Turn One Recording Into Weeks of Marketing Reach (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Hello everyone and welcome to a very special community workshop here at Riverside and I say it's a very special community workshop because today we are talking about marketing strategies and I know that a lot of you might have come to previous sessions here to talk with us about different creator strategies, how to grow your audience, but today we're going to be really focusing on growing your brand, growing engagement, being able to get more pieces of content out there and when you're marketing a brand or a business wherever you are working and trying to get that word out about. So as we're starting I'm really excited to see a bunch of people are already in the chat but let us know where you're coming at us from and also let us know about what you're marketing because it would really help us gear our session today to be able to help you get the most out of it. And before we start I also want to give a little bit of a preamble about these sessions for anyone who has not joined. So I'm Kendall Brightman, I'm the head of community at Riverside and these sessions were really started because I wanted to create a space so that people within our community can share skills with other people who want to learn more and so as we are building out different features within Riverside, rolling out new tools, there's so many more marketers that are using Riverside to create content and then distribute it and get more out of their content. So I thought that it was a perfect time to bring in Justin over here from Distribution First and have him talk to you about how to really put distribution at the forefront of your content marketing and be able to get more content out there without drowning yourself in more work or creating more work for yourself. So all of these sessions are really about actionable, really real takeaways that you can apply tomorrow to your actual work. None of these kind of theory sessions where we talk about what is distribution. It's really going to be about actually what you can do right now to really crack that because I know that also so many marketers are kind of having to wear a lot of hats right now. We were talking in our office about like full stack marketing kind of thing that you kind of have to think of the ideas, execute them, distribute them. So that's really what leads us to our session today and I hope that my preamble let a bunch of people join. I never know like how long to make this intro because I want to give people some time to time to join but I also want to want to give people a little bit of context. So without further ado, I want to introduce Justin here but before that really quick I have a poll that I'm going to put out right here if you can see it. Who is already repurposing their content? Are you already repurposing your content? Not yet. Are you doing it but you feel like you could be doing it better? Because that's what this session is all about and while you're voting on that, I would love for

[00:03:00] Speaker 2: for Justin to introduce himself. Hey everybody, I'm super super excited to be joined with Kendall here and the Riverside crew. So yeah, my name is Justin. I have worked in content marketing and marketing. I mean man for like 15 years now which is wild. I'm just getting older and older every day that apparently that's how it works. So but yeah, I have a ton of experience as far as repurposing distribution. I've worked across big teams, small teams, was a solopreneur, went back in-house, still do solopreneur stuff. So I have a wide experience of how to do this across multiple teams. It's not as if it's a cookie cutter approach for every single team, every single person. It's a little bit different. So I'm super excited to not only show you all what's possible but then also hopefully give you some inspiration to do it no matter what part of the program you're

[00:03:55] Speaker 1: in. Awesome. So I'll let you jump right into the presentation as you're kind of pulling that up. For anyone who is new here and has not joined the workshop, at Riverside we are an end-to-end content creation platform. So a lot of people are using us for their content creation as far as YouTube, recording, editing, publishing podcasts for example. But what we're seeing more and more is that people are using it also for their marketing efforts. So for example, taking a webinar like this, splicing it up, and creating clips, newsletters, LinkedIn posts out of this content. Yesterday I actually interviewed somebody that is using Riverside and now I can use that video to create testimonials from that. So there are a lot of different ways that you can use that high quality content to create some really great marketing material and we're going to be talking about some of those ways today. So Justin, take it away. All right, let's do this. So yeah, hopefully

[00:04:50] Speaker 2: this will give you a lot of practical stuff and then we'll have lots of time for Q&A and things at the end too so it's not just me jammering on the entire time. But yeah, like Kendall said, we're going to be talking about the Marketer's Guide to Smarter Content Distribution and my goal is hopefully to help you all see how you can turn one recording, one video into weeks if not months of effective marketing without always having to create something new. That's a key part. So as we get started, I think one of the things that may or may not be controversial but I truly believe it is right now, where you stand, regardless of who you are, you don't need more content. And I know that's weird for marketers and content marketers to think about or to try and like register as an option but you really don't need more content. You probably are already creating plenty. It's just a matter of not getting the most out of it. And to frame this up, I want to tell you a quick story of my buddy who just started a new podcast. And anybody who runs a podcast or runs content marketing in any way knows it's a lot of work to create that core thing. So whether you're creating a podcast or a YouTube show or a YouTube series, or even a blog series, like that core piece of content takes a lot of time. It can take weeks to prepare, to write the script, to get the guests to do the things, to do the research, to outline, to shoot, to record, and then you create it. And then maybe you publish it for a couple days and then you're right back on the train having to do it all over again. And I think a lot of times the reason why I say you don't need more content and where I come from in a distribution first world is this idea of a lot of times we're creating so much content that we don't even have the time capacity to properly distribute it. So back to my buddy, he's creating the show and I'm sitting there talking to him and he's already worried about, he's created three episodes and he's already worried about having to schedule the next one. And I said, you know, you don't have to create a weekly show. You don't have to do that. And oh no, I have to do it, I have to do it, I have to do it for this and this reason. And I said, well, what if you created a monthly show and then pulled a lot of stuff out of each episode and then you would maybe, you'd only need 12 podcast episodes a month and you could still market yourself, market your business and do all that. Wouldn't you want to do that? And he couldn't wrap his head around it, but I think that's what I want to try to do today is wrap your head around this idea of just because we think we need a weekly, a biweekly, a twice a week cadence, that doesn't mean we have to. So we don't need more content. What we need is actually a system around distribution. And we need that way to, regardless of what we create, what we input, we need a repeatable way to keep the message and our best ideas out in the marketplace. Because a lot of times with content marketing, the funny thing is, is like, we forget we have to market the content we create. It's not going to do it on its own. So we can create the best YouTube video, the best podcast, the best blog post, the best LinkedIn post, whatever it is, unless we put some momentum behind that in a distribution space, it's not going to do anything for us. So my quick poll, and you can put it in the chat and I'll try to open chat here, but I'm super curious. What usually happens after you hit publish? Do you have a documented distribution plan for after we launch our podcast, this happens? Do you just sort of randomly promote it a few times here and there when you think about it? Do you post it and move on? Or do you, like my buddy, immediately start making the next thing?

[00:08:56] Speaker 1: And I just want to jump in and say, even without like, as people are answering in the chat, even beyond podcasts, like for webinars, for example, or like if we have even an internal kind of discussion, internal meeting within Riverside, if we're recording it, and then can kind of use that to create more content from it. There's so many different ways. But yeah, what are you doing with that afterwards, for example, for this webinar? Am I just going to post the webinar and move on? Excited to see what you all say. It's a pretty good mix. I'm seeing a

[00:09:28] Speaker 2: lot of C and D, some B, a couple A's, which is super exciting. Pretty good mix. Pretty good mix. That's exciting. That means we have a lot of space to chat through this stuff today. Let's see here. So I want to take you back to 2016. This is when I first started running content on my own at a company. We were a really successful software company. And I was sort of brought up in this SEO world back in 2014, 15, 16. And so that's where we packed a lot of our marketing efforts and our distribution efforts into SEO. And at the time, it kind of worked. We were bringing in 30 some odd million views a year on the traffic, on the pages we were creating content for. It was incredible. And that drove a lot of, obviously, a lot of traffic, which drove a lot of downloads and revenue and all that stuff. It's great. But it sort of skewed in my mind when I had to start running this team. And I had a team of 10 people at the time because we were all burning out to hit a metric that didn't really matter. It was just, we have to create two blog posts a week. We have to be in these constant brainstorms about what to create. We packed our calendar. I literally remember building out some massive six-month calendar of all the stuff we were going to do. And it was super complicated. And the funny thing was, when I actually did a drill down for our team for where our traffic was coming from, it was the classic 80-20. And 20% of our pages were driving 80% of our traffic. And so it just sort of started to speak to me as I'm trying to get my team to focus in on what to work on, what matters, all this type of stuff. And it just became a reality of like, man, we're creating so much content, and 80% of it isn't showing up in Google. And if it's not showing up in Google, we have no plan to get it in front of our audience. So that was 2016. Then in 2021, I moved from that team where I had a content team of 10, and we had a marketing team of probably 30 to a startup, high-growth startup, where I was on a marketing team of three, and I was content person numero uno. It was just me, solo content marketer. And all of a sudden, I'm getting stuck in this spot where I'm coming in on Monday, and they're like, all right, Justin, what are we putting out this week? What are we doing this week? How are we getting in front of our audience? And it was like, holy smoke, I have all of this stuff. I'm supposed to do blogs, and maybe we want to do some videos, and we've got social to manage. And how is one person supposed to do all this stuff? And I talked to a lot of people who are in that same spot right now, whether they're a solopreneur trying to do it on their own and market their own business, whether they're on a small team trying to do this. It's really, really hard when you have all of this constraint put on you. But the funny thing is, go back to the beginning of like, you don't need that much. Is this constraint real, or are we putting it on ourselves? And that's the question that I think we really need to ask is, how much more can we get from what we already made, or how much more can we get from the things we're already creating? And for me, what I ended up doing was, we took this giant event we had scheduled with 12 sessions and all these guests and all this stuff. And what we ended up doing was literally dripping that content out over the entire fall into the next year. So I started in August, we started dripping that out September, October, November. So we had constant content coming out off of one thing for the entire back half of the year, which honestly was an amazing thing for me. Not only did we get the great content out, but I think one of the things like Kendall mentioned in the beginning is like, when you have so many hats, like it allowed me as a solo marketer to also be strategic and think about what's coming next. And so because I wasn't constantly worried about what's going to come out on Tuesday, and do we have enough emails and what's going out on LinkedIn, like all that stuff was already built out. It really freed me up to be able to be strategic and think about what's coming next. And that's like just something I think gets undersold as we talk about content distribution and repurposing in this way. So all that to be said, right? Like, I think at a high level, my goal when I got on that role, and then literally probably for the five years and probably for the rest of my life will be this idea of like, how do we create less, distribute more, and still get in front of our audience? Because again, I think a lot of the stuff that sort of the head trash that gets in marketers' heads about we got to be creating, I got to create a new show every week, I got to do this, that's all self-imposed. Like if we just separate ourselves from what we think we have to do, and we start to think about what we need to do, it's a big shift. And hopefully today I'll be able to show you how to start to do some of that. So how I think about this is what I call building a distribution flywheel. And really, it comes down to three parts that you need to think about. You need to select and choose your core piece of content. Could be a podcast, could be a video series, it could be a blog. But in this case, we're chatting a lot about video. So it's probably, it could be a webinar, like this, any of these types of things. From there, you want to be able to multiply not only the content, but the ideas in them. And then the third part is the part that I think is really important, and that's systemizing. And that goes back to that poll question of like, what happens after we publish this thing? So we created this great piece of content, we started to multiply it, we want to be able to get these ideas out. Cool. Let's give it a repeatable pass. So every time that we have an input, it's going to go out in a particular way. So step one, select. How do we select what the heck to create to begin with? How do we select what the heck we even want to repurpose or distribute? And this is the truth. I've done a ton of repurposing for myself, I've done a ton of distribution working with other companies, and it never fails. Bad source material equals bad content. And so even the interview with your CEO that you've tried to get on the books for months and you finally got, or the webinar series that you put out, this is why I preach distribution first, because you have to think about how this is eventually going to get packaged out into the market. It's not just this webinar that we're shooting, it's how do we set up this webinar in a way that could be packaged and shared out in front of the audience? Because one bad idea, one bad message, one poor audience choice, it all compounds when you multiply it. I always say if you have one turd and you multiply one turd 20 times, you just end up with 20 turds. And so it's the exact same thing. It's like, you end up with one bad webinar that your team wants you to repurpose, and then you end up being trying to force a cut up clips out of this webinar and you're like, oh my gosh, there's nothing here. You're just pitching product the entire time. What do you mean you want me to share this on LinkedIn? What do you mean you want me to write a blog post about it? So again, thinking about how you want to distribute that content ahead of time will help change what you want to even put in the content to begin with. It's a little weird, but if I can give you an example, even in this webinar, as I thought about building out this webinar, the ideas around it, I can obviously talk about, if I were to cut this up in my way afterward, I'm going to talk about the core stories around my experience in content repurposing. I could tell that story in a LinkedIn post. I could write a newsletter that talks about that story. I could talk about each one of these sections, selecting the right content. I could have a whole bunch of content around multiplying and then building the system. So you could see how I can eventually just pull all these things out and do it in different ways. I actually have a cool example in a little bit that will show you how I did this just in the last month for my own content. So when you're selecting content, there's four guardrails that I like to look at, which is message, POV, audience, and channel. These are the things that are really easily often overlooked, not necessarily at the marketing side, but a lot of times at the company side. Marketers, I think, inherently know this stuff, but it doesn't always translate to the company at large, which means it doesn't always make it through to the actual content. One of the first questions I always ask when I'm working with a company is, at the end of the year, if you could be associated with a single message, what would that be? What do you want people to remember you for? So at the end of the year, if I were to ask what does Riverside want to be known for? Then you start to build the content strategy around what you want to be known for. Then it's, okay, cool. Off of that, what do you all believe that's worth repeating, that POV? How do you do that? Okay, which audience needs to hear that? Okay, let's go after them. Where do they hang out? Leads number four, that's the channels. How do we build up all these things so it's not that we need a giant 40-page strategy document about how to properly distribute our content? We just need to understand and have enough clarity to know, okay, sales team, this is our message. This is our POV. Here's who we're going after. Does this make sense for how you're going after the market? Cool. Or, oh, it's not? We should probably get aligned on those things before we start creating all this content. It's just a good guardrail set. One of the things I want to remind you as well with all of this is you will be tired of your message and your content way before your audience even knows it exists. You'll see this in the example that I show, but I pulled out an entire month's worth of marketing on one podcast. Let me tell you, at the end of that month, I was kind of bored of it. I have written about it, talked about it, done all this stuff across my content for a month. And you're like, man, do I really got to talk about this formula one more time? And it's like, you sure do, because my audience has no clue. I don't know how many people on here, maybe you follow me on LinkedIn or follow the podcast, or maybe you've never even heard that thing that I talked about. So I probably have to talk about the frameworks again and again and again for it to go and actually hit the audience. So that's just something to soak into your bones a little bit when you're going to be starting this venture. It's like, okay, I am going to be bored of this, and that's okay. And just because I'm bored of it, or my team is bored of it, or we're sick of it, that does not mean the audience is bored of it. And I think it's just a huge light bulb moment when you start to experience that out in the world. And I'll tell you what I've talked about. I'm going to bring it up here, the 3C content method, I'll walk you through it. I've been talking about that for like five years, and I still get asked to come on podcasts and talk about it. So it's just like, oh my gosh, people are still interested. It's wild, even though it bores me to death sometimes. So the other thing with this, don't feel like you have to be everywhere in distribution. I actually would advise you to not be everywhere, especially if you're a small team. You are going to burn yourself out faster than you know what to do with if you're trying to do everything all at once. So pick a few core channels. I sort of break them up into three buckets, like SEO. Oh, what you got, Kendall? You got something? No, I'm just like, yes. I feel

[00:21:50] Speaker 1: like everybody's trying to be on everything. And then you don't really do any one of them so well that it needs to be. And then you're also burnt out trying to create content and put it everywhere. So that was me. I can't snap, that's a fun fact about me, but I was just quietly giving

[00:22:05] Speaker 2: you some snaps. Got you. Got you. Love that. Yes, yes. And I think it's honestly, if we're being super real, it's very tempting because with AI now, your output could be unreal, right? Even some of the stuff in Riverside, you could create a ton of outputs. The problem is, are you creating good outputs? Again, going back to the 20 turds analogy, right? Are you creating actual stuff that's going to market you in the way you want to be marketed or are you just creating outputs? I think that's a hard thing for marketers to get around because we were sort of baked into this output equals great success category. Like I used to do, I got pats on the back when we successfully created two blog posts a week because that was a moat, that was a differentiator. Now it's like, write me a blog post, AI, thank you. Yeah, yeah,

[00:23:01] Speaker 1: definitely. And also it's about engagement in each of them too, because the algorithm overwards people that are going to be engaging with the comments right away. And so when you're posting on all these different things, kind of playing whack-a-mole, trying to jump on engagement for all of these different channels, then yeah, obviously things can fall through the cracks. You don't feel like you're really on top of it. Just a really easy way to get to be burnt out as either a marketer or a content creator or whatever you're doing with your

[00:23:27] Speaker 2: content. And honestly, it's really hard to learn all of these things in a way where you're going to find success. I've been posting on YouTube for really the end of this year and it's like, I am learning stuff all the time about like what's working, what isn't. It's so different than email. It's so different from LinkedIn, but it's exciting and it's fun, but you need that focus to be able to do all of this successfully. So I always advise to pick one or two, maybe three, and then learn how to distribute those really well. Because the other thing that I would say too is yes, the algorithms support you in that way, but what they really want to support you in is being consistent. And so the more that you are consistently being shown and seen as a creator on these platforms, the more likely they are going to be wanting to put your content out there. If you're only putting things out there here and there, or you go all in and then stop, that's a bad signal to the algorithm as well. So as we sort of close out this selection piece, what's worth amplifying? And this goes for if you're looking to select stuff that's already existing in your archive, or you're looking forward to creating new stuff. Like what type of content is really important to the business right now? What content do you have or can you create that is connected to that message you want to own? What's useful to your audience? Not necessarily useful to you. So it might be really useful to you to put out a product video. Is that what your audience needs right now? Or do they need help in another area? Is it rich enough to break apart? And then is this still going to be relevant six months from now? Again, ruthless elimination of all the noise and the garbage just down to focusing on, okay, if I'm going to amplify something, does it hit this criteria? If it does, awesome. Let's distribute the mess out of that thing, which leads us into multiplying. So like I teased, 3C content method, I'll go over it really quick. I have a ton of stuff on this, podcast episodes, YouTube videos, etc. But at a high level, if you've never heard of this, I think about this method as a way to cut up content. So quarterly content, a lot of companies are creating big things every single year, whether that's a flagship event, like I talked about at the startup I was at, original research, which I've done before as well, major guides, courses, you can think about all this type of stuff that people create. How can you take that stuff? And it doesn't necessarily have to be quarterly, it might be yearly, it might be twice a year. But how do you take this stuff, make sure it fits the message, like we talked about, has your POVs involved in it, all those sorts of things. And then how do you break those things up into the things you're doing webinars, podcasts, videos, which then gets those things into the posts, the clips, the emails, the graphics that you're going to create. So you start with this really good, again, really good idea, it's got to be great content at the front. And then you work it into your other content as you go down. An example of this when I was at that startup, we had a benchmark report that was based on our proprietary data. We then pulled that benchmark report data out and found the most interesting insights. We brought those insights out and then talked to our experts on our podcast about those things, which then got cut up and put on LinkedIn, put in emails, etc. So you can see, I'm not just going straight from this like, hey, check out our original research piece. It's kind of a little bit more sneakily involved when you can actually cut those things up and weave that into the overall marketing message rather than just have everything be a promotion for the original research. It feels like a more natural, a more platform native way to be able to consume that content. So you know this because you're here, hopefully, right? One recording is not one piece of content. One recording can be a bunch of pieces of content and really should be a bunch of pieces of content. I love video. Like I mentioned, we could do blogs. I love video and I was so excited when chatting with Kendall about this because video has so many things baked into it. Video has the actual video, it has audio, it has the transcript. You can now take that stuff and put all those insights into AI and pull all the things. It's amazing. It's one of my most favorite pieces of content to be able to create because it's so rich in how you can repurpose and distribute it. And again, not even just being able to change the content, but I think the key part is what I want to talk about next, which is changing the idea. So I don't want you to think about just having to repurpose a file. So it's not like, oh, I have this video and that video becomes clips, or I have this video and this webinar and it's going to become an email. I want you to think about how do you repurpose the ideas inside of that thing? So like I mentioned, in this case for this webinar, how could I not just repurpose this video into a clip, but how do I create a bunch of LinkedIn posts, a newsletter, maybe it's me point of view with a camera talking about how to select the right clips for distribution because that was a segment in here. Or one of the main ideas, like how do I talk about the idea that you don't need to create more content and really push that POV? How do I pull out some of the examples that I have in this presentation and do it in a way that's native? Maybe it's a newsletter where I'm breaking out each example and showing how I thought through the creation process of it. I'm not just repurposing this webinar in that case. I'm taking all those ideas and getting a rich through line that is way more valuable to the audience. So let's do a live breakdown. This is a podcast episode that I put out August 10th, apparently. And so when I took a screenshot of this, I had 75 downloads. So not all that impressive, not unimpressive, but sure. Cool. Podcast got 75 downloads. And that's the thing, I could have just stopped there or I used to live the life where I felt that I had to create a weekly podcast. So if I created a weekly podcast and each one averaged 75 to 100 downloads, cool. By the end of the month, I've got like 400 impressions on that content. Cool. Good for me. But that's not how I did it. That's not how I did it this time. What I ended up doing was actually taking that content, and there's even more stuff than this, but taking that content and breaking it up onto YouTube and putting that. So here I have, I took the full podcast and put that in there. It got 89 views. So I got more views. A podcast got more views on YouTube than I actually did in the podcast feed, which I love. That's what I love about YouTube right now. And then I could take a three minute segment on a part of that and share that one out. That got another 53 views. I could take another segment and put that one out. And that got another 41 views. I can take those and create the shorts and put those out and it can give me hundreds of more impressions and views. So you're just building the stack. So that's, again, one channel. You go from podcast and now I'm on YouTube. And cool. Not a ton of work either. Yes, work, effort, but I don't have to... I mean, man, marketers, don't we know the struggle of coming up with constant new ideas and trying to figure out what the next YouTube video is and the next thing and the next thing and the next thing? When you create content this way, it makes it so much easier because it's like, cool, I have this full podcast. I have this full webinar. I can break those sections up and not force people to have to watch 45 minutes worth of content. They can watch three minutes and understand how to build a brand based on a bit of content that I put in there, which is so cool. I love where distribution is at right now for this. The next thing I did was I sent out emails. So I have an email list. And for every single one of the... I'm pointing like you can see for Pete's sake. These videos, we create an email that comes off of it. And even off of that, this is like even crazier, but I did a whole POV workshop where I had people come in and sent that to them, which was part of the video here. Why creating content is a work. There's a whole part about POVs. I was like, cool, I'm going to take that out and expand it and do a workshop on it. Got people in for that. From there, we break all this stuff out on LinkedIn. Bunch of different clips, videos, created multiple newsletters, created multiple posts, all off of that single podcast dripped off over multiple weeks. And this is the wild part. This is just me doing this. I don't have a team. This is me doing all this stuff. And so it's not to say that it's not work. It's work, but it's not hard because I have a system that's repeatable. So I know when I'm going into it, what I'm going to try to get out of it. And we're going to walk through that next. And I'm super excited for that. Just so you can see this, one video, full video here can be weeks of stuff if you plan it out. You don't need anything new. That's what going back to my buddy, you don't need a weekly podcast. You can, but you're just opting into a hamster wheel. Maybe you do two a month. If you want to be more consistent in the feed, or maybe you think about how to creatively cut up those segments and put those back into the feed. So you are dripping consistent content. There's a million ideas and there's no rule book. So you can make it up as you go. Don't feel like, oh, I must do X, Y, and Z. It's your company. It's your team. You figure out how it's going to work for you. But this is just a high level example. You got this video, you got a newsletter, you're doing YouTube segments, another newsletter in week three. Then in week four, you've got a couple more things coming out. Again, super high level, not prescriptive, but just an idea that even if your team size changes and what you're creating changes, one recording can be weeks of visibility for you. Then if you're just curious, I want to throw this in here as a super tangible way to get unstuck. If you're like, how do I do this? How do I take one idea and multiply it? So I have this framework, why, how, example, mistakes, and resources. I don't have a fancy name for it. But if you use this, it does work. So you could take any idea, any core point of view, any core piece of content that you have for your company. And if you run it through this, this could be five posts. This could be five webinars. This could be one webinar that talks about all these things. This could be five newsletters that break it down. So why is that thing important? How do you do it as your company? How does your audience do that? Examples of seeing it work, mistakes at what go wrong, resources and how to do it. So if I was Riverside thinking about this, again, I'll make it super meta. Why do you need to distribute the things you're creating? How to distribute the things you're creating using Riverside? Here's an example of somebody who's done it really well. Here's six mistakes that happen when you're publishing and not distributing. And then here's some resources. Justin created this awesome guide. Go get this resource. Am I doing your job, Kendall? Thumbs up. Yeah, right?

[00:35:41] Speaker 1: Yeah, you are. Mark it back down. Send it to the social team. Perfect.

[00:35:46] Speaker 2: Keep going, Justin. Yeah. Love this. Cool. So now this is my favorite part, which is systematizing this. And I know, like I mentioned, this looks like more work. I'm already busy. I'm already doing so many things. And I will tell you, it is a lot of work if you reinvent the process every time. And so that's where I want you to focus and really think about what works for your company. Because what you do at your company, what you create, how you distribute it, all of that is going to be completely different than your competitors. It's going to be completely different than anybody else because your team is different than everybody else. And what you want to think to, how do you make this flywheel actually run like a flywheel? It's planning ahead. It's making it easy to repeat. And the idea is that as you do it, you get stronger. So the more that you do a repeatable flywheel, the more that I post on LinkedIn, the more that I post on YouTube, the more that I create this stuff in these consistent, repeatable ways, the more that my audience obviously gets to see this stuff. But the better I get at it, too. The more I learn, I'm not distracted. I'm not distracted. I'm like, oh, I need to be. I forgot to do my X post this week. I forgot to be on TikTok this week or I forgot to do YouTube. It's like whatever you have, you're just focusing on getting better at that and then you can add more distribution channels as you go. But I'll show you an example here. This is what I do with my team. So we are a super small team. I have a video creator on my team and I have a writer on my team and I have a designer on my team. So not for distribution first. So I also run a marketing team. But I want to show you how I do this, how we do this for our YouTube channel. So this is built in Monday. It's just a screenshot. I'm sure you can do this in whatever type of project management software you have, but essentially we built out an automation. So when we create a YouTube video, I click this cool button here. It says run flywheel and it creates all these tasks and then we can just execute on them. So this is just a test video, right? So test off of that. We're going to create a newsletter off of that. We're going to create a blog post. These all go out in November. We're going to create, take this newsletter and also pop it into LinkedIn for a newsletter, which will force us to create a LinkedIn summary post. These all go out day of, but then this is the part you get to figure out what you want to happen after and schedule those things out. So we're going to have an image or a carousel. We can have a short video. We're going to do a POV or a photo. We're going to do a visual post and that's going to get this content that dripped out in November all the way through to December 15th. That's only like five extra pieces of content. It's not, it's not crazy. This is not like some massive, like six month long distribution campaign. It could be, but it doesn't have to be. And again, that's the thing. You don't have to reinvent the wheel and make it something that's overly complex. Just create a system and it's going to help you.

[00:38:57] Speaker 1: Actually, if you go back to that slide really quick, I do just want to say, because I wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't. You could also do a lot of most of this, if at all, in Riverside. So you can create your full episode. It generates a newsletter for you that you can go in and edit yourself. It generates a blog post for you. You could take a snapshot from that conversation and conversation and put that out as a post. You could take your transcript, even ask co-creator or chat GPT, Claude, whatever, and ask it to, excuse me, and ask it to add, like take some pull quotes from it, put that as a carousel. Like there are just so many different things that are either already generated for you. Magic clips, there's magic segments that you talked about before, kind of like that three minute YouTube segment. A lot of that is already generated for you. Then you can go in and have that full control and be able to make it exactly what you want. It seems like a lot of work, but some of that work's already cut out for you.

[00:40:01] Speaker 2: Totally. Tools like Riverside are a massive upgrade. Again, like I mentioned, AI, all this stuff is a massive upgrade. So it's not as if it's necessarily more work. It's just different work. For anybody who's done marketing for long enough, to me, it's really fun to be able to do marketing this way where I'm not having to spend all my time thinking about what the next idea is or this and that, and I can actually execute on stuff. It's really fun. This is exactly an example

[00:40:33] Speaker 1: of when we talk about AI and content creation, we're like, no, but I don't want to lose my authenticity. I don't want to lose my voice. This is such a great example of how actually, if you use it correctly, if you use it to... The newsletter generates for you, but I'm going to go in and make the tweaks that I want and be able to get out something that's in my voice and that I stand behind, or it creates a segment for you, but I'm going to change the scenes a little bit or whatever you want to do. It's just a way to amplify, in this case, so that your authenticity, your voice, your message, your brand can get out there easily and more effectively. That's my plug. I'll give you back the mic, but-

[00:41:14] Speaker 2: Love it. Love it. Yeah. I mean, to that, right? At a minimum, give every source asset a default path. If you're creating a blog post, a lot of folks, to go back to the way beginning of this whole presentation, my default path, if I'm being honest, 10 years ago was hit publish and hope Google picks it up. That was my default path. I'm not saying it was a good one. It was just the reality. What we need to do is get away from that mindset with all the other stuff that we're creating, because there is nobody coming to save us. It's going to get harder and harder, honestly, I think. I think distribution is going to be a huge moat for a lot of companies and a huge differentiator for marketers who want to excel in their career to be able to say, yeah, I know everybody else talks about creating content. I know how to actually get it in front of the audience. Just having a default path is going to be a huge lift for that. This is maybe the most important thing about the system. Do not build the system for your best week. Build it for your worst week. I say that as somebody who has a lot of worst weeks from time to time, right? Stuff comes up, kids get sick, meetings happen, meetings get canceled, this happens, team members leave, budgets get cut. That's the reality of life. When you're thinking about building the system, I wouldn't think about what is the most premium distribution system that we can create for our content. We're going to be on seven places this week, and then it's going to expand. It's going to be built. Build it for your worst week. Build it for the week where you have four hours worth of time to be able to make this thing run or your team can make it run. That way, you can always add more. When your week goes to crap, you can still get all the content out in front of your audience. It's just being realistic with what you want to do. That way, you also can feel good about yourself. Because isn't some of this just like, I don't want to feel like crap at the end of the week because I once again didn't get my content out that I was supposed to because I built the system that's too complicated or I'm too burned out. I can't do it. Build a system that works regardless of what happens within your week. Again, like I've mentioned throughout this whole thing, this is totally editable. This is totally dependent on you and your team. Team of one, maybe one recording a month and one email a week and a couple social posts is as good as it's going to get. I would say even for a small team, that's probably pretty solid. If you're a small team, maybe you're going to add in a newsletter. Maybe you're going to add in a few more clips. Maybe you're going to add in another recording. Then if you're a larger team, sweet. You've got multiple resources. You can do more channels. Maybe you have somebody dedicated to a particular channel. Some of the teams I've worked with, they have an SEO team and then they have a YouTube team and they have a social team. It's awesome. How do you still build out those things within those groups so they're not so siloed? Then just having a system, like I mentioned, is going to be able to remove decision fatigue. Without a system, you're going to be like me showing up my first week at the startup and they say, Justin, what's going to go out this week? What should the newsletter be about? What should we get out there on LinkedIn? Do we need to do an email? When you have this system in place where you drop one thing in and all the entire flywheel starts to run, a lot of those questions go away because it's not, what should I post? It's what ideas are in the podcast that I just recorded this past week? Oh, this is a key idea. This is a key idea. This is a key idea. What are the channels I distribute on? Oh, I do a newsletter and I do LinkedIn. Cool. I need to get these ideas onto these channels and that becomes what the work ends up becoming. Then real quick, I just want to make a note where a lot of people get in trouble with distribution and with marketing in general, if I'm being honest as somebody who runs a marketing team as well, we are obsessed with outcome goals. These purple goals, views, leads, revenue, subscribers. Like, Justin, we want to get 10,000 subscribers. We want to get X amount of impressions on LinkedIn. We want X amount of views on our YouTube channel. Amazing. Those are great, but they're completely and utterly out of your control when you're going to start to build this distribution system. Rather than going to your boss or your boss's boss and being like, cool, our goal is to hit this and we think we can do that. It's great to have that goal, but you won't know if you're going to get there or not. You're not going to know how many views you're going to get on YouTube unless you start posting videos to YouTube. Rather than focusing on, I'm going to get a million views this year or 10,000 views this year. It's like, nope. I am going to post a video every single week for the next 52 weeks and see what happens. We think it's going to be able to get our message out there, our brand out there and be able to do these things. Just a quick note on setting goals and I always just suggest start tracking by what you can control. Build the system and it's going to help you feel good too. It's not about, I'm going to hit X amount of views. It's I'm going to be able to ship this amount of things and do it consistently. Finally, just as we wrap, this is an example from just a very brief document that I shared with our sales team about a year ago after we created some content. The idea is trying to change the narrative within a company. Often the narrative inside a company is, how many things did you create? How many blogs did we get out? How many webinars are we doing this month? The assumption again is still on output. Rather than that, I want to start shaping across the org and across the company of how far did that thing travel? How well did that thing work? We created this blog, it got 42 views, whoop-dee-doop-dee-doo. We also created a video on YouTube, got almost 300. We did a short that got almost 700. We did a LinkedIn post that got 1,000. Now you can start to see this track and I can say, hey, sales team, I know you really want to sell this thing. We did a blog, sure, but we also did this, this and this. We put those inputs in and we got 50X the return. So this is the strategy. This is what we're going to do. They're all nodding their head in the room. They're like, awesome. Let's keep doing that. So this is it. Distribution first system. You're going to select what's worth repeating, ideas, content, et cetera. You're going to multiply them to your best of your ability and then you're going to give that thing a system so it's flexible enough to work on any team and to work on your worst week. You want to be able to create compounding assets. A creation-first mindset is all about having to create something brand new in order to market to your audience. A distribution-first mindset is thinking about how do you get that idea and content in front of your audience regardless whether it's new or not. You could have a great blog post, a great podcast, a great webinar from years ago and it's got all of those ideas that you want to be able to get out and extract. Cool. Go use it. Get it out there. Recycle the winners, gather feedback, what's working and just keep that cycle continuing. That's all I got. If you want to get a deep dive in this, I do have completely free, it's five-day emails. It'll send you five emails. It's not spam. It's nothing horrible. It's literally in-depth teaching lessons on how to do this. You can get it at course.justinsimon.co. If you want videos and assets on how to do this yourself or potentially join in with me to be able to do this, you can check out distributionfirst.club. That is where you can actually get the entire system to be able to build this out for you and your company.

[00:49:35] Speaker 1: Let's go. Amazing. Well, first of all, incredible presentation. There were so many different questions that people were asking and I knew that we're going to be getting to them, so I was really excited to show your full framework. I think that this is really, really helpful for so many people here. First, I want to say thank you for that. Second, I want to say that a few people had asked in the chat if this is recorded. I always forget to say that at the beginning of these. This is recorded and we are sending them out after. We're going to be sending you the full recording and your slides, question mark, Justin? A lot of people are asking for your slides. Absolutely. Yes. And his slides. We'll be sending both of those out as soon as possible, so you should expect to be able to see that and review that. I really should get to saying that in the beginning, but you know, we live, we learn. I want to get through a few questions that we have. Two questions that we have here. One of them was, we talked about, what's the best, Hanan had asked, what is the best way to group which platforms you want to use, i.e. how to choose your top three that you want to be present on?

[00:50:50] Speaker 2: Great question. The cool thing about, literally before we hopped on this call, I have a podcast episode about this coming out tomorrow, so hopefully you'll check that out. But I call these things into three buckets, distribution buckets. So really it's SEO, like search-based distribution, which still is viable. I would put AEO in that as well. So there's a lot of that discovery search-based thing. So YouTube, Google, Claw, ChatGPT, all that stuff. That's one bucket that people can focus on. Another bucket that people can focus on is rented channels. So think, again, YouTube is technically a rented channel, LinkedIn, Axe, any of these social channels. And then an owned channel is a third part of that. That could be a membership. That could be a private community. That could be an email list. It doesn't have to be super complex. But how I would think about that is trying to get a mix somewhere in there. So maybe it's YouTube and it's email, or maybe it's a community and it's SEO. How can you try and diversify your mix so you're not stuck in any one way? So if you're only on rented channels, let's say you're only on social and then the algorithms change, even though they never do that, and then you lose all your stuff, you're not at the mercy of any one platform or any one algorithm. The other thing too, just as an aside of what channels you like, I always say pick ones that you enjoy doing, which is easier said than done. But if you hate opening up HubSpot or whatever email you're in to write an email, probably not the best option for you. Or every time you think about having to hop in front of a video recording and record a video, I don't know if I'd go do YouTube. Pick something that you can be consistent and that you actually would like doing.

[00:52:48] Speaker 1: Definitely. Another one that I am also curious about, Dan had said, when you plan your content creation slash interviews, are you writing a question that will elicit a concise answer that will work best for promotional clip? Or are you just

[00:53:02] Speaker 2: kind of grabbing parts that will work post-facto? Potentially both. You can always have best laid plans. I can plan out a segment or I can plan out a series of questions or topics that I want to hit if I'm doing a webinar or a podcast, but it doesn't always guarantee it's going to run the best way. I've definitely experienced that where maybe it doesn't run in one way or you ask the question and then they tangent off into another. It's like they started to answer it and then they go off on a completely different stream and you're like, oh, you had it. That was my perfect clip for YouTube. And now it's gone because you didn't stay focused. So yeah, I think it's both. You can absolutely plan for it, but then sometimes you're just finding the best stuff

[00:53:55] Speaker 1: out of the gold that you're creating. Yeah, exactly. I'm going to send in the chat right now. We had another workshop where another creator had shared their process where they go in for SEO, AEO, see what people are searching about their topic, and then they'll put in, they'll sprinkle in like three or five questions in their interviews that's just about that. So let's say that I have a podcast about YouTube creation. I'm saying, what are three things that people are usually doing wrong when it comes to YouTube creation? They'll take that answer. They'll find out if that's like a searchable thing that people are writing, like podcasting or YouTubing mistakes. They'll ask that question, clip just that part and say, the biggest YouTubing mistakes, make it super searchable. And then they'll use that as a segment. Like they'll put that up as like a three to 10 minute video. So if you want to learn kind of more, yeah, it's very cool. So if you want to learn more kind of about that pointed, more asking pointed questions to get those distributable segments out of it, that is a really cool workshop to also take a look at. So here, there are so many really cool questions. For what program are you using for the distribution plan? You're using monday.com, correct?

[00:55:12] Speaker 2: I use Monday. Within the club and stuff, we have it all built out in Notion as well. So it's, you know, like I said, it's really could be dependent on whatever you use.

[00:55:22] Speaker 1: And somebody had asked, here it is. Karina had asked, how do you define great content at the front? Like when we're talking about really what makes great content to you?

[00:55:34] Speaker 2: I think it goes back to those, those like five questions, you know, like, is it solving a problem for your audience? Is it focused on your audience, not yourself? Is it something that's going to be able to last longer than six months? Does it tie into a core message, core POV that you want to be able to get out in front of the marketplace? Like, those are the like, is it tied into what you're selling? Like, does it tie? Does it make its way all the way back? Does it tie into the audience that you want, right? So often, when we're not aligned on those things, that's what makes it bad. It's not that it's like, truly bad content, it could be great. It's just misaligned. So for example, I've seen in the past where the marketing team hasn't been aligned with sales, sales is going after one group, marketing is like going after, like, tangential kind of the same group, but it's not the exact same. And so then there's a disconnect. And so the marketing sort of falls flat, because it's not tied in with what we're actually selling, which is like a weird thing organizationally. But I think it's it's not necessarily like, there's there's bad, like, macro bad, like that sort of macro bad, and then there's micro bad, like bad, like, bad edits, bad audio, bad, you know, bad quality, which I think is a different type of bad.

[00:56:50] Speaker 1: Yeah, which you won't get if you're using Riverside. And also, like, I'll take I'll take one last question. Let's see. Let's see which question to go with. In the discussion about distribution, can you also talk about posting frequency on social media? For example, how often should somebody realistically be posting? You did touch on this, but I just want to make sure if there's like a hard and fast rule or not that you want to share.

[00:57:23] Speaker 2: I tend to not share any, like, hard and fast rules, because as soon as I say something, it'll change. But I think it's truly dependent on the platform, right? Like, LinkedIn, I had my buddy screenshot something and send me the other day goes, thought you posted something new as a post from three weeks ago, you know, and so it's like, LinkedIn has this like staying power in some ways where you can post something and it will last. So like, you don't necessarily have to be posting every day, you go over to X and people are posting 30, 40, 50, 60 times a day just because of how the feed goes. YouTube Shorts, YouTube Shorts, different again, that's where it's really platform dependent. And that's why I say, like, focus in and learn the platforms that you're distributing on, because that's going to help determine what you do, right? Like, I know people who send daily emails. And I know people who send monthly emails. And I know some people who send a weekly emails and companies. And so none of those are wrong, necessarily. But none of those are necessarily right, either. It's really dependent on the channel itself and kind of what you learn for your brand. But that's where I again, I say like, pick something, go with it, test it for three months, do an analysis,

[00:58:32] Speaker 1: did it work? Did it not? And adjust from there. Awesome. So we have a few other questions. But we are at the end of our time. So I'm going to point you in two places. As far as Riverside's concerned. First of all, I'm adding our Facebook community. That's where we have over 30,000 creators who are asking each other questions. I see a lot of familiar faces or names in this chat. But if you're not part of the community, definitely check it out. It's a really supportive group and helps answer a lot of questions. We also, we're talking about putting our content monthly. We have a monthly newsletter that I author, where every month I give a different tip on how to grow your audience, how to distribute better, anything like that. So we'll be doing a wrap up of this webinar, of course. And then also you have on your screen, course.justinsimon.co, this QR code. And then last but not least, I just want to say thank you so much, Justin. This has been everyone's in the chat saying that it's been super relatable, really helpful. And so I just want to thank you so much for sharing all of that with us today. Thank you. It's awesome to hang out

[00:59:42] Speaker 2: with you all. Hopefully we can do it again or do it in different formats. I love doing these type of things and jamming with people on all this stuff. So glad it worked out. Awesome. And thank

[00:59:52] Speaker 1: you to everyone who tuned in live, everyone who signed up and is watching this recording. So I can't wait to see what you do with this. Tag us in whatever you're putting out, because we really would love to see what comes out of this session and what inspired you. So until then, thank you so much. See you next time.