I wanted to mention a few of the tools that make this whole process possible and efficient. 

(*Note that some of these links are affiliate links. I only promote tools I use and love them myself, and sometimes I get a small credit or thank you payment if you decide to use them, too.) 

Rev.com 

As mentioned above, this content repurposing plan of ours relies heavily on the magic of my favorite transcription platform… Rev. It’s accurate, fast, and magically transforms my source content into both subtitles for Youtube videos and those amazing transcripts we use for slicing and dicing! You can try Rev.com out here. 

It’s also really important to have captions – especially on YouTube videos. Because not everybody is going to listen. Plus, you may have viewers who speak different languages or have different abilities. 

(#StayWeird moment: For whatever reason. I like to sometimes sit in bed and watch YouTube videos with the sound off… I can’t be the only one, right??? So that’s another reason I appreciate captions! 🤷🏻‍♀️) 

Zubtitle.com

So, Rev captions / transcripts are super-pro. They end up with the least amount of errors – and it’s an affordable service. But, I’ve also been experimenting with this newer tool – Zubtitle.com –  especially over on Instagram TV. You can use it to add little “pop up” copy pieces, too – to add context to what you’re speaking about in the video.

ActiveCampaign 

This is our email marketing system – and it’s a completely indispensable tool for me. It’s both user-friendly and versatile, so it’s good for beginners but can also grow with your brand. 

You can start simple with ActiveCampaign, and just collect emails and send one-off emails.

But these days, I’m using many of the more advanced features it offers. For example it’s smart enough to “talk” with my Facebook ads account for retargeting and custom audience creation. And, it allows me to set up some incredible time-saving and money-making automations – with segmentation features to ensure we’re giving my subscribers personalized experiences. You can learn more about ActiveCampaign here. 

Buffer 

We use a few different scheduling softwares, but Buffer is like our Swiss Army knife of schedulers. It just keeps keeping on for us! We use it to schedule out the videos to my Facebook group and my Facebook page, among other things. Check Buffer out here. 

Planoly 

For Instagram, we prefer Planoly. Buffer has some options for Instagram scheduling, but Planoly’s visual planning system and layout are a worthwhile upgrade. Check Planoly out here. 

… and we use some other tools, too! 😉 Because I’m aaaaaaalllll about using tech and systems to save humans time. You can actually learn a whooooooole lot more about the various tools I use in business over in my Online Business Resource Library – located here. 

The Final Analysis: Content Repurposing is powerful.

Want to know a secret? For YEARS, I was trying to create completely new pieces of content for every platform. 😕 (Hello, Hamster Wheel.) 

My blog. Videos. Instagram posts. Facebook page posts. Facebook group prompts. Weekly emails… (and more). I was treating them all like silos. 

When you first get your brand established, this is already a time-consuming approach. But when you’re scaling your brand… that’s when the “silo” approach really gets out of control quickly. 

There are really only two scenarios that roll out from it… 

• Either you’re spending your entire business life creating content – which isn’t serving anybody… Because then you don’t have the bandwidth to actually work with enough clients.
• Or your visibility suffers when you work with clients – because you can’t stay consistent with an unsustainable system. (I call this the “hustle-do” see-saw. Have you been on it? 🤣 ) 

I’m definitely past that hurdle, clearly. Part of pulling on my big-girl pants and becoming a CEO was finding ways to be more leveraged. And content repurposing gives me that leverage, big time! 

But it took some doing. So, know that – if you’ve had trouble in the past with creating content, consistently getting it published, and operating the other parts in your business – you are not alone. 

It has happened to the best of us! And there are specific steps you can take to get ahold of it all, get consistently visible, and build your brand online – all with more ease and waaaaaaaaaayyyyyyy less hustle. 

It just takes implementing a system like this one to make it happen. 

If you’re ready for your brand to “grow up” and to increase your revenue, audience, and impact in meaningful ways… 

And you’d like to have support with building a system like mine – for your brand… 

… consider applying for my Amplify group program. I’d love to discuss it with you – and determine whether it’s a good fit for you!