The Three R’s of Creating Great Content: Reduce, Release and Repurpose

The easiest, by far the most natural (and for many people) the most effective way to promote a business is by creating and distributing great content. Be it a link bait, social media outreach or guest posting, content comes first.

Content is the driving force behind any successful website or online marketing content.

It is almost always easy to tell great content from a mediocre article – but how much do you really know about *great* content? Here’s the three R’s of the great content I have come to understand:

1. Reduce

… or Get Focused

Let’s face it, *really* great content is something that happens very seldom – even for the best of us. You can write often and be very good at it – but let’s face it, it is hard to surprise anyone with good content today.

The Web is over-saturated with good content (as well as with the bad content, of course). If you are really willing to stand out, you need to brainstorm something different, unique and, well, unseen (which obviously takes enormous amount of time, inspiration and work)

I don’t mean to say that you only need to create *great* content – don’t get me wrong! Unless you write often and experiment with different styles and approaches, you are not going to learn to produce something really awesome.

You should definitely write a lot, try different ways to promote what you write and listen to what people are talking back – but invest a lot of time, effort and money only in really *great* content because it happens once in a lifetime and *great* content is what will make a difference.

So just accept it: you (may) write well but not every piece of yours is “worth” to be promoted: wait for the real one. Let it be your best bet. Get focused.

2. Release

… or Let it Go

The Golden rule of *great* content that I have come to understand (which was not easy to do by the way) is:

If you love it, let it go.

You can spend days and months wrecking your head over how you can stop scrapers from stealing your articles, how you can prevent thieves from copying-pasting your content and how to keep random reckless surfers from downloading your images, reports or tools and sharing it further without giving you any credit.

You can focus all your efforts on protecting your content from being stolen… and you will still fail. If your content is good, it is most likely to be popular. If it is popular, more and more people will be stealing it from you (either recklessly or deliberately) – and you will never be able to control that. This is how the (social) Web works – you can’t control that.

If you can’t prevent people from stealing your content, benefit from them reusing it. Make your content easy to embed and re-blog and promote your brand through embedded content.

Let people download, share and exchange your content. Let them “steal” the best parts of it and embed it to their sites and social media profiles. Let people know you by that content.

3. Repurpose

… Or Give it a Second Life

Great content doesn’t have to live only once. Instead, you can expand its reach and popularity even further by re-purposing it and letting people re-craft it multiple times.

• Does your article outline a detailed step-by-step tutorial? – Create a flow chart and let people download it for further reference.
• Does your article include a lot of numbers, rules or tips? – Create a cheatsheet and let people print it to always have it by hand.
• Does your article include a lot of beautiful images or photos? – Create a slideshow and let people download it and enjoy whenever they are offline.

Think about the huge benefits content re-purposing opens up for you:

• Every piece of downloadable content encourages people to take your “brand” with them whenever they go offline, travel or go on vacation;
• All alternative types of content can be further promoted via high-traffic content-based social media networks (which will bring you additional links, traffic and exposure):
  • Promote your cheatsheets at Scribd;
  • Promote your slideshows at SlideShare;
  • Promote your images on Flickr, etc, etc.
• Downloadable content prompts users to share your content (via email) with co-workers and friends.

The good news is that your content re-purposing can be automated to some extent:

1. Use “Save to PDF” buttons for your most useful content:

Best tool: Web2PDF

PrintFriendly is another useful tool that allows readers to either save to PDF or print the page (after customizing its look).

2. Create podcasts to let readers download your content to iTunes

Best tool: Odiogo

Note: It has rather machine-like voice and it is also reported to slow-down your site performance, so you may want to consider to record podcasts yourself and use WordPress plugins like this one to embed your podcasts to web pages. If you do not speak English very well, you can try screen reading software like this one which sounds fine and also allows to add music to your podcasts.

3. Encourage users to make notes and clip your content

Best tool: Evernote Site Memory button

With Evernote growing popularity, you are likely to win your readers’ hearts by giving them the option to save your content to their favorite desktop note-taking utility.

Examples

In conclusion, let’s take a look at a couple of inspiring examples. What do some smart people do to make the most of their great content?

Allison Boyer did a very smart thing: she created The 12 Days of Blogging 2010 series writing one post a day featuring tips from some of the best bloggers around the world. Each day was dedicated to one particular topic like “guest blogging”, “tweeting for bloggers”, “podcasting”, etc. When the 12 days were all done, she created an awesome eBook, again, with the idea behind it: each page of the eBook is dedicated to one prominent blogger with the citation from his article and Allison’s comment below it.

The eBook looks neat and in the end makes a very interesting and refreshing read – and obviously makes a perfect example of smart content re-purposing:

Another example: our very awesome guest author Todd Heim did a great post for SEJ called 8 Villains of Social Media which was very well-received and resulted in many shares and comments. Therefore we decided to give it the second life by creating an infographic completely based on the initial post. The result? The infographic got hot on Digg, generated plenty of shares and was insanely popular:

Are you making the most of your great content? Share your tips!

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