How to make your content go further, and reach more vendors and landlords

Content is precious. It’s hard to create, time-consuming to get right, and most agents find it’s just not worth the trouble.

But it is.

Authority content is a vital investment in your business, that will give back for many years after you’ve created it.

But once you’ve created a piece you can be proud of, what then? How do you make sure it doesn’t disappear from the newsfeed, there but only for a fleeting moment, then lost forever?

The answer is content repurposing.

Content repurposing is how you take one piece of content, and expand it into other forms. By doing this, you’ll:

1. Increase its reach
2. Attract different kinds of content consumers
3. Align your content with different platforms
4. Generate more clicks to your website
5. Leverage the time, effort and money you’ve spent on your content

How to start repurposing your content

Start with a key piece of authority content – an amazing blogpost or a direct mail letter. But only if your direct mail letter is a content piece, not if it is purely a sales letter (which we don’t recommend!).

Make sure your blogpost or letter contains specific, important information that your audience will find useful and interesting. A market update, or instructions on ‘how to prepare your home for viewings’ are both good examples of this.

How long should your content be?

At Firewave, we recommend a blogpost be at least 1,000 words. That’s why we write big, chunky pieces of content for our Firewave members. There are some important SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) reasons for your blogposts to be 1,000 words long, including:

1. Longer articles are usually featured higher in the Google search results, although this is more the effect than the cause. Longer reading time is a ranking indicator to Google, so as long as your long article is useful and interesting, it will tend to rank higher than a short piece.
2. Longer articles tend to attract more ‘backlinks’, that is, inbound links from other sites. The higher quality these backlinks (eg from a newspaper) the higher Google will rank that article.
3. Pages rank – sites don’t. So no matter the age or quality of your website, every page matters.
4. Long articles on important topics are more useful to users than trying to glean lots of bits and pieces of information from scattered sources.
5. Longer articles get more social shares. Research by Neil Patel of Quicksprout found that longer posts got an average of 68.1% more engagement on Twitter and 22.6% more on Facebook.
6. Longer articles on topics that matter to your audience are simply more useful and interesting to them.

But what about direct mail? How long should that be?

If you’re going to repurpose your sales letter into other forms of content, it needs to be around 1,000 words too. In sales letters, long copy nearly always outperforms short copy, and that’s why the sales letters we write for our Firewave members every month are usually around four pages long. That’s around 1,000 words (often much more) plus images and formatting.

Once you have your key piece of authority content, it’s easier than you might think to repurpose it into a useful, entertaining and attractive digital asset. Here are a few ideas:

eBook or guide

Take the key points from your blogpost or sales letter and add them into a slide presentation, using PowerPoint or Keynote. Add some attractive photographs and overlay headlines, convert to a pdf and voila! You have an eBook or guide you can share digitally, or even print and send out. A designer can help you put some extra polish on your eBook or guide if you don’t have the skills, but even if you do it yourself, it’ll look as if you spent hours on it, and impress your readers. 

Upload the slides to Slideshare

This is a platform you may not have heard of. It’s owned by LinkedIn and therefore carries the weight of their professional credibility. It’s free and quick to set up an account. They also make it super easy to share across both platforms, and you can add a slide deck to your media section within your LinkedIn profile and page. The first thing you’ll need to do is to create a slide deck from your blogpost. This is easier to do when you have a ‘listicle’ post – a post created from a list, eg ‘7 Reasons to Sell Your Home in September’. Once you have your slide deck, just upload to Slideshare and share across to LinkedIn and your other social platforms.

Video tutorial

This repurposing idea is a bit more advanced than the other ideas here, but creating a video of your slides with a voiceover can be a great way of attracting a new audience, and increasing your credibility with your current followers. For this, you’ll need screen capture software. Whilst PowerPoint does allow you to create a recorded slideshow directly in the application, I use Screenflow for Mac for a more polished result. (The pc alternative is Camtasia.) Add music from one of the music sites, and a ‘sting’, (animated logo) at the end, and the finished result will be impressive! Then just upload your video to YouTube and share across your social platforms. Here’s what our latest one looks like:

Facebook Live

Live video has a far higher engagement rate than any other post on Facebook right now. All you need to do is set up your phone on a tripod or table, and talk to camera about your post. Simply summarise your article, using a whiteboard or similar behind the camera to keep you on track.

Audio file

Once you have the video, either your Facebook Live or a slideshow video with voiceover, you can create an audio-only file from it. Just save as an mp3 file, and distribute it everywhere you post your video as an alternative piece of content.

PR piece

Create a PR piece of the main ‘hook’ in your article, and send it to your local paper with a few photos. We did this recently and got it published. We got a valuation worth around ￡1 million from it too.

Hopefully you now have some great ideas about how you’re going to use your content! If you’d like to find out how we might be able to help you to create amazing content and sales letters in the first place, just go to www.fire-wave.co.uk/start and let’s have a chat to see if we’re a good fit for each other.