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Platforms don’t care about how busy you are. But we do. Use this guide to conquer your content goals in 2024. Plus get a chance to get 5 well-edited short clips from your content by the end of this read.
The content landscape is super competitive this year, which means that you have to publish more pieces of content to remain relevant—no matter your niche. Suppose the average creator needed 200 videos to succeed in 2020. Today, the same creator would need to publish roughly 2000 clips.
That wouldn’t be a problem if you could simply spam low-quality clips and meet the volume targets. With the creator economy set to exceed $450 billion in value by 2027, a lot of money is pouring into content creation.
MrBeast has become the face of putting more money into your content to make more money from it. But he is far from the only one doing TV-calibre content on social media.
YouTube channels like The Cut and Jubilee have created new formats of engaging content pouring a lot of money into casting and production. And for better or worse, your content is competing for attention on the same platforms as Jubilee, MrBeast, and The Cut. So the bottom line is that in 2024, you need quality and quantity to succeed as a content creator.
At the same time, you are time-crunched like most people. Work, family, and socializing demand enough time as it is. And many creators don’t have the time to get on the ever-speeding content treadmill. But unfortunately, the algorithm doesn’t care about you. So you have to care about you while finding smarter ways to increase content output while maintaining high quality.
This guide will help you get the best results you have ever had with content creation so far. And that’s because it uses Gary Keller’s book The One Thing as its guiding principle. Keller built one of the largest real estate agencies in the world (Keller Williams) and he did so with the Focusing Question.
What is the one thing I can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?
This question helps entrepreneurs, creators, and students single out the one thing that can help them get to the next level. And for creators today, that one thing is short-form content. The internet landscape keeps changing.
Image memes were all the rage in the mid-2010s and vlogging was big after that. And with the TikTokification of the internet, short-form video has become the primary growth mechanism.
Of course, you might not want it to be true. You might wish that attention spans were longer and that people didn’t need so much bite-sized content. But this is the perfect time to remember a 400-year-old quote from Miyamoto Musashi.
_Truth is not what you want it to be; it is what it is. _
And you must bend to its power or live a lie.
The truth is that short-form video is the single most important way to grow your profile today. You can make image posts and text posts, we have tools for that in our own content repurposing suite, but you will get the best results with short-form video.
The Creation-Distribution Paradox
In his books So Good They Can’t Ignore You and Deep Work, Professor Cal Newport puts forward the idea that to get good at almost anything, you need focus. And that is true in content creation as well.
Only with deep focus can you get to the level of content quality needed to succeed. But the kind of volume required by distribution channels makes it nearly impossible to focus on one piece of content.
The distribution technology which relies on content volume to find an audience for you is at odds with the requirement of quality content creation: deep focus. Even the One Thing discussed earlier is all about focusing on one thing. And short-form content, unfortunately, is not one thing. It is 100 clips for one month and thousands for any given year.
This creation-distribution paradox is exactly why a majority of content creators give up. It is why 48% of creators make no money from their content. They zig-zag between focused content creation and trying to put out as much material as possible. And if you can solve this paradox for yourself, you can get better results than any of them have ever had.
One way we have helped creators overcome the contradiction between focus and volume is with repurposing. ContentFries has been the leading content multiplication system since Gary Vee first proposed the idea of content repurposing in 2019.
But enough about us, you can repurpose your content with a simple video editor as well. The whole point of this guide is to empower you regardless of whether you use our services or not.
The point is that you can focus on one piece of high-quality content, a long-form video, and then use an editor (or our software) to make hundreds of clips out of it. This helps you fulfill the volume demands of a hungry unhuman algorithm while maintaining the quality demands of your human audience.
Above all, you can protect your mental health from the stress of creating individual short-form clips. You can also create a realistic schedule for shooting and repurposing your content. People often make schedules when they are motivated to get their lives in order. But that’s the worst time to create a schedule since the “You” that has to follow through on it isn’t as motivated.
Create your content creation schedule when you feel like doing nothing. That’s a schedule you’ll be able to follow no matter your motivation level. With dedicated repurposing, creators can block up to eight days for long-form content creation and still keep up with daily upload demands.
The Obstacles To Repurposing
If content repurposing is beginning to sound too good to be true, that’s because you haven’t considered its challenges. There’s a reason why every comedian, podcaster, and educator hasn’t simply started repurposing content to blow up online.
Keeping a steady repurposing schedule is hard, which is good because it means it is real. Get big quick schemes are just as unrealistic as get-rich-quick schemes. To get big on social media, you will have to overcome obstacles. And the three main obstacles to Content Repurposing are as follows:
Scatter Brain - Even clipping hundreds of snippets can scatter your focus.
Time Constraints - You don’t have enough time to edit hundreds of clips.
Resources Requirements - You can’t spend big on hiring someone to repurpose your content.
If you want to repurpose your videos consistently, you will need to turn scatterbrain into focus with a streamlined conveyor belt of content. You will also need to use tools that take a fraction of the time it takes to manually edit clips. And finally, you will need a tool that is cheap enough to help you pull this off within your budget.
This is where ContentFries comes in. It can literally reduce your workload to uploading your long videos to the platform and clicking a button to get clips. Its AI does the rest. And of course, you can intervene and optimize but each second you spend doing that is going to get you better results than a minute you would spend on a traditional video editor.
Now, if you have a producer, editor, or an incredibly loyal younger sibling willing to edit your videos for free, you might not need ContentFries. The rest of this guide will still help you. But if you want to stick with content creation and repurpose clips until you blow up, you will need an affordable and efficient partner like ContentFries.
With that out of the way, let’s get into the practical steps you must take to get the most out of content repurposing.
How To Repurpose Content When You Don’t Have Time
Start with long-form content. The more value-packed your long-form content is, the better results you will get at the repurposing stage. Nothing illustrates this better than the difference between a streamer and a standup comedian.
A comedian works his material in small comedy clubs, cutting out unfunny bits and keeping the most potent jokes. Gradually he builds up an hour of material and then he puts it out in a comedy special. That’s one hour of material that is as value-packed as possible. So when that gets repurposed, every minute is worth “clipping”.
In contrast, streamers just talk. They have spontaneous funny moments, which do get clipped, but the content-to-clip ratio is extremely low. The average full-time streamer streams 8 hours per day. But how many clips do they put out? Let’s take a look.
Kai Cenat’s official clips channel drops 4 clips every day. And IShowSpeed is clipped on a dozen shorts per stream. That’s a very low primary-content-to-short-clip ratio. They can afford that, but new creators can’t.
So begin your journey right by making high-quality long-form videos. The sub-section below will help you with that.
Making Clippable Content
Keeping in mind the importance of “clippable bits” while making content will help you create long-form videos that can be repurposed into high-quality short-form content. All of this sounds abstract until you get into the specifics of your genre or niche.
Your niche will most likely determine what your audience is after. People who watch comedy videos expect the content to be funny. In that case, the “value” is humor. For those looking for practical instructions on how to change a tire, the humor could be a garnish but the value is in the instructions.
Knowing the primary value of your content will help you pack more of it into your videos. An educator trying to pack more humor into his videos won’t help him get more clippable content for his audience. He might get snippets for a completely different audience, though.
Similarly, a comedian packing a lot of educational bits into his videos won’t help him scale up his clip output for those who want funny stuff.
Comedian Jim Carr’s podcast appearances are a great example of this. Carr is already successful as a standup comedian. In his podcast appearances, he shows his deeper side instead of being a typical funnyman.
Moments like this get clipped.
People who are into philosophy will find value in that clip. But those who like Carr for his jokes might not be interested. That’s why, Carr’s official YouTube channel doesn’t feature such bits. It is packed with jokes only.
Know what your content’s value is for the audience you want to grow, and pack more of it into your content. Below are different types of content alongside their potential clippable aspects.
Podcasts: Questions That The Audience Can Tap Into
If you are a podcaster, your audience wants to hang out with you. Your content is their company. So when you ask the kinds of questions a friend would ask, you offer value. Questions like: “If you could buy anything in the world, but your boss would get one as well, what would you get?”
Asking such questions on your podcast will allow you to clip them later. And your viewers will start leaving comments with their answers, which is just bonus engagement.
Take the example of the podcast Brilliant Idiots hosted by Andrew Schulz and Charlamagne. A typical episode of Brilliant Idiots is over an hour and thirty minutes. But this clip from the podcast is just a few seconds long, yet it works as a self-contained bit.
Andrew asks if you would visit an ancestor or a descendant. The question itself gets people thinking. Then the clip also has a punchline, which we won’t spoil. Since Schulz is a comedian, having humor is essential to his content. That brings us to the next content type.
Comedy: Self-Contained Bits
Whether you are a standup comic or a sketch comedy creator, your audience is after humor. For short-form content, you have to spot and isolate self-contained bits under one minute.
One-liners and two-liners work very well in this case. Slow-burning bits that have a gradual build-up are still welcome, but make sure to add shorter jokes to your scripts to clip later.
Creator Trevor Wallace does this very well. Here’s a comedy sketch in which Wallace plays an annoying engagement photographer.
That sketch is over 3 minutes long. But it has a smaller self-contained funny part that Wallace has clipped into this short.
Education: Insightful Moment
It goes without saying that a typical consumer of educational content is after insights. So when you make long-form content, make sure to pepper it with insightful moments that can be clipped into shorter videos.
Alex Hormozi does this very well. And in fact, many creators who use ContentFries like that the platform lets them generate “Hormozi style captions”. But this article isn’t about dynamic subtitles. We have a separate one for that. This is about how Hormozi clips his content.
This video is over 36 minutes in run-time and goes over Hormozi’s productivity system.
Here is a 15-second clip that sums up the same productivity routine.
The clip above is taken from another Hormozi video. But it showcases his ability to sum up an insight into a much shorter package.
Being able to make a comprehensive educational video is great, but you must also be able to communicate lessons in a short-form-friendly manner.
Webinar: Solving The Problem
Webinar is a category of educational content that is either paywalled or used as a jumping-off point to sell a course. The insight aspect is valid for webinars as well, but those who consume webinars want more.
Webinars often solve individual problems. They are about a very specific topic. That problem is usually a big one. For example, a wealth creation webinar tackles the problem of personal poverty.
Attempting to solve it in a single sentence for a TikTok clip is not practical. Instead, you need to focus on smaller problems within that larger problem. Things like saving money, finding the right investments, and opportunities to increase your active income.
Then, within those smaller problems, you will find micro-problems like fighting the temptation for impulse purchases. Those microproblems can be addressed in short-form content.
In the example of the wealth creation webinar, you would include multiple tips like leaving your credit card home when you go to buy something, never entering a store until you have written down what you need and only buying what’s written until the next trip, and using cash envelopes for budgeting. These would be easy to clip as self-contained bits.
Grant Cardone has a 4-hour-plus webinar on Real Estate.
Now granted (no pun intended) that a big portion of the webinar features him selling you on his course, there is still a lot that he is teaching. And Real Estate is complicated enough that you couldn’t possibly sum everything up in a Youtube short.
But this Short that someone clipped from that Webinar, still solves a problem.
Reaction Content: Off-Guard Reactions
Reaction content is a very specific category that is often not as tightly scripted as the rest. So, here it is not as much about pre-planning moments but about knowing which moments to clip.
Usually, what people like the most about a reaction video is… the reaction (who knew?). So whenever you are caught off-guard, you have your clippable moment. A video might send you into a laughing frenzy or you might unexpectedly tear up. Both would be equally clippable because you were caught off guard.
IShowSpeed, one of the biggest streamers in the world spends a lot of his time reacting to content. And this short, which has over 11 million views, sums up the power of getting caught off guard.
Warning: It Does Feature Profanity.
The fact that Speed is caught off guard multiple times is amusing to his audience. You can work with your producer to compile clips that will get similarly exaggerated reactions out of you. That way, you can “blind react” and get more clippable moments.
Major Tip: In your long-form content, just before a clippable moment, say something like “This is really important,” or “Pay attention to this.” This will help you quickly single out moments to clip in the editing stage.
The Editing Stage
Assuming that you have filmed the long-form video, your next step is to edit it. There are two types of edits your content must go through. The first is the initial main-video edit. This is where the podcaster produces the full episode.
The second is the repurposing edit, where that video gets turned into a bunch of clips. We’ll be talking about the second one after we go over the three pre-edit things we do to avoid running into obstacles later on.
Solving Scatter Brain With Google Sheets
We use Google Sheets to organize our clients’ content in a single place. The links to their main videos alongside a column for priority help us decide which individual item to focus on.
Solving Time Requirements With An Assistant Or A Repurposing Program
Our clients solve their time requirement issue by letting us repurpose their content for them. We solve the time consumption problem by using our editor (which you can use as well). It uses AI to instantly single out and clip content.
Solving Resource Obstacles With ContentFries
Since ContentFries is cheaper than hiring dedicated editors, it remains a budget-friendly way to repurpose content without spending big bucks.
Unfortunately, you cannot avoid these obstacles with ContentFries. You can still repurpose but you’ll have to dedicate at least 8 hours per week or pay roughly $25 per hour to get someone else to repurpose content for you. If you make the decision to use ContentFries (a much wiser decision, by the way), you can follow the steps below.
Alternatively, you can use a traditional editor to clip out the moments you have planned according to the earlier directions in this guide.
Uploading to ContentFries
To repurpose your content effortlessly, you can start by uploading the long-form video to the ContentFries platform.
Click the “Upload New Content” button to get started. It is located on the right side of the interface, though this could change in the future.
After you click the button, the uploading wizard will give you two options.
Repurpose Content - This lets you upload your main video so you can repurpose it into shorter clips.
Subtitle and Add Overlays - This option is for dedicated Shorts creators who want to upload a pre-cut clip for AI subtitling.
Click “Repurpose Content” to proceed. You will then get the option to paste a link or simply upload a video from your hard drive.
Choose whichever option works best for you. Since we have our clients’ videos organized with links in our Google Sheet, we usually use the paste-link option.
For this trial, we’re going to use this video featuring Alex Hormozi. Since we don’t have its copyright, we won’t be distributing it.
The upload wizard will give you options to use AI subtitles or upload your own transcript. AI subtitles are faster. You will also be able to pick a template from the right side and save your settings for future projects.
There’s no need to play too much with the settings. Just scroll down and pick the contexts in which you want to publish the clips.
Choose short-form vertical video contexts, because they have the most potential.
Click “Finish” and the upload will begin.
Getting Clips With AI
As the upload begins, you will be taken to your content library. Simply hover over the video title to get the option to “Get clips with AI”.
Making Changes
Once the AI is done working its magic, you will be taken to clips that it deems worth turning into shorts.
You can alter the duration and the start and end times of the clips by simply selecting those in the transcript.
You can also click the “edit” icon to make specific alterations like changing the font and the size of the captions.
You can also use the AI emojis feature and animate specific subtitles when editing the clips individually.
Finally, you can click “Export” on individual clips to send them to the export queue.
You can also use the AI post caption generating feature at this stage. And finally, get your ready-to-upload content.
Organizing Exports
To keep everything organized, we upload the content to the cloud and paste links to clips on our Google Sheet. This helps us handle hundreds of short clips for our clients. We recommend that you do it as well.
Putting It All Into Practice
Finally, you have three choices. The first is to try to repurpose your content manually using a traditional video editor. If you have the time and can’t justify spending a minimum of $9 per month on your content, then that might be a good option for you.
The second is to hire an editor to do it for you. That option can be expensive. But if you work with our repurposing team, the cost can go down by a lot. We have a waiting list, though (because everyone wants cheap content). Just fill out this form and we’ll try our best to make room for you. And you have a high chance of getting 5 free clips from your long-form content.
Your third option is to use ContentFries yourself. Sign up for an account with a free trial and get limited credits to try out our AI transcription feature without risk.