How to Serve Up a Steady Stream of Content on a Shoestring Budget

Content has a short shelf life.

In order to remain relevant, you must deliver more than the occasional blog or LinkedIn post.

For example, here is a quick rundown of the best practices for social media posting frequency, according to Buffer.

And that’s just social media. According to HubSpot, organizations should also be blogging about 16 times a month.

Unfortunately, many marketing teams believe they lack the time and resources to maintain this level of activity.

With a little creativity, you can generate lots of high-quality content by systematically repurposing your best stuff.

The first step is to commit to creating real content.

What is real content?

There’s a lot of fake content on the web.

You can spot it a mile a way, intuitively knowing which results to skip over every time you do a Google search.

If you can see right through it, your audience can as well. You can’t survive by simply creating content optimized for search.

The purpose of content is to educate potential customers and move them through the sales process.

That will never happen if no one wants to engage with your content, no matter how optimized it is.

Your content must deliver direct value.

How to generate real content

The inevitable follow-up question is: How do I create real content?

What form does it take?

Real content can take many forms. It can be a blog post, YouTube video, infographic or ebook. The form doesn’t matter, as long as it communicates direct value to your audience.

Coming up with new ideas can be tricky. To help inspire fresh thinking, XANT President Ken Krogue offers 14 ways organizations can generate real content.

This list is taken from his 2012 article, The ‘Core’ Model of Generating Real Content.

1. Answer a question
2. Tell a story
3. Highlight trends
4. Research best practices
5. Compile tips
6. Point out a problem
7. List good (or bad) examples
8. Recognize who
9. List what
10. Warn when
11. Show where
12. Debate why
13. Demonstrate how
14. Restate so what

What is the core content model?

The last step in this process, once you have your real content, is to find additional ways of repurposing and sharing that content.

Enter the core content model.

The core content model is designed specifically to help you consistently and cost-effectively produce enough real content to generate significant traffic to your website.

The process is simple.

It starts with real content, as you can see at the top of the circle.

Organizations can use that original content, specifically its core idea, to create all the other formats around the wheel.

That way your message can be experienced or consumed by many different readers, viewers or listeners.

Changing how your content can be consumed gives it a fresh look, but because the core idea doesn’t need to be regenerated each time, it saves you incredible amounts of time and money.

Using the core content model

The easiest way to see how this all comes together is with a real-world example.

At XANT, we try to offer a new webinar every week. We often partner with other sales leaders and experts, highlighting the industry’s best sales methods, research and technology.

Our webinars are a significant source of real content. Not only do we have the webinar itself, but we can break it down and use it to create many additional pieces of content.

For example, we recently hosted a hugely successful webinar alongside Grant Cardone titled, “Cold Calling Tips and Million Dollar Sales Prospecting Secrets.”

As you can gather from the title, the core concept focused on cold calling and sales prospecting.

We took the real content from that initial piece, and used it to create many derivative pieces of content:

• On-demand webinar
• SlideShare presentation
• YouTube video
• Ebook
• Blog post
• Social media posts
• Targeted email campaigns

There are all kinds of additional options you can create with bundles, kits or combinations of this content to meet the specific needs of your audience.

Want to master social selling? Download the free ebook below.

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