INBOUND 2016 Salma Jafri: "How to Upcycle your Content for Maximum Mileage"

Okay, so I got on a plane two days ago. It took me almost 45 hours to get here. Yeah, thank you so much. So I traveled about 10,000 kilometers halfway across the world. And then of course, my flight had to get delayed by 24 hours. So I was in transit, staying at airport hotels and getting food vouchers and all that kind of stuff. And then I finally landed here last night just in time to hear Gary say all the F words he could possibly say. And I think I put my hand up for everything he said and I was like, so zombied out, but a little bit better today. So I don't know about you guys, but I Woke up at 3am this morning thanks to jet lag. And I guess some of you might have been up till 3am listening to the world around us. So I just wanted to say that, you know, after all of this hassle and trouble and this entire experience of, you know, finally being able to reach here, I have to say that the inbound community and staff and members were so helpful. They were so supportive, and I am so thankful for this amazing, helpful, empathetic community here. So thank you so, so much everybody who helped out, who tweeted while I was in transit, and who supported me. So thank you so much. So I'm a content marketing strategist speaker and I work with both Fortune 500 firms as well as bootstrapped entrepreneurs. And in my work, I see a lot of my own marketing qualities reflected. So I'm kind of a lazy ass marketer. So I like to find, like shortcuts and, you know, smarter ways of doing work and leveraging time in smart ways that I can find. And so that's what this session is really about. How to work smarter by leveraging your content to work harder for you. And so of course, we have to start with a movie. I want to see a show of hands. How many people have seen the Core? Wow, it's a really bad movie. It's a really bad movie. It's a sci fi movie starring Hilary Swank, Aaron Eckhart, Delroy Lindo and Stanley Tucci. But seriously, I mean, how bad could a movie starring Stanley Tucci possibly be, right? But it got released, I think around 2003. And, you know, there was a lot of bad science in the movie. It was basically that the earth's core had stopped turning. And so our crew had to go and detonate a nuclear bomb at the core to restart it. But when they reached the core, they found out that it was too thin and one nuclear Bomb was not going to restart it. Bummer, right? So what did they do? Okay, I have to tone down my voice now. All right, so what happened next was that aside from all the bad science in the movie, there was actually one very relevant scientific phenomena called the ripple effect, which was. I'm sure you've all seen the ripple effect, right? You drop a stone or a pebble in the water, and you can see the ripples dissipating, getting weaker as they dissipate, going in circles, equally everywhere. I like to call this phenomena the concentric circles of influence. And you'll see why that's important in just a minute. So back to our movie. So one nuclear bomb. Not going to cut it. What do we do? How do we restart the core? So Stanley Tucci's character comes up with a theory, and I'm going to let this GIF play in loop while I read you a transcript really quickly of what he says, what this is showing. So what you're seeing on screen is this. We have to use wave interference, okay? Because one explosion won't do it. Think about stones in a pond. You drop a large stone into a pond, you get a big splash, and then that's it, it's over. But drop a smaller stone, wait until the ripples weaken and drop another and another and another, and fluid dynamics 101. The ripples reinforce each other in geometric progression. The whole is bigger than the sum of the parts. Then we'll have five instead of one. Big bang. So essentially, that's how you need to look at your content creation. Instead of one big piece of content doing all of the heavy lifting for you, we want to help you create multiple pieces of upcycled content so that the whole is going to be bigger than the sum of the parts. And one of the key points to note in this is that these pieces of upcycled content have to be released at timed intervals. That is really a key phrase here. So essentially, what happens is that you get a cumulative ripple effect, and they reinforce each other, and it becomes a way of leveraging content in a smarter way rather than working harder. You're letting your content do the heavy lifting for you. All right, so now let's get into what upcycling is and what this session is about. And before I start. So you got a taste of who I am and the kind of work that I do, I would like to really know a little bit more about this wonderful audience sitting here. So if you run a digital marketing agency, please raise your hand. Great. If you Are a marketer who works at a digital marketing agency, please raise your hand. Okay. And if you are an entrepreneur and how shall I phrase the last one? Other. Okay. Whoa. Okay, so what do you do? Yeah, I work in an in house frontline. Okay. So that does fall under point two. Right? Oh, okay. Okay. Okay, got it. So I'm speaking to an audience of marketers of all levels. It appears here, which is great. So the presentation is going to be sort of an introduction to how you can strategize and think about how to get the most out of your content using the concept of upcycling. Cool with everyone. Okay, so we're just quickly going to go over. We've already done the ripple effect, so we're just going to quickly, quickly going to go over what my definition of upcycling is my personal strategy that I use for my own work and for my clients work. A couple of examples from the industry, some tools and software that can help you, and then finally a blueprint of how you can put together a strategy for your business or for your clients. And hopefully we'll have some time left for a Q and A. So let's do this. So my definition of upcycling is it means to convert content into multiple formats for the purpose of adding value and bringing that piece of content into circulation again. So the orange highlighted part is really the crucial differentiator between other terms such as repurposing or recycling or reusing. So we're attempting to bring that piece of content, that piece of upcycled content back into circulation. So what does all that mean when you think about reusing or republishing content? Typically what happens is that you take something old and instead of throwing it away, you try and reuse it in a way. So I'm a big fan of reusing wrapping paper. Yeah, I'm a mom. I like to save on stuff, but in other ways. You know, I just really like good looking wrapping paper. Right. And so I try and reuse that for wrapping another gift perhaps and you know, letting that continue. So how does this relate? So upcycling is very different from recycling or reusing. It takes something old and create something new that is equally or more valuable. My 9 year old daughter took one of the wrapping papers that I had saved and created a birthday card for me using that shiny piece of wrapping paper. Guess what? I'm never going to throw that birthday card away because now it has value, it has sentimental value. It's a piece of art to me. Right. So Even though other wrapping papers might eventually have landed in trash, I mean, they get wrinkly. I mean, there's only so many times you can reuse them, right? But that particular piece of wrapping paper converted into a birthday card for me, I have saved that, and I'm going to keep that forever. That is an example of something that she took and she created something new that is actually more valuable to me. So that's what we need to think about with our content. I like to think of upcycling as this cool little diagram here of an upward spiral. Okay, so we talked about how when you drop a piece of content into the world and it spreads like a ripple, various people see it, and when you drop multiple pieces, then it's a cumulative ripple effect, right? So it spreads out as far as it goes, and then you keep coming up with new pieces of content to create from that core piece of content. And so it becomes an endless upward spiral, which is a great way to think about content creation, right? So it doesn't just fall to the wayside and get lost, but you think about ways of how you can continue to build upon it in ways that are valuable for the audience that you're creating it for. So when recycling just delays trash, but upcycling just. Just gets rid of it altogether. I mean, there is no residue, there is no trash in upcycling. It's all value creation. So there are a couple of different ways that you can upcycle. You could maybe convert content into different formats, into different platforms, you could perhaps target different audiences, and maybe you could change the medium, and maybe you could even change the industry vertical that you are using. And I'm going to give you examples of all of these as we move on. So why is this such a good strategy? Ignore the boom. Okay, so I have a couple of points written down here, but actually there could be a lot more. It just allows you to focus on creating epic shit, right? I mean, you have to create a core piece of content, and it has to be good because you're going to be working with it for a while. You want to give it your best, right? So it encourages you to create something that is some of the best work that you do. It's obviously great for SEO, because let's say you have a video and a blog post and an image of that content, and suddenly you're showing up in Google Web Search, you're showing up in video search, you're showing up in image search. It gives you an extended reach because people consume content in different ways. And so you're reaching more people by diversifying your platforms and your formats. I love number four because I'm allergic to spam, allergic to being spammy. And so it's a great way to say the same thing, but in different ways. And I'm going to tell you a little bit about my dressing up strategy for point number four, further down the presentation. And lastly, it respects the way that your audience wants to learn. Some people like to go to YouTube and consume a video when they need to know something new. Other people listen to podcasts, other people read blog posts, right? So when you have content catering to all of these people, you're respecting the medium that someone has chosen to learn in. So basically it just helps you be a little bit lazy but smart. Lazy but smart. And allows you to 10x your content in an intelligent, non spammy way. OK, so really quickly, what I do for my own video. So what I do is I create one video every week for YouTube. So this is an example, a thumbnail of a video that I created. And you can go check out my videos, just do a search for my name, Salma Jaafrey, on YouTube and my channel should come up. And so I start with a core piece of video content, then I write a blog post around it. So what I do is I take the transcript of the video, I add in more context, put in hyperlinks, put in subheadings, format the thing, make it a little bit easier to read, add in any images if I need to further explain, and so add a lot of meat to how a blog post should look like. So so from that transcript I convert it into a blog post and also embed the video in my post. And then I'd like to take a different perspective on Instagram. So one of the things that works really well are code cards. So I like to take a key piece of takeaway or something that you learned from this and make a code card out of that and put it up on Instagram. Another thing Instagram is really good for, and I learned this lately, is blooper videos. So I put my outtakes and all my mistakes into a 30 second video which I then put up on Instagram. And that's a really great way of showing the less professional side of your personality, perhaps, or just having fun with Instagram like you're supposed to. So it's respecting the platform and creating content that is suited for that platform. Then of course I send my subscribers an email and I like to include a personal story or an anecdote or a reason why I'm sharing this with them. So they get exclusive content that blog post readers don't, and so that is beneficial for them. And then, you know, this piece of content was great as an faq, so why not? So that's another use that I made out of this. And you know, what I did put up here is that I'm currently writing a guest post on the content that's in that video and it's being converted into an infographic. And you're watching the presentation it here and it's being recorded as a speech, right? So all. So that one video has spawned all of these different types of content. And each of them have their own value. Each of them is consumed in a different way for a different reason. And so what I really believe in is that the best way to start upcycling is to love what you're creating is to absolutely love what you're doing. So that you keep thinking, okay, what more can I do with this? What else? How else do I want to say this? How else do I want to convey this message? What are the different ways or takeaways that my audience can have from this? And all of that can become all these different pieces of content that you can create for your audience, an inexhaustive list of stuff you can do. So I'm not going to read all of these out to you. What I will do is I'm going to give you a link at the end of this presentation where you can download my entire presentation. And I believe Inbound will also have the entire presentation up so you can view that. So what type of content is best suited? So I wouldn't say upcycle everything and just go blind with that strategy. I would say that the best kind of stuff is evergreen because then it feels like you're not wasting your time. It feels like it's time well spent. This stuff can be around for a long time. The other kind is series based content. So we did some work for a client and, and every week he would publish two blog posts and at the end of every month we'd combine all of those blog posts into an ebook, which we then offered as a content upgrade to his subscribers. And so when you plan series based content, it becomes really easy to upcycle it and repackage it as another value piece of content. And the third is authority content. So if you publish anything that falls in the realm of opinion or expert or thought leader, then that is also a great piece of content to start with. When you think about Upcycling. So what are the stuff that's not good to upcycle? So current news trends, things that are fads, things that are going to fade out very soon, things that don't have any kind of central theme, they don't seem to have any kind of connector, they don't have a thread that connects them. It's just harder to upcycle that kind of stuff, although not impossible. A lot of people say that, okay, if I were to put up this blog post on Medium or LinkedIn, then that's upcycling. I disagree with that. I think that the magic of upcycling happens at the content creation stage and not the distribution or the promotional stage. And here's what I mean by that. So if you have a blog post, the process of creating more content from that is where all your effort goes, is where all your ideas and all of your perspectives come into play. And then the last column is just pushing it out. Right? That's easy. So a lot of people say that, okay, well, if we're going to start to create all of this content, then I'm going to sound like I'm saying the same stuff over and over again. Google might think it's duplicate content, and I just don't want to work on the same thing. It could just get a little bit boring. And so my answer to that is what I call the dressing up strategy. So the dressing up strategy starts with an lbd, a little black dress. And then over that little black dress, you have over 30 ways to tie a scarf to dress it up, dress it down, change your look, do various things with it. Sorry, gentlemen, I'm sure you can do some stuff with ties or stuff, but this is the best analogy I could come up with. So, you know, or gentlemen can wear scarves too, right? Yeah. And you could, you could dress up as scarf in different ways, tie a double knot, wear it like a jacket. I mean, yeah, you can get creative with it. So think about your content, like wearing different pieces of scarves or even different pieces of jewelry with the same outfit. Right. You want to change it up a little bit. You want to add a little bit of different perspective. It saves you time. It's a creative use of the resources that, that you have. Why wouldn't you want to do that? Right. It makes sense. It's smart. Remember, we're all about smart here. Lazy, but smart. Right. So I want to give a few examples from the industry of content that I think is expertly upcycled. One of my favorites, the naked Chef who's a fan of Jamie Oliver here. Yay. Okay, so on his YouTube channel, he has a very, very simple recipe for spaghetti. And it has all the stuff that you would find on a recipe page. So ingredients, nutrition, servings, how to prepare it, method, how many people you can serve with all of this. Right. And so this is the typical recipe page. Now he takes the same content. This is part of a larger video on YouTube. It's approximately nine and a half minutes. And it's part of his food revolution, where he teaches Americans actually how to cook basic food really well and how to gain the nutrients that they need. Right. And then he upcycles or his team upcycles this same video as a standalone video for Facebook. But notice the counter here, it's only 46 seconds. So essentially what he's done is not just taken the same piece of content and slapped it across different formats. Right. He's understood that each format, each platform, has its own set of rules. What works on YouTube doesn't necessarily have to will work on Facebook. Right. So on YouTube, it was part of a roundup video, which was nine and a half minutes. On Facebook, it's a shorter 40 second video, which has titles because I forgot the stat. But I think like around 85% people don't watch Facebook videos with the sound on. Right. So it's smart to have text on screen so that you're still getting your message across as people are scrolling up the screen. So that is smart upcycling. It's content creation which takes into account the audience and the platform and, and is native to each format that it's being upcycled to. I have another example, one of my favorite entrepreneurs, James Clear. So he repurposes his blog post as Quora blog posts, Right? Quora, the Q and A site, Quora. So he publishes all of his blog posts over there. And then what I really love is that he says that he's, he's a weightlifter, he's a travel enthusiast, and he's an entrepreneur. And his two Instagram accounts reflect that. So the first Instagram account is all about weightlifting, and his blog posts are all about habit creation. And so he's showing how his weightlifting every single day, a small bit of effort consistently applied. A consistent habit is how he achieves results from his weightlifting. And so essentially he's showing the same content in blog post format, but then he's showing it in a completely different visual way on Instagram. And then he has another Instagram account where he's A travel enthusiast. And so he's showing all of these different sides to his personality. And that is a really great use of upcycling because a lot of us have varied interests, right? A lot of us have clients who want to showcase different aspects of their service or product or business. And so using different channels to showcase that is actually a great way to do it. So Darren Rouse does this really well with ProBlogger. He took the entire book, which was 31 days, to build a better blog, and made it a special 31 episode only podcast. Right? So that's another example of smart upcycling. Another one is converting your content into an infographic, which is always. It became the rage ever since copybloggers started to do this. And one of my favorite examples is of converting content into. For different verticals. So John Kabad Zinn is a mindfulness specialist. And so his first book was Mindfulness for Beginners. And then he upcycled that for the hospital care industry. And he wrote the same content, the same guided meditation practices, but in this case, a different vertical for health care. And then he joined up with his wife and another book, Mindfulness for Parents. Right. So essentially teaching the same concepts, but to different verticals. And then of course, when people buy one, they buy all the others. So that's another advantage of having upcycled content is that you get people who are interested to consume more and more and more from you. People are doing really some great stuff. So if you want to go any of these, some of these examples that I gave you are pretty basic, but if you want to go really extreme, you can do quizzes, you can do contests, run challenges, do board games, design interactive content, all sorts of things. Right? All sorts of things. It's only limited by your imagination, maybe by your resources. So this is a comment I found online. And the reason I'm saying don't be this guy is because he says it looks like a lot of work. Well, it is a lot of work. It's not easy. It's smart. Right? It is a lot of work. But another thing is how do you measure. Measure it? How do you know if it's successful? Right? That's the stuff that he's asking. How do I know that this is actually working and that it's successful? And my answer to that is the same way that you would measure the success of anything, any content, any other piece of social media, the same analytics that you're using with one question that you can ask yourself, and the answer to that one question is how do you know if you upcycled successfully? The answer is if it holds its own as a standalone piece. So if I see that Facebook video by Jamie Oliver, I'm still going to get the recipe for spaghetti right? If I see the recipe page, I'm also going to get the recipe. So it holds its own as a standalone piece. It is full of value to me and that's the test. Some tools that I like to use to make this process a little bit faster. Designer will take your blog posts and convert them into formatted ebooks for you. Pretty handy. Tubetogram is one of my favorite tools to use because I make a lot of YouTube videos and so I take little snippets out of those YouTube videos to put them up on Instagram really fast and convenient. This is a relatively new tool, Adeoma. It's an infographic tool and I love the little quirky little icons and graphics. Designed by Anna Vital of funders and founders fame. She's just released it recently. Another tool that I really like to use is Adobe, another fairly new on the market tool simply because it does so much so images as well as videos as well as short animations. And so that's really cool. Haiku Deck is one of my favorite tools for who are making really, really quick presentations. So they offer you images, they do layouts for you, and you just use some of their templates and it's a really quick way to create a presentation out of the content that you have already created in some other format. Right. And Animoto Powtoons for animations. Bussumo for if you want to upcycle content that you've already developed and you want to see what is popular to be able to choose what to upcycle. So Buzzsumo will tell you that Showbox is a relatively new tool as well. This one's great for doing video content. So even if you don't yourself want to come on screen, they have tons of templates for designing interactive and quick animated style videos and they also do green screen videos for if you do want to be on screen. And so I found that to be really helpful with my clients. So how should you start and where should you start from? So there are two points you can start from and before those two points you need to know what your frequency is going to be, what resources you have available. Are you a single person creating all of this or do you have a team? Do you have a budget? Who's your audience? Right. So these are all key considerations before you start. Then There are two ways you can look at it. You can either stitch stuff together that you have created, so bits and pieces of content that you can put together, or you can start with a core piece of content and atomize it and distribute it and divide it, which is what I do. They both have their merits, so it depends on how you want to start. But whichever method you choose, you want to look at the end results, right? You want to be able to look at the entire life cycle of your content. You want to be able to see the different formats you'll be creating. You want to be able to see all the concentric ripples that you want to be creating, right? So you want to plan all of this out in advance. So if you're starting with serialized content, or if you're starting with content that already exists, then look at your most popular old posts and start there. If you're starting with something new, then develop a weekly authority core piece of content and ideally try and upcycle at least five to seven more pieces from that. I'm going to give you some examples. You could take the data from your content and make charts, graphs. You could take the images and create code cards and memes. I don't think anyone will refute the power of video. So you can create short video content native to the platform, right? So video content for Facebook, for Instagram, for Twitter, and whatever other networks that you are using. Then another way that I really, really love upcycling content is number seven, which is to take that core piece of content you've created and get on Periscope or Facebook Live and get some interaction going with your community, get some Q&As from people, and you're gonna see that what you created and other people asking questions is going to supplement that, right? It's going to make it more powerful. So if you want to ask your community, you could ask them questions. So that's another great way of gathering more information to build out another piece of content. Content upgrades are always a great thing. I try and have them with every other blog post that I do. And if your aim is to build a subscriber base, then that's one of the best ways to do it. It could be something really simple like a checklist or a template or, you know, a cheat sheet of the post that you've created. Another easy way to create upcycled content is just to interview somebody else on the topic, get someone else's perspective, right? That's really easy and really fun. You could create a short presentation out of it, hold a webinar, do an online course, do a challenge. And I've done all of these and it's all fun and it's all relevant, depending on if your content supports that particular medium. So these are just ideas of how you can get started with create ebooks, create an actual book, you know, host a telesummit, make an infographic, write a guest post. So, you know, just take away all of these ideas and then apply them as they correspond to your situation, your business. But at least do these seven. If you have nothing else that you. If you, if you don't want to create all these 14 pieces, start with these basic seven pieces. And if you'd like, you can go to this link where I have put up a seven day upcycling strategy. So for creating these seven pieces of content, which ones, what platforms and with what frequency, and you can just simply download this template and use it as is or modify it to your needs. I like to think of content as an asset and I like to think of upcycled content as something that appreciates in value. Thank you so much for listening. Do we have time for a Q and A? Okay, five minutes. If anybody I know you guys will want to rush to attend the next session, but if you want to have some quick questions, we can do two, three minutes. Yes.

When you're judging the success of your.

Content asset, do you.

Each email, do you point them to the same landing page? Okay, so do you judge the success of the content piece by overall how many views, downloads, or do you measure your analytics based on each distribution channel?

Well, it's both. It's individual as well as cumulative. Right. So like I said, I like to think about each piece as having its own standalone value. Right. So on its own merit. So for example, maybe a presentation might bomb. It didn't really work. So that would be like slideshare analytics for me. Right. But overall it would be like, okay, I did all of these and I got maybe like 2% of views with the SlideShare presentation, but 20% from YouTube. And so maybe this piece is better suited for video consumption rather than a presentation without a speaker. So it would be both. Any other questions? Absolutely, absolutely. So mine is a weekly calendar and if you download the seven day upcycling plan, that is essentially a calendar that you can apply. Yes. Presentation on that link as well. It will be. The full presentation will be by tonight, as soon as I get back to my hotel room and upload it. But it's currently on private because I didn't want to upload it just yet, but, yeah, thank you so much. So it will be there tonight? Okay. Thank you so much, guys. Take care.