30 Insider Tips To Extend Your Content Marketing (Without Really Working)

Content Categories That Facilitate Content Creation

One of the biggest challenges content marketers, including B2C, B2B, not-for-product and solopreneurs face, is having enough fresh content to meet customer needs and feed social media.
When developing your editorial and social media calendars, plan ahead to incorporate ways to extend the utility of each piece of content. (BTW–here’s a Cliff Notes Version of an editorial calendar.)

Here are thirty insider tips you can use now to extend your content marketing.

Live events and/or conferences provide a variety of content development options including the keynotes and presentations as well as exhibitor materials.

1. Live stream the event to extend your audience. This can be shared in real time or used for later download. Depending on your content and revenue model, this is useful for paid products.
2. Create shorter videos of specific speakers or panels. These are short, focused videos that correlate with your event.
3. Live tweet the event highlights. Tweets can come from a member of your team or from members of the audience. It helps to create Twitter bait to enhance the conversation around your event. To increase event related tweeting, offer a prize. (Here are some specifics regarding live tweeting events.)
4. Collect the best tweets into a blog post or article. This option is a no brainer. Go through the events’ tweets to find the most engaging ones and curate them with supplemental commentary. (Here’s Michael Brenner’s round up of his tweets from Content Marketing World.)
5. Live blog the event. Get designated bloggers who are good at turning around posts about your presentations.
6. Extract the salient points of your presentation into a blog post or article. This is an alternative to live blogging. (Here’s an example from Content Marketing World - 7 Content Marketing Rockstars Give Their Advice.)
7. Interview presenters and/or attendees for short videos or podcasts. Take advantage of the opportunity to speak with presenters and gather their opinions. Make sure that you get their permission.
8. Take photographs (or let your attendees share theirs).  Use pictures of the people at your event to promote the next one by showing how much fun people are having. People like sharing images of themselves.

Presentations and webinars, regardless of whether you presented them to an audience or not, this content can have a second life through recycling.

1. Post your presentation or webinar on Slideshare. This helps extend your reach to other members of the business community.
2. Extract and convert your presentation’s graphics into an infographic. Infographics are eye candy on social media so why not give your content another life beyond your presentation.
3. Expand the theme of your presentation in a blog post or article. Use your presentation points as an outline for a column.
4. Create pinnable visuals to share on Pinterest and other social media sites. Extract the standalone visuals from your presentation to share on Pinterest.
5. Tweet various facts. Extend your presentation’s reach by making it more Twitter friendly. ClickToTweet can help encourage people to tweet your remarks.
6. Add a soundtrack to convert your presentation into a video. This option is useful to provide an alternative for people who couldn’t attend.

White papers and/or e-books can come in an assortment of flavors based on the kind of content and length.

1. Create blog posts or columns from aspects of the white paper. Divide your content into bite size chunks so readers can consume the information easily.
2. Collect the visuals into a larger infographic. Extract the visuals from your white paper into a sexier infographic that attracts lots of social media shares.
3. Create pinnable images. Use your white paper’s images as stand alone data graphics (or mini inforgraphics). These elements can be useful for sharing on other social media platforms such as Facebook, Tumblr and Pinterest.

Blog posts and articles are medium size pieces of content that include both text and other forms of content most commonly photographs.

1. Make sections of your article tweetable. Incorporate “Tweet This” into your article to get readers to share the most tweetable.
2. Chop your column into Twitter bait. This works particularly well for list posts and enables you to share your content over time.
3. Incorporate pinnable charts and images. These images can be data from your research, photographs or mini-infographics like recipes. They can be shared via a variety of social media venues.
4. Collect the best of your posts into an ebook.  To create a product that’s marketable requires creating a new structure for your content and adding new, unique content. Lisa Petrilli did this with her ebook, The Introvert’s Guide to Success in Business and Leadership. 

Photographs are this year’s must-have content. (Here’s a useful guide showing how to use your images and other people’s photographs.)

1. Gather photographs into a larger visual. This is a great way to make a statement.
2. Organize your images into a Tumblr or blog post. Skip the words and let your photographs talk about your offering. Take a page from Target and  show how to use your product.

Videos can be long or short form. It’s useful to have a few options available since if viewers like what they see, they’ll look for more.

1. Chop longer videos into a series of shorter ones. If you’ve got a video of an event or other presentation, consider posting shorter videos.
2. Create a text transcript of your video. This is useful for people who’d prefer to read the content. (It also helps your search optimization by associating text with your content. )

 Podcasts are audio content. Think of it as social media radio.

1. Create short audio shows. Like you would with a video, if you’ve got a podcast of an event or other presentation, consider posting shorter audio segments.
2. Create a text transcript of your podcast. This appeals to people who’d prefer to read the content. (It also helps your search optimization by associating text with your content.)

 Email (aka the original interactive social media) complements other forms of content marketing. This use assumes a weekly content marketing email.

1. Include links and a blurb to new presentations. Extend your audience by allowing members of your email to get a peek into special content.
2. Incorporate the past week’s (or two weeks’) articles. Promote your recent blog content in an emailing with a blurb to expand your reach.
3. Trim your email with infographics. Use infographics to attract attention.

Regardless of the content you’ve incorporated into your editorial plans, take time to think through how you can extend it’s reach and effectiveness. By doing this in advance, you can leverage your resources more efficiently. (Here’s help for building your content marketing team in terms of skills.)
What other suggestions do you have for extending content marketing without really working?
Happy marketing,
Heidi Cohen