The AI-Enhanced Blueprint for Repurposing Your Longform Content (And Distributing It Across Marketing Channels)

Offloading the tedious parts of your workload into Chat GPT won’t solve your content problems.?You need a roadmap.

Afterall, it’s not just about generating ideas and crafting valuable, interesting content. It’s that plus repurposing, synthesizing AND distributing it across your marketing channels.

The starting point of this roadmap, though you may not like it at first, is long form written content (i.e. blog articles, ebooks, podcast show notes).?

Essentially, this is the content where you cannonball into the depths of your expertise, research and wit to deliver deep, unique value. And starting off the bat with the richest, most time-consuming content might seem daunting…but it’s the only part of this content journey worthy of pouring into, as it will become the gift that keeps on giving.

If you don’t already have longform content out there, save this resource for later.

Here is your blueprint for taking that wealth of value and extending its lifetime:

1. Identify your top performing long-form assets
2. Leverage Chat GPT to repurpose that written content
3. Use Chat GPT to transform those tweets to visual content
4. Fine-tune the output
5. Deploy and analyze the content

This very post has churned through this machine. Carry on for the detailed schematics.

1. Identify What Content To Transform?

YOU still have to be data-driven - even with all this AI. Chat GPT is literally fed and driven by real-time data (yours and the millions of other inputs and history) - but that doesn’t let you off the hook when it comes to being data driven yourself.

When it comes to your content strategy (at least for now) us humans still have to poke prod and analyze to decide what long-form content is worthy of repurposing - and that takes analytics.

Obviously, if you’re going to spotlight your longform content and allow it to be extended into multiple forms, you’ll want to cherry pick the heavy hitters. Random, arbitrary selection is not strategic.

So how do you award the opportunity of immortal, shape-shifting life? Think of it as natural selection or reproduction - you want the strongest genes to be passed on, and the weakest to fade into history.

Prepare

To identify your top-performing long-form assets, I recommend centrally aggregating them somehow (in Drive, Excel or another PM tool). Include links to them here, as they’ll be useful for referencing not only natively in the platforms they’re published, but in the analytics platforms you’ll use to dig deeper. Have columns for your KPIs - aka the data you’ll be collecting.

Navigate

Metrics to note for when it comes to assessing performance of content can be broken out into two spheres of access:

1. The native platforms in which they’re published.?

This shows engagement metrics - think impressions, likes, comments, reactions, shares within social platforms or your website (i.e. blog comments).

2. An analytics tool.?

This shows website activity metrics - think website traffic, website behavior and conversions DRIVEN by the content, beyond the social platform post. *This applies to long form content that has CTAs that link off the platform to a landing page or website*?

You’ll want to isolate the top 10-20% of your content in the end to move forward with giving them eternal life.

Collect The Data: Native

Low hanging fruit for performance insights is #1 - using the native analytics within the platform.

Linkedin has transparency into individual post performance to go through one by one, but with some digging you can see “Top Performing Posts.” (It’s up to you to sift through which are long-form, though).

Click on “Me” profile icon in your navigation bar

1. Under “Manage” click “Posts and Activity”
2. Find any post and click “[number] Impressions” OR “View Analytics”?

This page shows you all of the engagements for this post. To see Top performing posts:

1. Scroll down to “Combine Post Analytics”
2. Toggle the date range in the top left to encompass an adequate time frame for analysis
3. Scroll to “Top Performing Posts.”

You can use your aggregated list of long-form content mentioned above and ctrl + F to search in the UI and grab the data, then plug it back into excel to compare.

Platform engagement is a great indicator, but its shallow. To get a true picture of what content has gone the furthest OUTSIDE of social media and onto your websites…you’ll need to hit up an analytics platform.

Collect The Data: Analytics Tools

Likes and comments are dopamine shots, and are good for the algorithm /your status as pseudo-LinkedIn influencer…but they’re superficial when it comes to analyzing your content performance and implementing a solid content strategy.

Point blank, it’s essential to know where your WEBSITE hits come from, so you can know what’s working for you.?

If you’re gearing your longform content towards a bottom-line business goal, you are including links (“calls to action)” to properly entice prospects off social media and into your world. Be it “learn more” “download now” or “sign up", these CTAs send people to your website or landing page where you can capture them and work your magic.

To see the full effect of your content beyond vanity metrics, YOU will also need to get off social - and into an analytics platform.

Using Google Analytics To Analyze Content

Google Analytics is a free tool with an easy pixel to install on your website (Plausible is an Open Source alternative). It tracks website activity sent from all sources - social media, paid advertising, organic search and referral traffic.

To see which of your content has gone the distance, here’s a simple outline in Google Analytics:

1. Set up Google Analytics: https://support.google.com/sites/answer/97459
2. Click on “Reports” from the left navigation to open your reporting categories
3. To see website traffic, Click “Acquisition” then “Traffic Acquisition”
4. Toggle the date range to the top right of the graph
5. Scroll below the graph under the “search” function to “session default channel group” dropdown
6. Type and select “source/medium”
7. Back in the dashboard, click the “+” next to the drop down you just used
8. Type and select “session manual ad content”

In theory, each piece of content should populate here, along with:

• How many individuals have hit your site via your content (“Users”)
• Total hits you’ve had overall (“Sessions”)
• Conversions driven by the content? (if you have this tracking set up, that is - highly recommend this, it takes a bit more dev work though).

I say in THEORY, because in order for this to be true, you’ll need to tag your content appropriately in order to make sense of it. Aka, ~decorate it~

Here’s a dive into how tagging and GA tracking work.

GA Tracking

Adding tracking enables GA to recognize traffic sources, and you do this when you first publish the content. This means attaching custom UTM parameters to URLs you include in your posts. You don’t HAVE to use all of the parameters, but the more you use, the more granular you can get with filtering.

The tags are attached after a “?” to the URL, like this:?

www.example.com/posts?utm_source=Linkedin&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=repurposingcontent&utm_content=nameofpost

Google offers a free tool to build these URLs for you (https://ga-dev-tools.google/campaign-url-builder/). I HIGHLY recommend this, as the formatting is VERY important - rogue space or period can render them useless.

I also recommend creating a standardized naming convention SOPs for your tags, for ease of filtering in Google Analytics.

Parameter Breakdown:?

• Source - specific source where your content was distributed
• Medium: The high-level type of traffic or overall tool you used to get it
• Campaign: Name of campaign (I recommend making this “longformcontent” to isolate only your longer stuff)
• Content: Name of specific post or piece of content where the link came from

You can use the search bar in GA to further isolate any of these parameters - for instance, if you want to aggregate your long form content from multiple sources (i.e. linkedin, blog).

Once you have your system for generating and attaching tags to all content you want to track, then you’ll follow the steps outlined above to see all of it in one place - and then, you can truly see what long form content has done you right, deserving of? immortality.

2. Use Chat GPT To Transform Your Top Performing Longform Content

Here’s a new phrase and metaphor for this roadmap we’ve been talking about: “content micro-morphosis,” the metamorphosis of your long form written content into endless other microcontent.

• Caterpillars are your longform assets, awaiting exponential growth.
• Cocoons are the chambers of your and AI’s strategic reconstruction.
• Butterflies are the repurposed, refined and heavy-hitting microcontent that enchants and compels beyond what the caterpillar could have dreamed of.

Only the strongest of caterpillars survive metamorphosis, evade predators....and now that we’ve selected the strongest contender to advance, next is incubating that content. Here’s how to do this with the help of Chat GPT - faster than a butterfly emerges from its cocoon.

Convert To Twitter

The first step to repurposing your top-performing longform content is to tell Chat GPT to convert it to Twitter threads.??

1. Aggregate any written content from creators you follow with a vibe you want to echo
2. Copy and paste your longform content you intend to repurpose and type some variation of this prompt:

"Reference the blog post below and turn each section into a tweet within a twitter thread.”

1. You can elaborate within the prompt with more specific instructions. Spell out desired tone, voice, etc.:

“Language should be lighthearted, informal and irreverent.”

Add a prompt to “use this content [insert creator content to emulate here] as a guide for tone and voice”

4. When satisfied with the draft, copy the output into a word document, use to reference for building Twitter threads

Further Short-Form

You can also use the same longform content and prompt Chat GPT to convert it to shorter-form to experiment. Use a prompt like the one below:

“Reference the blog below and turn it into shorter social media captions”

Then, even ask it to generate short video scripts for you to record for micro video content:

“Reference the blog below and turn it into a short form video transcript to be spoken over 60 seconds. Include creative direction for each section of the video including visuals or statistics to reference”

Don't just copy and paste the output - give it your spin. Butterflies can’t go back in their cocoons, but content can go back to the drawing board endlessly until its just right.

But one thing Chat GPT can’t do quite yet that legitimate cocoons can is create visuals from your written content (other tools like Midjourney can, though!) Even image AI isn’t robust enough to generate carousel content - that’s where your touch comes back in.

3. Convert Tweets To Visual Content

You must cater your content to different learning styles - and algorithm favors - all while adding your pizazz into the mixture.

Next is to make it pretty - transform the microcontent you created from your longform content into a visual asset that will not only succinctly convey your value, but accommodate the LinkedIn algorithm’s affinity for carousel photo content.

This step doesn’t involve AI, but I will provide some tools to shortcut this step.

Building your carousels

You’ve done most of the prep and a dash of the experimentation required of this process, now it’s time to make them pop.

Step 1: Get your tools?

Make a Contentdrips account. Simply connect it to your Linkedin and voila! Then create a Canva Account - this is a bootstrappers photoshop and will enable you to create attractive visual thumbnails for your carousels.

Step 2: Get your Twitter thread

Copy your Twitter thread you want to transform into a document. You probably have these centralized already, in preparation for actually posting on Twitter.

Step 3: In Content Drips UI:

1. Click “IG & LinkedIn Carousel” from the left navigation
2. Choose a template that you like - or keep it simple and select “Clean Read” to customize it yourself
3. Name your carousel
4. Copy each tweet in your thread and paste into its own carousel slide - leaving one blank in the beginning
5. Upload a picture for your bubble and update your name and Twitter handle
6. Format the text and your Twitter identifiers to align with each other (pro tip: select an area outside of all elements you want to move at once to maintain their proportion to each other)

Step 4: In Canva:

1. Click “Create a Design” at the top right
2. Select “Instagram Post (Square)”
3. Create your hook for the carousel (you can use Chat GPT to generate some ideas. Feed it the Twitter thread, or the original longform post, and prompt it to provide a catchy hook)
4. Play around with the “Design,” “Elements,” and “Text” options in the left navigation to create an eye-catching yet easy to digest thumbnail/first slide for your carousel
5. Download by clicking “Share” in the top right > “Download” > select “Current Page” only from the dropdown

Step 5: Back in Content Drips UI:

1. Upload your Canva image and size it to the first blank slide
2. Double check everything, then “Download"

The last step here is posting it to LinkedIn! You’ll select “PDF Document” from the Create Post, then upload your asset. Scroll through to make sure it looks right, sometimes it gets jumbled.

Be sure to caption it with something relevant and catchy, perhaps pulled from your original Twitter thread or summarized. Oh, and add that nice chargrill mark for your final touch - those hashtags!

Of course, a recipe needs to be finetuned - next is refining your art.

4. Fine Tuning All The Way

Chat GPT is a brand safety threat. Unchecked, it’s straight-up plagiarism - with different consequences. In the academic world, powers that be are frantically working on that part…

…but in the context of creating content for your business, the only accountability is yourself. The consequences are more of the insincere, robotic and tacky variety than disciplinary. (Maybe even cringe… I can say that for a decent amount of my raw ChatGPT output, even after training…)

Again, a brand safety issue.

All it takes is a too-obvious lack of pizazz and humanity, a few too many clich?s, and your edge is lost.

That’s why fine-tuning your content is a crucial part of content creation, at every stage of transforming and repurposing and every AI you’re using.

Train Chat GPT

Though it will get “smarter” the more you use it, Chat GPT will never quite be able to emulate you without your constant guidance. To sound more “on brand,” you’ll need to train it.?

To do this, you:

1. Enter and dissect other high-performing pieces of content (yours or other content creators whose style you want to reflect)
2. Do some old school, high-touch editing and personalization to make sure your spark isn’t lost in the Chatty sauce

To teach Chat GPT to write in your style, take your high-performing longform content and preface it with a variation of this prompt:

"Analyze the following text for tone, voice and style. Take your learnings and apply them to all future responses: [post]"

Do this with several of your posts, to provide it with the richest well of information to work off of.?

*Note: you will have to repeat this outside of the one chat you’re in, it won’t know you forever*

You can use the same prompt for other people’s content! If you want to mirror someone else’s vibe…just be sure you maintain your authentic self. There are no rules against being micro-manage-y. Ask it to re-write! Give as many detailed instructions as you like.

Manual Fine-Tuning

There’s no way around it: the home stretch here before your new short form content is primed for posting requires your manual attention. It’s highly improbable that the responses Chat GPT gives you would reflect your style perfectly even after training. So, at the very LEAST read through everything to consciously approve or not.

I’d recommend infusing any trademark phrases or tags that humanize you. Clip a few witty or hard-hitting sentences or phrases from your original longform content that you’re proud of to plug back in, even if they’re hard to quantify and you simply like them.

You wouldn’t (or shouldn’t) outsource copywriters far removed from your business, that are bootstrapping for minimum SEO requirements only. You certainly wouldn’t publish their content without revising and providing feedback. You wouldn’t sacrifice finesse or hope for comprehensive value, would you?

Then you certainly shouldn’t entrust a robot with producing your content without your well-trained eye and magic touch.

Thereafter, it’s the last frontier: releasing your content Hydra.

5. Deploy & Analyze Your Microcontent?

Your microcontent babies were born of the very best of you (i.e. your top-performing longform content), and synthesized with your AI partner through a ton of patience and attention (and maybe hybrid human-robot couples therapy).

And now you must trust they will make you proud out there.

You’ve spent a LOT of time with this robot, and together have produced some perfect little microcontents, each different in form, yet sharing the same parent: your original longform content.

Incoming is how to make the break easier for you, as the now single human parent..

..while unfaithful Chat GPT stays busy popping out other asset babies for everyone else.

This time, not with the help of robots - but algorithms (really, not too far removed).

Manual vs. Scheduling content

The first decision you have to make before you deploy your microcontent is how you will publish it:

- Manually - native within each platform

- Scheduled

But before you make any decision, you have to plan. This doesn’t mean you need a rigid content calendar… just a semblance of a framework for what content goes where. That makes it easier for you to plug and play.

Could be as robust as “on Wednesdays we wear pink,” or as chill as “twice a week I want to grace my audience with xyz.”

Back to your decision: manually post or schedule (it might be a mix).?

If you choose to manually post, know this: Native posting arguably provides the best results. Linkedin allegedly “favors” it. It “feels” more organic to the algorithm, like it has a sixth sense.?

But manually posting requires a significant interruption in whatever is happening in your/your teams' life.

So, enter scheduling. It is more convenient, scalable, overall better for humans..but not for algorithms. Somehow they know. Results show it’s almost like they feel they’ve been “hacked.”

Regardless, at a certain point it will cost you more to post at certain times than to bulk load.

Here are some tools I use for scheduling:

• PostDrip custom-made scheduling tool for LinkedIn. Big fan. Also, same company that created Content Drips!
• SocialPilot
• Buffer - Free and very simple, but gets wonky with links (check it for yourself)
• Hootsuite - an OG in the marketing automation space. A doorbuster for a host of other crazy useful tools (i.e. a UTM tracking builder - DING DING DING to this post: https://www.dhirubhai.net/posts/jakeageller_repurposingcontent-contentplan-activity-7057112213152501760-inFY)

Explore and choose what works for you.

Once your microcontent babies are live, all that’s left is to brace yourself for a shifting wave of troublemaking, teachable moments and pride. Wait, is Chat GPT preparing me for being a father?!

I digress. What’s really left is analyzing performance of said content, and using the same KPIs you used to identify your top-performing long form content. Do it over 24 and 48 hours. Two weeks, four weeks. Look for impressions but also deeper engagements.?

Basically, helicopter parent* your content.

Roundup

With this blueprint, you now have a welcome mat for all this new AI to enter into your content strategy.

Sure, you can delegate and offload through and through, but you’ll likely spin your wheels either because you can’t get traction with results, or you’ll be overwhelmed with all of the potential and options

Use this as a resource from the beginning:? to identify what longform content to use as your springboard, to use Chat GPT to transform it, to convert into visuals, refine and fine tune it and distribute it.

I’m curious how/where you would infuse AI into this process differently or additionally. Please let me know!

#repurposingcontent #longformtoshortform #aiblueprint #airoadmap #aicontentstrategy