Table of contents
Create A Creation And Repurposing Workflow
Leverage AI To Get Clips From Long-Form Content
Don’t Just Clip It - Combine Clips For More Watch Time
The Dopamine Ladder: The Secret To Masterful Content Compilation
Document, Don't Create – Revisit, Don't Repurpose
Don't Limit Your Content To Social Media
Major Secret: Create 1000 Pieces Of Content With Contentfries
We are living in the golden age of content and repurposing is the number one tool most content creators are using to come out on top. Whether you want to maximize your digital footprint or are looking for ways to be everywhere all at once, you need a content repurposing strategy.
This resource will help you create a grand strategy out of seven specific ways to repurpose your content in 2024. Here is a bird’s eye view of the strategies:
Create A Creation And Repurposing Workflow
Leverage AI To Get Clips From Long-Form Content
Don’t Just Clip It - Combine Clips For More Watch Time
The Dopamine Ladder: The Secret To Masterful Content Compilation
Repurpose Across Formats
Remember The Platform Context
Document, Don't Create – Revisit, Don't Repurpose
Within each strategy, you will find tips, tricks, and best practices to level-up your content creation game. So bookmark this post and visit it as many times as you need.
Major Tip: Don't forget to read the final section on how to create 1000 pieces of content in one week with a ContentFries subscription.
Create A Creation And Repurposing Workflow
The first strategy that will help you increase your digital footprint in 2024 is having a strategy. Content repurposing is becoming incredibly easy with platforms like ContentFries, which is why a lot of creators are randomly generating hundreds of clips from their webinars, live streams, and podcasts.
You have to develop an edge unique to you, or you will be forgotten by the thousands of people you reach. Making memorable content is easier said than done. You need to focus all your energy on one thing at a time. Scattered focus leads to mediocre results.
These best practices for developing a content creation workflow will help you repurpose without diluting your value.
Have a five-step workflow: ideation, execution, editing, and repurposing;
Dedicate one day to each step;
Produce multiples so you can take breaks;
Take breaks to avoid burnout.
If the above practices make sense, you can move to the next repurposing strategy by scrolling down to strategy #2: Leverage AI to get clips. But if you want to get a better understanding of each practice covered earlier, continue reading below.
Have five-step workflow
Content creation is a multi-faceted operation and not everyone has a team working to increase their digital footprint. Fortunately, teams aren’t necessary to create or even repurpose your content. You just need focus and a plan. The following five-step process works for most content creators.
Step 1 - Ideation - Dedicate at least one day to come up with ideas. You can jot down ideas you get randomly and then flesh them out on a specific day of the week. Gathering material throughout the week to flesh out on a specific day is a great way to ensure that you have something to write about.
Step 2 - Execution - Dedicate one or two days for just filming the content you have thought about. Take your most executable ideas and make them happen.
Step 3 - Editing - Dedicate one or two days for editing. Produce high-quality, well-edited pillar content that you can repurpose later.
Step 4 - Repurposing - Dedicate one day to repurposing your content. At a minimum, you need to create 7 pieces of content. That way, you don't have to create new content every day. You can ideate, write, and film on a loose schedule while the content you've already filmed does the heavy lifting for you. If you use ContentFries and spend one whole day just repurposing your long videos, you'll have content to post for a whole month. And if you manually edit and clip your content, you can still create enough content to post throughout the week.
Dedicate one day to each step - It might be harder in the beginning, but sticking to doing one thing a day will move the needle. You might think that the process takes longer than simply whipping out your camera and shooting a video. But it is a better strategy overall. You need motivation to film every day. But if you film one day and manage to create enough content for the whole week, then you need motivation for just one day.
Produce multiples so you can take breaks - It also helps to create in batches of seven. So, come up with at least seven ideas, film at least seven videos, etc. This lets you relax and take breaks. It is not realistic to edit seven videos in one day, though, so don’t set that as an expectation.
Take breaks to avoid burnout - As long as you repurpose your content into multiples, you will be ahead of schedule and will have time to rest. Take at least one day a week off your content creation grind.
Leverage AI To Get Clips From Long-Form Content
AI is helping content creators produce more content than ever. Of course, there's the lazier route of getting ChatGPT to whip up a script for you, followed by getting a generative VO app to voice it for you.
But smart creators understand that such AI-powered content is too similar to all the rest of the AI generated content. Smart creators produce human content and then use AI to multiply it.
For instance ContentFries has an AI-powered content repurposing engine. It analyzes your videos and clips seemingly significant moments into shorter videos. You do not need to personally remember or even analyze your own podcasts and webinars.
ContentFries is also working on a feature that lets you turn a blogpost into an AI-generated video. Again, you have the option to simply put in a ChatGPT-generated article to get a video. But a smarter path is to write a human piece and let AI elevate it.
AI video repurposing also has the advantage of removing silence and filler words. The umms and ahhs can take hours to remove manually. And if you leave them in, you might as well push your viewers with your own hands because they will leave.
AI content clipping lets you get rid of these engagement killers while identifying and isolating the most engaging moments from your longform content.
Some repurposing platforms like ContentFries also have auto-captioning features. These captions can make your short-form content even more engaging.
Here is a roundup of all the AI use cases for quick content repurposing:
AI analysis - AI is capable of identifying high-energy moments that make for great short-form clips.
AI captions - AI has gotten good enough at captioning content to replace 90% of human transcription. If you repurposing program doesn't have this AI feature it is pretty much useless for YouTube Shorts, TikTok, and Reels.
AI editing - AI-powered editing can take over the boring and repetitive aspects of post-production. In repurposing, this entails isolating key moments in long videos and creating short clips out of them.
AI format alteration - Because AI has generative capabilities, it can now take content in one format and turn it into another. For instance, ElevenLabs' AI Voiceover can turn text into speech. And ContentFries' upcoming AI video creator can turn your blog post into a publish-ready video.
Don’t Just Clip It - Combine Clips For More Watch Time
Creating shorter clips from longer videos is such an obvious content repurposing use case that most people gravitate toward it. This creates an opportunity for smarter creators to monopolize the opposite type of content repurposing.
You can merge multiple short clips together to create long-form content. People are under the erroneous assumption that viewers today do not have the patience for a longer viewing experience.
However, according to data, the average TikTok session time is ten minutes. So, people who watch TikToks want to move to the next clip after consuming the first one. If you splice together multiple clips and create an 8 to 10-minute video, you will produce the same effect as scrolling TikTok for 10 minutes.
But to make the most engaging long-form videos from your short-form content, you need to be strategic in clip selection. Follow the best practices below for best results.
Let the environment change between clips - The visual variety can help keep viewers watching. The change in environment, presenter’s clothes, etc., creates a feeling of novelty, which reduces boredom.
Have a unifying theme but a contrasting point - Don’t make your clip selection too random. Let all the clips feed into the same overarching topic. But at the same time, create enough contrast with your voice, delivery, etc., to keep a sense of novelty alive.
Keep the individual clips short - If you’re posting a standalone short, it can be up to a minute long. But when you’re making a compilation, you have to merge shorter clips. This is better for audience retention.
Give them a reason to continue watching - Each clip should create curiosity towards the end which the next clip satisfies. This constant hooking and rehooking helps retain viewers for longer periods.
Start and end on a satisfying note - Finally, you need the first and the last clip to be the best. The clips in the middle do not have to be excellent, though they, too, need to be pretty good. Do not give viewers a reason to click off.
The Dopamine Ladder: The Secret To Masterful Content Compilation
The practices above will help you produce engaging clip compilations. But if you want to take your merged videos to a whole new level, use the dopamine ladder. This is a ContentFries exclusive recipe that creators can use to cultivate high watch time.
Start with the best clip - The first clip should reward the viewer for giving your video a chance. It should be super engaging from the get-go. Don't create drawn-out intros that give your viewers time to reconsider their choice.
Keep up the quality until clip three - After someone has watched three clips, they are committed enough to the whole video. So, the fourth clip can be slightly less exciting/funny/educational.
Keep the plateau for two clips - The fourth and the fifth clips can have relatively low entertainment value. But by the sixth clip, you need to level up the value quite significantly.
Raise value significantly with each subsequent clip - When each subsequent clip is more entertaining than the previous one, your viewers subconsciously pick up on it. They develop an appetite for the next clip.
End on a high-note - The final clip should be as good as the first one if not better. This gives your viewer the satisfaction of getting the most out of their click and watchtime.
The dopamine ladder works with comedy, educational, documentary, and even slice-of-life content. But each of those content types has a different type of value.
In comedy, the first clip has to be funny, followed by equally funny clips. Then, there can be slightly less funny clips followed by increasingly hilarious clips.
In educational content, the first clip must feature a super-valuable insight. The second and third clips must have similarly mind-blowing content. The fourth and the fifth can touch upon obvious insights. The sixth clip and onwards, each piece should have increasingly valuable insights.
And if that’s too many rules, just remember that your main goal is to maximize your audience’s stick-aroundness.
Repurpose Across Formats
In 2024, many Youtubers quit their supposedly successful operations. MattPat from The Game Theorists said goodbye, while Tom Scott also announced his retirement from making weekly content. One reason many creators quit is that they want to do something else.
If you're starting or scaling your content creation journey in 2024, you need to avoid the content format trap. The format trap will put you on a path towards a dead-end. You, too, will find yourself announcing your retirement because you want to do something else.
Why not do something else off the get-go? Become a video content creator but also an audio podcaster and a blog writer. Have a mailing list and author books. Develop ideas and collaborate with creators in different fields. Sounds like a dream but also hectic, right?
Not if you use a smart content repurposing strategy. With repurposing solutions like ContentFries, you can convert your videos into blog posts. You can convert video to audio and distribute it to audio-podcast channels. You can also add B-roll to audio and create videos. The best lines from your livestreams can be turned into quote cards. And with the right partnerships, the stories you tell on your podcast can be turned into animated cartoons.
Remember The Platform Context
While you’re turning one content type into another, you need to remember that different things work for different platforms. Even similar-seeming platforms can be vastly different in the types of content they promote.
Take YouTube Shorts, for example. They seem like the YouTube version of TikTok. But on TikTok, musical content gets ranked higher than spoken-word content. On Shorts, dialogue-heavy content gets better exposure. Then there is Instagram and its Reels product.
You can post musical content or spoken-word clips there too. But you’ll get better reach with reels that have text overlayed on them. It turns out, Reels viewers want to read with music and a visual in the background.
And if all else fails, try being pretty on screen. That works across all platforms.
What the audience wants is the most important context consideration for any platform. The same person goes to LinkedIn and TikTok but for different reasons. He won't feel comfortable liking a dance video on LinkedIn, but he will double-tap his heart out on TikTok.
Similarly, he will read articles about getting a job or increasing sales on LinkedIn but will ignore that subject on TikTok. So before you post anything on any platform, remember to ask yourself: "Why do people come to this platform?"
Other context considerations include:
Content format - Some platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn let you make text, image, and link posts alongside allowing video uploads. Other platforms allow image and video posts only. Then, there are channels that distribute audio only. Repurpose content to match the platform you're uploading to.
Content duration - Different platforms have different duration limits for video and audio uploads. Also, the audience has different duration tolerance. TikTok has now expanded its video length to 10 minutes, but its audience is still interested in shorter clips.
Content resolution - Some platforms allow or encourage square posts. Others have the classic TikTok vertical resolution. You should film your content in the resolution best for your primary platform, then reframe it when repurposing. ContentFries allows you to generate content in multiple resolutions at the same time. So you can have the same clip cropped in square, vertical (TikTok), and landscape (Youtube) resolutions with one click.
Document, Don't Create – Revisit, Don't Repurpose
Gary Vee made famous the dictum that you should "document" instead of "create" content. This means letting content happen instead of getting in its way with overthinking.
His philosophy is that people are interested in the journey more than the product. Take them along for the ride by filming the process. This organic approach to content creation is inspiring. But how do you translate it to repurposing?
We propose: revisit, don't repurpose. If you start thinking about content repurposing as "content repurposing", you will get too analytical. Simply revisit your content with a different platform in mind. That's the best approach to organically and—very naturally—repurpose your videos, podcasts, and blog posts.
This approach has another parallel with Gary Vee’s “Document, Don’t Create” strategy. When you document instead of creating, you can start right now. You already have something going on that you can document.
Well, when you revisit instead of repurposing, you can start right away. You already have something to revisit. Old blog posts, videos you never published, or even your childhood pics. You can always revisit something.
Don't Limit Your Content To Social Media
The final strategy for content repurposing in 2024 is to go beyond social media. You can repurpose your videos, livestreams, and even text posts into something with more longevity than social media content.
Here are formats that get ignored by most creators:
eBooks - One of the most accessible forms of content repurposing is eBook creation. You can repurpose long blog posts into ebook chapters. But what if you don’t have any blog posts to repurpose? Use ContentFries’ video to blogpost creator.
Physical Books - Physical books are a little more serious but can be created from pre-existing materials. You might need to hire an experienced editor for this. But video/audio transcription will come in handy.
Workshop Materials - If you are an educator, you can turn your live streams and webinars into quote cards and graphics. While these are social-media-friendly pieces of content., you can print them out for use in workshops.
Quizzes - Speaking of workshop materials, you can turn any educational content into a quiz with the help of LLMs like ChatGPT. Simply turn your video into a blog post with ContentFries, then feed it to ChatGPT and ask the bot to turn the text into multiple-choice questions.
Merchandise - Quote cards look good on social media. But quote graphics can also be slapped onto T-shirts.
Newsletter - You can distribute any social-ready content behind an opt-in via a newsletter. Instead of posting all your content online, you can keep some of it exclusive for your newsletter subscribers.
Digital Course Content - You can also repurpose your videos into a structured course. But remember, if customers have to pay you to get it, then the videos used in the course should not be available for free. If your customers find that the content they’re paying for is freely available elsewhere, they will feel cheated.
A Standalone Special - Standup comedians have sold standalone specials for a long time. Sketch comedians and educational content creators need to realize that they, too, can sell standalone pieces of content. Youtuber Jake Tran sells a package of his evergreen business lesson documentaries for $300. You, too, can combine your content in an interesting enough fashion to sell directly on demand.
Major Secret: Create 1000 Pieces Of Content With Contentfries
You have learned a lot so far, but if you want to get a seriously unfair advantage over other creators, you need two things: a ContentFries subscription and the following plan. This will help you create 1000 pieces of content. In one week.
Day 1 and 2
Create primary pillar - 1 - This is a one-hour long-form video. It can be a video essay, standup comedy special, or a lecture. As long as it is one-hour long and substance heavy, it can work.
Create derivative pillar - 1 - This is one hour of “BTS” and commentary content. So, you’re talking about the “making of” of the first video. For context watch A Pitch Meeting then a Pitch Meeting Revisited. The first is a primary video, and the second features commentary content. Running total: 2 pieces of content.
Day 2
Repurpose the first pillar into a blog post - 2 - You can use ContentFries to turn your video into a blog post. But instead of making one blog post, cut it up into two posts. Even if you do not have a blog, work on making and polishing two blog posts. Running total: 4 pieces of content.
Create individual text posts from the blog post - 100 - Now that you have enough text to work with, you can start singling out individual sentences and snippets to highlight as their own text posts. You will find 50 of these in each post, so 100 overall. Running total: 104 pieces of content.
Day 3
Screenshot text posts to create image posts - 100 - A screenshot of your tweet can go on Instagram or LinkedIn. Since there are 100 text posts, that’s 100 tweet screenshots. Running total: 204 pieces of content.
Use mockups to create image posts from text - 100 - Place your tweet screenshots on billboards and walls using SmartMockups. Running total: 304 pieces of content.
Create quote cards from the best moments - 100 - ContentFries has a quote card creator, so all your text posts can also be generated in different-looking graphics. Running total: 404 pieces of content.
Day 4
Make short clips - 30 - With the text and images set aside, you can now identify the most engaging moments in your long videos and turn them into short-form content. Realistically, you will find 30 moments, each lasting anywhere between 15 to 40 seconds. Running total: 434 pieces of content.
Slice 8-minute segments - 3 - You can also create medium-form content by slicing slightly longer segments. 8 minutes is a good duration to aim for, and 3 videos is a decent expectation to have from an hour-long clip. Running total: 437 pieces of content.
Day 5
Convert 8-minute segments into audio podcasts - 3 - You can convert the three videos into three podcast episodes to be distributed via RedCircle or any other podcast aggregator. Running total: 440 pieces of content.
Place text over stock footage to make new videos - 100 - The text posts you used earlier can be overlaid on dance videos or videos of nature and turned into reels. Running total: 540 pieces of content.
Repurpose derivative pillar into short clips - 50 - This is where you start chopping up the commentary video into shorter clips. Running total: 590 pieces of content.
Day 6
Compile shorts clips from derivative pillar and primary pillar to create 8-minute videos - 3 - Since you’re commenting on your original video, you can splice clips from the primary pillar and merge them with clips from the commentary. Running total: 593 pieces of content.
Convert derivative pillar into a blog post - 2 - Use ContentFries to convert the commentary video into a blog post. Running total: 595 pieces of content.
Create text posts from the blog post - 100 - Just like you did with the primary pillar. Running total: 695 pieces of content.
Screenshot text posts for visual media - 100 - Again, similar to repurposing the transcript of the first video. Running total: 795 pieces of content.
Day 7
Overlay text over stock footage - 100 - You can stock footage of dance or nature videos. Running total: 895 pieces of content.
Create quote cards out of quotable moments - 100 - Create quotes and text graphics from the text transcript using ContentFries. Running total: 995 pieces of content.
Place memorable moments on billboard mockups - 100 - Use SmartMockUps to create 100 visually engaging posts featuring your text. Running total: 1095 pieces of content.
Turn audio podcasts into visualizer clips - 6 - ContentFries allows you to convert audio into video clips with a visualizer. Running total: 1101 pieces of content.
That’s it, by day 7, you have 1000+ pieces of content. And the best part is that you have used less than half of ContentFries’ features. Click here to learn more about our features and sign-up for a free account with 1000 content credits.