How to Produce Huge Quantities of Content on a Budget
In the last few months, I have produced hundreds of pieces of content. I’m not a content marketer, I don’t have a massive team behind me, and I definitely don’t have countless hours to spend on content. It’s something I do while continuing to work as a consultant, business owner, and speaker, so how was it possible for me to do this without devoting every cent I have and every minute I can spare?
More importantly, how is it possible for personal branding experts like?Habib Salo?and?Kristina Bucaram?to create even more content while operating within the same budget and time constraints?
The answer is quite straightforward and it could revolutionize how you produce content.
Step One: Prepare Your Team or Your Skills
Time is a great substitute for money. If your budget is low, then it’s time to roll up your sleeves and do some of the work yourself. If you don’t have any time, talent, or patience, then start writing checks!
The first step in the content creation process is to assess where you are, what you need, and whether or not you can afford a team.
The content plan that I’m going to outline will only require around 5 to 10 hours a week. In return, you will get several pieces of daily content to publish across all social media sites. If you’re doing all of the work yourself, you’ll need to have a basic grasp of filming, video editing, and image creation.
You should also be a pretty capable writer.
If you’re none of those things, don’t worry. Filming is easy as you can do it with a smartphone and a simple setup. Video editing is a little trickier, but in the early stages, you won’t be doing anything complicated so you don’t need to worry too much.
The only area in which you may need help is with the writing. You’ll be blogging, not writing academic essays, so you don’t need to be a professional writer. But it’s important to have a good grasp of the English language and to write engaging content. If you don’t meet those requirements, hire someone.
Step Two: Create Your Pillar Content
To the uninitiated internet user, publishing several pieces of content a day is a full-time job. It’s something that requires lots of written content, videos, and images, and something that takes all day to complete.
Photo by?Priscilla Du Preez?on?Unsplash
But that’s not how the pros do it.
The trick to creating masses of content is to start with “pillar” pieces.
Pillar pieces of content should be long-form videos and/or guides of at least 5,000 words. For example, if your personal brand is all about fitness, your first pillar content could be a video titled “The Best 20 Stretches and Exercises to Aid Recovery”.
By filming yourself performing the exercises and then editing some text overlays, graphics, and narration, you can create an hour-long video that covers the topic in full.
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It’s far from a “quick and easy” solution and if you’re new to content creation, generating pillar pieces on a regular basis can feel like a Sisyphean task, but it’s all plain sailing from there.
Step Three: Expand Your Content
Once you have your 60-minute video, you can write a 10,000-word article that covers the same topic, using the video as a guide. You can write 500 words per stretch/exercise and use screenshots of the video as embedded images. At the end, not only will you have a long 10k word article, but you’ll also have 20 shorter blogs.
Photo by?Glenn Carstens-Peters?on?Unsplash
At the same time, chop the video into 20 different segments — one for each exercise — and create 20 separate videos. Take 10 screenshots from each section and use passages from the relevant blog posts as accompanying posts/quotes to use on or alongside the images.
The only creative work you’re doing throughout this process is to plan and film a 60-minute video and follow it with a 10,000-word article, although the latter will be a lot easier considering you’ve already done the research and are basically just transcribing your own content.
At the end of the process, you will have all of the following:
And that’s just the start!
That 60-minute video could be condensed further to create 50 to 60 TikTok videos. The 10k word article could be chopped into 100 to 200 paragraphs for social media, and you can grab hundreds of screenshots from the video.
It’s all original content, and as far as your social media accounts are concerned, nothing is being duplicated.
Sure, there’s a lot of editing and cutting/pasting, but it’s much better than the alternative, which is to create all of that content yourself from scratch.
The result is that a single 60-minute video and a 10k guide can give you enough content to make multiple posts every day for a month. At the end of that month, just create another video and start the process again.
Step Four: Hire People
If the idea of writing 10,000 words terrifies you, pay a writer to do the work for you. If you don’t have the patience to cut/paste, hire an assistant and/or a video editor.
Photo by?Christina @ wocintechchat.com?on?Unsplash
As noted at the outset of this article, when time is not on your side, substitute it for money and someone else will take the burden away. If you don’t have any time, money, or content creation skills, and you’re not willing to learn, well…this is probably not the right industry for you.