If you’ve ever heard me talk about content marketing, you know that I am a big believer in spending MORE time on FEWER pieces of content. That’s why we create our own Instagram Templates that anyone can customize and use for their own business.
A piece of this is making sure you have a few larger pieces of cornerstone content that you can repurpose in multiple ways.
I call it the Vanilla Ice rule: Creating one big hit that you can remix, reuse, and reimagine for months if not years.
The key to creating high-quality, long-form content is simply investing more time. For example, if you have 10 hours per week to invest, reserve the majority of that time, 80 percent, for your long-form content at some point during the year. So that you have a deep bench of content to pull from for social media posts.
When it comes to creating a big piece of content, you’ll want to invest at least 60 hours researching, crafting, and promoting the content.
Breaking Down The 60 Hours
60 hours is my theoretical minimum. But find what works for you.
I’ve even spent more than 60 hours on one big blog post before. Many businesses end up skipping long-form, high-quality content when they start producing posts for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and maybe a blog.
Sometimes businesses are just filling up the space when they add a post on social media. When you skip long-form content, you are missing out on your most strategic content opportunity. Long-from content creates valuable returns for your business. It creates trust.
In 60 hours, you can create a strategic and high quality piece of content that will perform for your business.
Here’s how to invest your time:
Two-thirds of that time, or at least 40 hours, should be spent on creating (10 hours on research and 30 hours on crafting the content).
Whether you are interviewing experts, writing blog posts, or shooting video — invest at least 40 hours crafting.
The final third of your time, 20 hours, should be spent promoting and distributing your content.
You don’t spend 60+ hours on a single piece of content without a promotion plan. And quality promotion takes time. Your promotion includes SEO work, guest posts, repurposing the content into other formats, publishing excerpts to social networks, paid promotion, and more.
What Topic Should 60-Hour Content Cover?
For your 60-hour content, you want to answer customer questions.
Pick the topic that relates to the broadest section of your customer base, or the most lucrative subset of your customers.
You also want to make sure that the topic has a strategic tie back to your content business goals.
We want relevance, both to the pain points of your customer and to your bottom line.
What Is The Best Format For 60-Hour Content?
Here are a few quick ideas:
- Ebook (25 pages or more)
- Long form blog post (list or “complete guide”)
- Conference or other live event
- Online training course
- Webinar series
- Audio series (or podcast)
- Video series
- Infographic(s)
- Microsite
It is important to realize that whichever format you choose, it is just a starting point.
The content can be reshaped into other formats over the long term. Choose the format that 1) your customers will respond to and 2) you are most comfortable creating.
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Get additional details about how to implement 60-hour content in our course, the Content Marketing Template.