If you’re not putting out relevant content in the relevant places, you don’t exist.

Most venture firms aren’t putting out relevant content.

Those that are aren’t putting it out in the relevant places. They usually stop with a blog post on their website, and that’s all she wrote (pun intended). 

But every piece of relevant content can and should go much further than that.

In this article, I’ll unpack how I take one piece of content  in this case, a video - and repurpose it into 10 pieces of content for over 10 platforms. 

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1. Source content

Video

Your source or foundational piece of content could be anything really, but video works best as it enables us to repurpose into more rich formats than just text or audio alone.

I’ve selected a long-form interview I did with co-founder and managing partner of Blackbird VC, Niki Scevak (below).

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Step 2. Repurposing and Distribution

A  video can be repurposed into an image, an audio file and podcast episode, a transcript, short videos for social media, social media posts, infographics, transcripts, ebooks, newsletters, carousels, and more. 

Here’s what I did with this video. 

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1. Podcast episode 

I took the audio from this episode and published it to both the Future Squared and the Venture Backed podcasts, exposing the interview to two different podcast audiences, ultimately expanding its reach.

Distributed to: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, Overcast, SubStack

Shared to: X, LinkedIn, Instagram, Reddit, HackerNews

‍2. Article

I turned one of the interview’s main talking points - starting a venture capital firm - and turned it into a mid-length article (read here and see preview below). 

Other options:

- One long-form 1,500+ word article

- Several short-form 500+ word articles exploring different talking points

‍Distributed to: LinkedIn, SubStack, Medium

Shared to: LinkedIn, X, Reddit, HackerNews

3. Audio version of article

Prefer to listen to an article than read it? 

Easy.

We can turn the article into an audio file in one of two ways:

- The old fashioned way, by recording ourselves or someone with a good reading voice actually reading out the article

- Use one of the many AI text-to-speech tools on the market such as Murf, NaturalReaders, or Speechify. All of these tools offer an abundance of voices (male, female, American, Australian, British, and so on) to match the reader with our target market. Heck, you can even have Snoop Dogg read your content if you think it would resonate!

‍4. Audiogram for audio version of article 

We can turn the entire audio version into a long-form or a short-form audiogram focusing on a key take-away. This can then be shared on social media to build awareness and drive traffic to the article. 

Tools like Headliner.app or Veed help you do this faster. 

Distributed to: LinkedIn, X, Instagram, TikTok

5. Video Shorts

We can take compelling 30 to 60 second snippets from the episode for sharing on social media. Short video performs up to 10 times better than text alone on social media, hence the popularity of platforms like TikTok and Instagram nowadays. Click the image below for a preview, and find some other examples below.

Other examples from my podcast Future Squared:

Kevin Kelly short

Jason Calacanis short

Gloria Mark short

‍Distributed to: X, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn

6. Social media posts 

We can produce a series of social media posts on:

- the original long-form video and/or podcast episode

- the subsequent articles

- the video shorts

In this case, the post below is for the article and Niki’s journey raising Blackbird’s first fund.

‍Distributed to: Instagram, YouTube

7. Infographic

In this case we’ve opted not to create an infographic, however using DIY tools like Canva, and emerging text-to-infographic AI tools like Appy Pie, you can spin up infographics like the one below from a16z in relatively quick order. 

‍8. eBook

Once we have a large enough number of articles from our repurposing adventures, if there is a common theme and we can loop them together in a way that makes logical sense, then we can leverage them for an eBook.

This is something I did time and time again at an innovation consultancy I ran for almost a decade. The resulting eBooks, which we gated, were fundamental in growing our mailing list to over 25,000 executives, and driving hundreds of inbound leads every month.

I even repurposed a handful of blog posts for a self-published book that I sold on and got to number 1 in its target categories on Amazon - more on that here. 

9. Transcript

Using a tool like Descript, we can turn this entire conversation into a transcript with the speakers’ names tagged. 

Protip: You can get free transcripts from YouTube uploads (below right). The downside is YouTube transcripts don’t tag the speaker which can make it hard for readers to follow along, but these can still be useful to juice your SEO. 

‍10. Newsletter

Finally, we can curate newsletter from all of this content (video, podcast, article, social media shorts, and so on) to share with and update our subscribers on a pre-determined frequency (e.g. weekly, fortnightly, monthly). 

Here’s the repurposed article in our fortnightly newsletter (which you can sign up to here, btw!).

‍Final Thoughts on Repurposing and Redistribution

It should be clear by now that limiting your distribution efforts to a solitary blog post on your firm’s website is seriously undercooking it. This is especially true when you consider that traffic to most venture firm websites is poor - even more so for their blogs. 

By repurposing our content for redistribution across different platforms, we give ourselves the best chance of catching proverbial fire. 

For example, I’ve been writing for over a decade and often publish my articles across several platforms - my website, my company website, Medium, LinkedIn, and occasionally Substack. It’s not uncommon for an article to generate the sound of crickets on all of these platforms except for one, where it might get tens or even hundreds of thousands of views. 

Protip: You’ll want to use canonical URLs in the redistributed articles, pointing back to the source that you want to optimize for SEO (likely your website). 

Similarly, I’ve noticed the same phenomenon with video shorts. 

My shorts might only get several hundred or even double-digit views on Instagram and TikTok, but then get over 10,000 views on YouTube. By being everywhere you give yourself not just more reach, but the best chance of going 100X with your content. 

Protip: By publishing shorts on YouTube, which is owned by Google, you give yourself more chance of ranking for the video’s related keywords and popping up at the top of page 1 in search results. Google is aggressively pushing video content, and trying to take a bigger piece of the short video pie that it currently shares with TikTok, Instagram and now X, and it is doing so by rewarding creators not only with search rankings but also more views.

In Summary