Content leverage helps you get your highest return on investment. Here’s how to leverage one piece of content to get the most bang for your buck.

My grandfather was a pastry chef. He passed away when I was 16, but one of my most abiding and treasured childhood memories is going with him to the bakehouse in the very early morning. Lamingtons were one of his specialties – in fact, his lamingtons were out of this world.

Making the day's worth of lamingtons was an intensive process. He started with massive slabs of vanilla sponge cake that were cut up into squares with a large cutting form. Each tray of cubed sponge was then dipped in thick, luscious chocolate before being covered in flaky coconut.

Each baking day my grandfather made something like 1,000 lamingtons in a single go. As a child, I was always impressed by the sheer volume of deliciousness he created every day. But now I understand that this was the best way to get the highest return on your investment.

If my grandfather had prepped and cooked each lamington individually, it would have been a far more labour- and time-intensive undertaking. And, it likely wouldn’t have been worth the effort.

Creating content is much the same. When you create a single piece of content and use it for a single blog, or one Facebook post, you are wasting time and energy. A much better approach is to take one piece of content and leverage it into many, many more. In fact, you can take one piece of content and leverage it into 99 separate pieces of converting content.

Why you should leverage your content

Leveraging content is not about using the same thing over and over in a boring repetition. It is also not about creating more digital noise. There are important reasons to leverage your content.

It maximises your resources

When you leverage your content you are maximising your resources. This one piece of content stretches your time and your money to give you maximum impact for the least amount of input.

Business owners are busy, and we simply don’t always have the time or even mental energy to be composing content every single day. Leveraging gives you an opportunity to create valuable content with less effort.

Content has a short lifespan

As you can see from the model above, content has a short lifespan. And different platforms have different useful lives.

IT company, Mamsys, conducted research about the lifespan of content. They found that a blog post lasts for two years, a Pinterest post for four months, YouTube videos for 20 days, LinkedIn posts for 24 hours, Instagram posts for 21 hours, a Facebook post has about five hours of visibility and a tweet on Twitter has a lifespan of roughly 18 minutes.

Creating content is a way to keep your audience engaged with your brand. But you have to keep creating it. Regardless of the platform, it doesn’t last forever.

It’s how you reach your community

When you leverage your content you’re effectively meeting people where they are and distributing your content in the learning styles they like. For example, some people prefer Facebook to LinkedIn, and some will prefer Twitter to IGTV. When you create content on each of these platforms you are meeting people where they are comfortable and where they like to hang out online.

In the same way, some people prefer to get information via the written word. Others prefer to watch videos or listen to podcasts. If you can access each of these different methods then people can ‘learn’ from you in the way that best suits them.

How to leverage one piece of content into 99

But how do you actually do it? Let’s break it down.

Ideation

A fantastic idea is the first step in any content campaign – and it’s the most important step. Feeling passionate (or at least excited about) your new idea keeps you motivated through the sometimes long process of content creation. And it’s important to have passion yourself, if you want to instil passion in others.

How to find your ideas is something I talk about a lot in my workshops and during speaking events. You can also read about it here and here.

Creation

Once you have your great idea, your next step is creation. This is where you want to think about written, audio and visual approaches. To really maximise your content, you’ll want to tackle all three.

Written will be your article or blog post, audio will be a podcast and visual will be video. These three streams allow you to multiply your content idea by three right off the bat.

Of course, you may not want to take on all three. Maybe podcasts are too much for you at this stage of your business. That’s OK. You don’t have to use all three streams. But the more ‘creation’ types you utilise, the more your message will reach a broader range of people, where they are and in the learning style they like.

Distribution

Finally, you’ll need to distribute your content. The model above shows 33 different channels of distribution starting with people (or face-to-face interactions) and ending with Instagram stories. Of course, there may be others that are particular to you or your industry – perhaps an industry conference or a masterclass. And there may be some that suit your business and audience better than others.

But the more distribution channels you can access, the better your chance of reaching the right people. And your 33 options become 99 when you take advantage of the written, audio and video streams as well.

Note about efficiency

At the end of the day, leveraging your content is more about being an efficient manager of your content than it is about being creative. The creative process takes place first but the rest is just plain good business management.

Like my grandfather’s lamingtons, content leverage helps you get the highest return on investment from each piece of content. It can move your content marketing from ordinary to extraordinary.

As Robin Sharma, the author of The 5am Club says, ‘The hours that ordinary people waste, extraordinary people leverage.’

How do you leverage your content?