Unlock the secrets to transforming your digital footprint through the art of content creation and repurposing strategies that could redefine your online influence. In our latest episode, we delve into the indispensable role content plays in building trust with your audience, and we equip you with the tools to navigate the challenges of an ever-changing internet marketing landscape. From the robust potency of long-form material to the perilous dependence on external platforms, I lay bare the nuances of fostering brand equity and offer you a treasure trove of actionable insights to broaden your content's impact.
Then, take a stroll down memory lane with me as we reminisce about the eclectic charm of Austin, Texas, from the vivid cultural tapestry to the mouthwatering Mexican cuisine shared with my mom. Meanwhile, we'll explore the cutting-edge realm of AI and automation tools like Opus Clip and Repurposeio, which are game-changers for solo entrepreneurs looking to amplify their content with efficiency and flair. These personal anecdotes and technological revelations entwine to bring you an episode that promises to be as heartwarming as it is informative, leaving you with a stronger sense of community and a bevy of techniques to elevate your content strategy.
Unlock the secrets to transforming your digital footprint through the art of content creation and repurposing strategies that could redefine your online influence. In our latest episode, we delve into the indispensable role content plays in building trust with your audience, and we equip you with the tools to navigate the challenges of an ever-changing internet marketing landscape. From the robust potency of long-form material to the perilous dependence on external platforms, I lay bare the nuances of fostering brand equity and offer you a treasure trove of actionable insights to broaden your content's impact.
Then, take a stroll down memory lane with me as we reminisce about the eclectic charm of Austin, Texas, from the vivid cultural tapestry to the mouthwatering Mexican cuisine shared with my mom. Meanwhile, we'll explore the cutting-edge realm of AI and automation tools like Opus Clip and Repurposeio, which are game-changers for solo entrepreneurs looking to amplify their content with efficiency and flair. These personal anecdotes and technological revelations entwine to bring you an episode that promises to be as heartwarming as it is informative, leaving you with a stronger sense of community and a bevy of techniques to elevate your content strategy.
Episode two five seven. Late night. Internet marketing. This week on the Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast, we're going to talk about the importance of content creation and what you can do to efficiently repurpose your content to multiply your reach and the impact of your message. All this and more on the Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast.
Speaker 3:The Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast. The Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast.
Speaker 1:Hey, hey, hey. How is everyone? I am your host, mark Mason, coming to you from the Little Studio in Dallas, texas, where it's 80 degrees and sunny. I'm wearing shorts and a t-shirt. In February how great is that? I hope your week is going super galactic, turbo, fantastic. I really hope you're having just the most amazing start to 2024.
Speaker 1:You know, we talked last week about how, even if things are starting to get a little messy for you, there is definitely a way for you to get back on track. You can check that out in episode 256. But today, in episode 257, we're going to be talking all about the magic of content creation. And you know I would say that, no matter what your online business is, content marketing and content creation either is, or should be, a critical part of your business. Look, if you're trying to help people, you need them to know, like and trust you, and that's true whether you're trying to sell them a widget or coach them or provide them helpful content, like we're doing on this podcast. If they don't know you, like you and trust you, they're going to have a really hard time getting benefit from your content. And the best way for people to get to know you, for you to get your message out there, for you to get people's attention is to create content, and so we're going to talk about how, once you create content, you should be repurposing it to get the maximum impact from that content. Rebecca Leib, who is the only person I've ever heard of that, has actually a PhD in content marketing. She said that content is the atomic particle of all digital marketing, and what she means by that is it's foundational, it's fundamental, it is the key part of marketing, because when you think about it whether it's copy on a listing for an e-commerce product or it's a podcast, or it's an ad on Facebook people are interacting with your content in some shape, form or fashion. So that's what we're going to talk about today, and when you leave this episode, you'll have a fantastic plan, a strategy, a way to move forward when it comes to amplifying your voice and repurposing your content.
Speaker 1:Now, we've talked a little bit already about the importance of content, and I think it's pretty obvious. But when I talk about content, what am I really talking about? What I'm generally talking about is long form content. It doesn't have to be that way, but if it's an e-commerce business, maybe we're talking about articles about how to use the different things that you sell, about how to properly select the things that you sell, and so forth. For my wife and her digital photography business, she creates contents that tells the stories of the experiences that she has with her clients, and it gives her a way to showcase her work. She also offers valuable tips about how to survive a photo session.
Speaker 1:These kinds of content that actually help people do a thing, accomplish a thing, make a decision these are incredibly valuable and they can build brand equity and trust with the people that you're trying to reach that, ultimately, will become your customers. One of the things that I see people doing all the time that makes me incredibly uncomfortable as a coach of content creators is that their main content platform is oftentimes a platform that's owned by someone else, and while this can certainly work we see lots of examples of people creating content and becoming very successful when your platform is owned by someone else, those other people can make devastating decisions that impact your ability to reach your target audience, and, while I'm not saying that you should never create content on other platforms, I think it is a risk that you need to understand and maybe even somehow manage, and one of the great things about content repurposing is it does, in a way, help you manage that kind of problem, and we'll get to how that's the case. But just as, by way of example, we've all heard stories recently about how YouTube decided to take alternative medicine content and de-rate it compared to normal traditional medical content, and by alternative medicine I'm talking about things like the keto diet. Okay, so these high profile practitioners with medical degrees on YouTube suddenly woke up one day and found that no one was finding their content, and maybe that was because someone made a valued decision about whether or not one point of view was right compared to another, and the content creators are hostage to the platform owner in these cases and there's just really nothing you can do about it, especially in a case like YouTube, where you, the content creator, are not the customer. Who's YouTube's customer? The advertisers are YouTube's customers. The sole purpose of YouTube is to sell ads and as a side effect of that, they make a platform where content creators can make money, but the end game for Google shareholders is advertising revenue. So the harsh truth of that is they don't care about their content creators unless the content creators are making their platform better and if they need to make a hard decision that goes against the content creators on behalf of the shareholders. They will do that and they have done that many times.
Speaker 1:So the upshot of all this is not to scare you. It's just to let you know that when you're choosing your main content platform and I think you should have a main platform, and I'll tell you why you might want to lean towards a platform that you control, like a blog or a podcast which is distributed, as opposed to a content platform that someone else controls, and while you can definitely have fantastic businesses that rely on other people's platforms, I think it's something that you need to be aware of. I also think that the best content, generally speaking, is long form content. Short form content on platforms like Instagram can be incredibly effective, but again, in that case, not only are you risking the content provider making a decision that isn't favorable for your business, you're also more subject to the whimsy of algorithms and viral trends and so forth. I just think that long form content creation is a safer bet in the long haul, and as I was researching this episode before going live, I was reminded of quite possibly the most important thing an anonymous quote to make your content meaningful, no matter where you put it. People need to read and feel something they've never felt before, or be able to do something they've never done before, to get the full impact from your content. So that's kind of an objective that you can put out there.
Speaker 1:But here's the challenge. It's the challenge I call content omnipresence. The problem with the digital content landscape out there is that there is so much of it. A recent study showed that there's over 500 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute. That's crazy, right? That means that during this podcast, there are going to be 15,000 minutes of content uploaded to YouTube. That's nuts. And that means that the content competition is immense on these platforms. Facebook reports that they have 1.8 billion daily active users. All of those people in general are creating user generated content, and last update that I had on WordPress was that WordPress users alone just the WordPress users, not all the other bloggers and content creators, just the people on WordPress are creating 70 million WordPress posts every month. It's crazy. It's crowded out there and every platform is crowded.
Speaker 1:So from this, I don't tell you that, boy, it's crowded and you need to give up and it's too late. You're too late to create a business. That's not what I'm saying at all, but I do think it's smart, given how crowded each of these platforms are, to focus and have a primary platform. For me, I have the primary platform of my podcast, which is hosted on my blog, so I have two primary platforms, and I recommend for you as well, no matter what you're doing, whether you're using YouTube or Instagram or wherever you're publishing your content I recommend that you have a primary type of content and that content reside ultimately on a primary location that you are in control of. You know, one of the things I see in beginning entrepreneurs is they have this desire or this feeling, they feel this pressure to be everywhere all at the same time, and here I am telling you to master a single platform.
Speaker 1:I think there are lots of examples of people who have mastered platforms that are just absolutely killing it. One of my favorites as a tech guy is Marquez Brownlee. Of course, now he is a YouTube guy, but he started making tech review videos as a hobby and has grown and blown up on YouTube 15 million subscribers or maybe more by now and he accomplished that by dedicating himself to YouTube, and now he's one of the most recognized tech influencers on the planet, and he's done things like interviewed Elon Musk and Barack Obama okay, so that is the power of focus right there. Jenna Kutcher on Instagram another great story. She started her journey as a photographer and she consistently posted relatable content, got up to a million followers, and her focus strategy allowed her to actually launch a successful podcast, which is a great transition to this kind of long form content that I'm talking about, and gave her the opportunity to sell online courses, and now she's a sought after speaker.
Speaker 1:And then another example is the Tim Ferriss show. Everybody knows about the four hour work week. Tim doubled down on podcasting and after he wrote his books, he shifted his focus to podcasts. He's closing in on a billion downloads. It's one of the top ranked podcasts on iTunes. These people are focused on single platforms, and there are a lot more examples of these people that do an incredible job with their primary platform, and that's what I want to encourage you to do. But once you've done that, you've got the fundamental problem that everyone else who creates great content on a single platform has, and that is how do I get more people watching or listening to or reading my content, how do I get eyeballs on my stuff, and I think one of the best ways that you can do this is by repurposing your content on other platforms. Now, the example that I'll use to illustrate this is what I do with my own podcast, but you can see these other successful people, like Marquez, doing this exact same thing.
Speaker 1:When I record my podcast, I actually also record a video. In fact, if you go over to latenightimcom forward slash YouTube, you can see a video of this podcast. It usually publishes a few days after the audio podcast releases, and the reason that I do that is not actually because I think video podcasting is the end all be all to everything and I wanna have a video podcast. The reason that I started doing that is because I wanted to have content that I could repurpose for social media, and by repurposing for social media. So what I do is I take impactful clips from my long form comment, little bites short form content. I make them vertical, because most social media video is vertical. I add karaoke style captioning because that's what those platforms expect, and the reason is oftentimes, when people are scrolling through social media, they have their sound off because they're probably somewhere where they shouldn't actually be watching social media, and then I publish that to those platforms, and I do that every week. So if I create a 30 minute podcast, I may find five or 10 clips that are engaging that I can publish to social media.
Speaker 1:Now what is my goal with that? My goal is to capture someone's attention, make them interested in learning more and have them come back and listen to the entire podcast. That's the whole point. It's a matter of reach and discoverability. It's fine with me if I publish these clips to Instagram and someone subscribes to my Instagram channel and that will happen. What I really want to do is discover new listeners for my main platform content. I want to catch people's attention, meet them where they are, which is on social media, and bring them back through my bio link or whatever, back to the podcast.
Speaker 1:And here's the amazing thing about this If you count up all of the social media platforms where this kind of content is useful so let's talk about TikTok, instagram, pinterest, youtube, shorts, facebook and so on, all of these different places where you can publish this content each clip that you repurpose from your content can be published, let's say, to 10 different places. And so if you're creating 10 clips and you publish those 10 clips to 10 different platforms, you've got 100 new opportunities to identify a new listener or reader or viewer for your content, and that's the game. And so to do this, there are two tricks, right. One trick is you need to spend the time to find the impactful pieces of content within your long form content. Let's face it, everything that comes out of my mouth during a podcast is not great for a 60 second sound bite on TikTok. It's just not. There's a lot of long stories and other things that just don't fit well on TikTok.
Speaker 1:So what you need to do, and what we've done in the past, is you need to scrub through that content and find those clips that are necessary, that are appropriate for those platforms, and what that means is you need to transcribe the content, or have it transcribed, or use AI to transcribe the content, and then take those words and put them onto the video in kind of a karaoke style, something that looks nice for presentation purposes and so on. You may want to add in some B-roll to make the video more interesting, so it's not just your talking head. So when you talk about baseball, you have a clip of a baseball game that pops in. You know the drill, and so you've got to do all these things to create this, and this is a lot of work, and so the question has been well, is this worth the effort? Let's say it takes you an extra hour to find all the clips and then maybe two or three hours of editing and transcribing, and you got to do this every week, and, as a solo entrepreneur, this is a real challenge.
Speaker 1:Well, now, with the invention of AI, there are tools, and you're starting to see these, and the first thing that we saw were tools that actually read the transcript and try and find the sound bites that are good based on the content. The AI has rules. It knows what an impactful statement is, what's likely to resonate, based on copywriting rules and other kinds of intuition that it has, being a natural language model, and it can pick some pretty good clips. Ai can. That didn't really help you all that much, because now you've got to go into the video and find that clip and clip it out and do all that work. So recently on the scene have come tools that can do all of that in one step, and the tool that I've been using is called Opus Clip, and you can find this tool at latenightimcom forward, slash, opus and basically what you do with this tool is you feed it your full podcast video or YouTube video or whatever long form content you have. Maybe, if you have a blog, you feed it a video of you reading the blog post and then you ask it to find the great clips in there and, using AI, opus Clip will actually find the clip, focus on the important part, make it vertical, add the karaoke style text in there that matches what you're saying and actually the transcription is remarkably accurate. And then it will add B roll in there if you want and by B roll I mean these cutaways that are kind of videos related to what you're talking about, just to increase user engagement. This tool is kind of amazing. Again, you can check it out at latenightimcom forward slash opus, opus. At the time of this recording, they still have a free tier.
Speaker 1:For me, I find this tool to be incredibly affordable. Like a lot of people in the past, I've paid to have this done and there are challenges and benefits to that, but with Opus I don't have to do anything. I just push a button. It creates drafts of the clips and it has a built in editor. I can go in and change the start and stop points, which I often do to make the best clip possible, and then in built in the tool, I can simply publish it to the platform on my choice. So that's great, but I still have this big problem in front of me that once I get a great 30 second or one minute or 90 second clip of video that I want to get out to the world, I still need to publish it to 10 places, and I will tell you, that is also a beating. It is hard to keep track of, and so automation is available for that Now, and the tool that I use for repurposing is called repurposeio, and you can find that at latenightimcom forward slash, repurpose.
Speaker 1:The way that I'm using the repurposeio tool is I'm actually publishing only to one place. In my case, I publish only to YouTube shorts. The repurposeio tool is programmed so that when it sees me publish certain content to YouTube shorts, it automatically takes that content and republishes it to Instagram reels, to Facebook reels, to Pinterest, to tick tock and so on All of these different platforms where I want that specially tagged content to go. It publishes it there automatically and I don't have to do that. And, of course, the benefits of this are obvious right You're still. You created great content to begin with on your main platform, and then you took small helpful pieces of that content that you hope will get people's attention and drive them back to your content. So you're spreading this out in a multiplier effect, and the results that you're hoping for are that people will find you and come back to your platform and start subscribing to, reading or enjoying your main content.
Speaker 1:And by leveraging the capabilities of these two things together Opus Clip and Repurposeio I've created a distribution platform where I can focus on the thing that matters most, which is creating great content for my listeners. When it comes to finding new listeners, I can leave that to automation, because what I really want people to do is to come back and enjoy the richness of the full content on my main platform. Now, is Opus Clip perfect? No, but we're at the very beginning of AI and I promise you this tool will continue to get better and better. It's already gotten remarkably better over the last six months and I suspect that eventually this clip will be even better than what you could do with a human, and, honestly, I've had the same experience with Repurposeio it just keeps getting better and better and more reliable with more features, so that I can get my content out there and kind of do it effortlessly and that's great.
Speaker 1:You know really what we're talking about here when you peel all this back is leveraging artificial intelligence and automation to amplify your message. Now, I think this is a super important distinction that people who worry about AI sometimes miss. So the worry about AI is that people are going to spam the internet with artificial content that's not going to be as high a quality as real content that comes from people, and I do think that's a concern. We know that's happening and my email inbox is full of emails selling these kind of business in a box machines where you can just generate hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of pieces of AI content, spam the internet and hope for affiliate clicks or AdSense revenue or whatever. You know, we had this exact same thing happen 15, 20 years ago when I first started on the internet back in 2007,.
Speaker 1:The big thing was AdSense websites and in fact, people even wrote books that were in bookstores about how to create farms of AdSense websites, and the idea was you would create content that you could rank on the search engines and you could put ads on that content and you could get revenue from people clicking on those ads. And people did this. I did this. I had websites that generated 5, 10, $15 a day, and back then you could make as many of these websites as you wanted and at one point I had 30 or 40 of these thin websites. The content wasn't that great, except in a couple of cases, and they would generate revenue. And then someone realized that you could do some of this writing offshore for prices under one penny per word, so you could get a thousand word article for less than $10. So we would buy these articles poorly written, terribly researched we put them up and at that time the Google algorithm was not very good and we would make revenue by ranking these articles, beating the Google algorithm and for as long as they ranked, we'd make money. That happened 15 or 20 years ago, and AI is the same kind of problem.
Speaker 1:Someone has figured out a way to create a lot more content a lot faster, and the worry is that that is going to break the internet and there is some risk there. But that's not what we're talking about here. What we're talking about here is creating fantastic content and using AI in ways that it's uniquely suited to to amplify that content. We're using AI for transcription, we're using AI to identify things that matter to people, we're using AI to format video and so on, and by doing that, we're able to actually use AI in a productive way, the same way that you would use machines in a factory to build cars faster than you could build them by hand. It's an efficiency. It's something mankind's been doing over and over and over again since the wheel, and I don't think it's something that we really need to be worried about. It's something we need to pay attention to, take advantage of and learn how to harness, because it's coming whether we like it or not. So here's the main message for you If you are wanting to create content, create fantastic content in a single place.
Speaker 1:Make that platform your home. Really create some killer content. Go watch Marquez Brownlee and understand how things are done well, and then, like Marquez, take some clips of that content and put it out on social media so people can find you, repurpose your content and if you want to get really fancy, use an AI tool like Opus, which you can find at latenightimcom forward slash opus to pull out the golden nuggets out of your content, the stuff that everybody needs to know about, and do it automatically and efficiently. And once you've got that nugget, distribute it on the internet with a tool like repurposeio at latenightimcom forward, slash, repurpose. Hey look, I hope this is helpful to you. I hope you understand that you should always be looking for more efficient ways to better help people get your content so that you can help them. Your content is there to help people. Whether you're selling widgets that will help people, whether you're creating content that helps people's lives by entertaining them, or if you're trying to help them build a business, like I am, what you need to do is reach as many people as you possibly can, and repurposing your content is a great way to extend that reach.
Speaker 1:I'm Mark Mason. It's my pleasure to talk to you today, and if you haven't subscribed to the late night internet marketing podcast, I want you to do that right now. Wherever you are listening to this, just smash that like button, the subscribe button, whatever it's called, on the platform that you're on, so that you'll be notified at no charge. By the way, the next time that I come out with great content and by the way, that next time is going to be this time next week Every Monday, an episode drops. I've got that commitment for 2024. And so far we're right on target. So it's great talking to you today. So that's it for now. I hope you have an amazing week until we speak again. And until next week, keep doing the do that you do and then repurpose it. Ciao.
Speaker 3:You've been listening to the late night internet marketing podcast. Be sure to visit L N I M podcast dot com today to leave feedback for Mark, Download special bonus content, access the show notes and more. See you there. Until then, go and make some great progress on your internet business one night at a time. Crazy town around here.
Speaker 2:I told you last week my day job was super busy because of things that were going on there.
Speaker 1:And then this week I was super busy because I was out of town with my son at a baseball tournament. That was super fun, but man being on the road in combination with a busy day job, I was super busy. I was out of town with my son at a baseball tournament Super fun. But man being on the road in combination with a busy day job, it's really starting to challenge my ability to stay on schedule. But, like I said last week, I've got a plan for that. Step one. You know, I know I'm behind schedule in step two as I'm catching up, and so that's really great. But it was a fun tournament.
Speaker 1:It was down in Austin, texas, which is a great place to visit. I lived there briefly when I was on assignment at a research consortium down there for a year. It's a great place to live and work, but it is the home of my arch rival university, so that makes me a little bit uncomfortable. Other than that, though, austin's great. It's a fantastic, multicultural, vibrant place to be. Lots of amazing food. My mom and I went to this amazing Mexican food place she lives down in Austin and was able to come to all the baseball games. So it's just a really great week, but now I got lots of work to do, so I'm out, ciao.