How to distribute content across 20 channels in 20 minutes using AI

Ross Simmonds (00:00)
Awesome, thanks Ben. So my name is Ross Simmons. I'm a digital marketing strategist and entrepreneur. I'm the founder of a company called Foundation, as well as a handful of other projects over the years from media companies all the way through to cleaning companies, coffee companies and things like that as well. I'm an investor in startups as well. I am passionate about tech, AI, all that good stuff. Me and Ben go way back to my DJ Khaled days when I started a X account many, many moons ago and blew that up and.

was one of the first anonymous accounts that did a bunch of crazy stuff in tech, but that was fun. And one of my passions is content distribution. So that's what we're going to be talking about today. So I'm excited to dive in. We're going to be chatting about distribution, how you can use AI to repurpose and repackage your content. I gave my first talk on AI back in 2017. So I'm excited to see all of the growth and the changes. It's been fascinating to see and witness. And I'm excited for today.

I'm also very informal, so if anybody has questions, drop them in the chat. Happy to review them. I've got some slides, but I'm a little bit of a cowboy, so if I exit out my slides and start showing you some other things as well, I hope you're okay with that as well. So before I jump into it, I do want folks to in the chat just to give me a quick rundown on your favorite AI tool. Just a quick message in the chat.

just so I know that everyone can hear me as well as that you're waking up. I know it's early for some of you. What's your number one tool that you go to to use regularly today? Perplexity, ChatGPT, Claude. Cool, Gamma, nice, awesome. All right, now let's jump into the good stuff. So I'm gonna take you through some of the methodologies that I use around distribution with AI, but I'm also going to...

take you back into time to kind of what got us to a point where I believe a lot of creators, marketers and brands are actually making a mistake, which is the fact that we're using AI, we're using...

content, we're doing all of these things with one sole focus and that is writing blog posts. And I think a lot of marketers have made the mistake, a lot of brands have made the mistake of thinking that when you use AI, if you're coming up with a content strategy, all you need to do is create blog posts. And I'm guilty as charged. Like I told people for years that that's all you need to do to be successful. Create blog posts, write blog posts, and you will win online. But that's...

complete fiction folks. You can't just create blog posts and the world will be yours. You have to do more than that. You need to be thinking about things that give you the ability to turn these blog posts into other things. You need to be thinking about other assets. And my goal today is to share with you some ideas that I hope you can use to diversify your mix. A lot of marketers also make the mistake of saying that they have a content strategy when in reality all they have is a content calendar around a bunch of blog posts that they're going to create. Again, this is not a content strategy. Just writing a bunch

of how-to content, SEO content, et cetera, is not a content strategy, but a lot of people think it is. The way that you should be thinking is more like a media company. And the way that you can approach this is by saying, okay, how can I create content? How can I edit content and develop content that ranks in Google? But at the end of the day, even these types of thinking, this thinking around thinking like a media company has kind of been debunked, right?

the newspapers of today are no longer the giants that they once were. So that line and that idea is kind of broken in many ways. Like newspaper companies are going out of business left, right and center. So why would we emulate them? And oftentimes I hear marketers say like, Ross, I'm doing all the things. I'm using AI to create better content. I'm using AI to create video content. I'm using AI to create long form blog posts. I'm creating thought leadership pieces with AI and all of these things. But here's the thing folks, you have to still market the content.

that you create, right? Like a lot of brands forget that content marketing is a two word concept and instead they exclusively focus on content. So what my hope is today is to show you some ways that you can take the stories, the assets that you create and sprinkle AI over the fact that these pieces might be good, but they're not good if they don't reach people. So how can we distribute them? The way that you do that is by weaving a web. Masterclass is an example of an organization that has taken individual assets, AKA courses,

and then they repackage and repurpose them in a wide range of different ways. For a lot of small and medium-sized companies, startups, et cetera, you don't have oftentimes the masterclass level budgets, but you can essentially replicate the lessons that masterclass can teach you by leveraging AI to take videos and turn them into shorts, turn those shorts into transcripts, turn those transcripts into carousels, turn those carousels into blog posts, turn those blog posts into threads and turn those threads into vertical videos and so on and so forth.

And my goal today is to show you how to do it. Now, before some of you start to tweet and get me canceled by saying Ross is saying that you don't have to blog anymore, blogging is dead. Let me just flag for you. No, no, no, no. That's not what I'm saying at all. I'm not saying that you shouldn't blog. I'm saying that you need to create things that are worth distributing. I'm saying that yes, you can create great blog content and you can probably leverage AI to do that, but you need to spread those stories after you press publish. Let's just establish a bit of a setting.

a stabling ground for where we could all be aligned. If you're creating content using AI, I am not mad at you. I believe that you should. I think that AI can 100 % be involved in the process to create content. But you need to create content that educates, engages, entertains, and empowers people. If the content assets that you create using AI or not using AI, I don't really care. I don't think that that matters. It's as relevant as spell check today. It's like, does the content educate people?

Does it engage people, entertain people, or empower them?

And if the content does these things, then well done. Congratulations, you're doing exactly what you should do as a content marketer. So many marketers get all on their high horse on LinkedIn and on social and they're like, but like I only create great content. The only thing I create is great content. Good content is the only thing that I'll produce. And they wear this like a badge of honor. Like your job is a content marketer. That's what you're supposed to do. It's like bragging that you raise your kids. Like you don't get brownie points for that folks. Like you're supposed to create good content. So well done, good job.

don't typically see is people take that good content and distribute it and spread it into the channels that make sense. My goal today is to show you how to use AI to distribute your content forever. You create it once and then distribute it forever. Here's the thing, across the buyer's process, the buyer's journey, things are more fragmented than ever. Because things are more fragmented than ever, you need your content to show up in more places than ever.

whether it's in a directory, whether it's in a community like Reddit, whether it's on X or LinkedIn or Instagram on TikTok, whether it's scaling out more landing pages for yourself, alternative pages to other software, all of these things, these are the things that you need to do. And to Guarav's point on like what am I talking about broadly? Yes, content repurposing, taking the content that you've created and thinking of ways to repackage it in different ways, but also thinking about it from a distribution.

You don't only need to be thinking about repurposing your stories, but also how to seed your content in different communities. So if my audience is on LinkedIn, that post that I shared today might be still relevant in two quarters from now. It might be still relevant three years, three weeks from now. So I should continue to promote that content. A lot of people make the mistake of doing something once and then calling it quits. What I'm gonna share with you is the model that I've used with some of the biggest brands in the world.

some of these companies to help them scale everything from their content marketing engines for creation all the way through to distribution. The strategy that I've used to turn these brands into clients, the same AI strategy that I've been using for Create Like The Greats, which is on the HubSwap Podcast Network, where we essentially have taken our entire podcast and started to repackage and repurpose it using AI. I'm gonna share with you some of the tools that we've used to do that. I'm going to talk about how we take those podcasts that I create.

for Create Like The Greats and then use AI to develop everything from threads to blog posts, et cetera, all of these things, how we take these assets and then submit them into sites like Hacker News, submit them into subreddits and get hundreds and hundreds of upvotes and comments and tons of traction and results, all of these things. It's the same strategy that I used to make Create Once Distribute Forever a best seller.

This picture used to be of me and my wife and she saw this slide and got very mad at me but it's still in my presentation. She was pregnant with our first and she was there and she was all beautiful and pregnant and I was doing this pose and she saw it at an event and I almost had to sleep on the couch but I digress. Anyways, this is the framework that I want to talk about folks. Research, creation, distribution, optimization and sprinkling AI over all of it. So if the motto Create Once Distribute Forever is the place that we want to start from.

I want you to recognize first and foremost that the things that you distribute will reach more people than the things that don't. This is a methodology that we've used time and time again. So what I would advise you to do is instead of thinking of a media company like a newspaper org, think about like the way that Disney produces their stories. When they go to market with a movie, they distribute it through so many different channels, whether it's through Disneyland and comics and merchandise and TV and music, they're constantly thinking of different ways to spread that story.

So you probably have stories that you've created, pieces that are worth seeing, reading, consuming, that need to be distributed as well. How can you do that? You do that by embracing that framework. And when you embrace that framework, I believe you have what I would call a modern media engine. So how do you think like a media company and use AI? It's funny, Ryan Reynolds recently followed me on X and I was like, I'm a big planet tears geek. I like, I wonder if I can convince them that we should do this movie. Anyways, I digress. Anyways.

This is the new way, content writer, editor, SEO distributor, developers, finance, partnerships, and outreach. This model makes way more sense. But here's the thing, when you look at that, you're probably overwhelmed. I saw the episode, I think, with Crew AI that happened, that Ben had hosted. And one of the things that I love about Crew AI is you're able to develop essentially roles for different agents. And if you can tap into that.

and have different agents run as the people who are doing your SEO, your editing, your content creation, your distribution, you can unlock some ridiculous returns. And I'm gonna show you a GPT later that we built that I will give you full access to and you can check out and you can steal and use yourself. So the first thing you need to do is start by doing research. You want to do research upfront to understand the stories that your audience cares about. So one of the things that a lot of people don't realize is that Reddit is one of the top most popular sites in

world, third most popular in the US right now. You go to Reddit and you type in site colon, any URL, you will see the most popular content that that website has on Reddit. Do this with your own site, do it with competitor site, with brands that are creating content similar to you, and then you want to sort the content by top posts. And then essentially you're going to have a list of the best content within that community or within Reddit that that website has published. And why is this valuable? Because this content has content market fit.

Content market fit is when you know that the pieces of content that you're pressing publish on actually align with your audience. And what you can do with this data is you can now scrape this content, copy and paste all of the titles, all of the descriptions, upload it to Cloud, upload it to ChatGPT, whatever, and you can ask ChatGPT to identify some trends. What are the trends that I should have from this around what type of content people actually care about that the HubSpot blog is publishing or that 99 % Invisible is publishing? And that gives you insight.

into the type of content that you should also be creating. A lot of marketers are afraid of Reddit. My hope today is to show you that Reddit is actually not that terrifying. And I can say without any fear, yes, I've been banned and blocked from Reddit multiple times, but at the same time, I've also been able to use Reddit to generate million dollar deals. I've been able to unlock some ridiculous amounts of traffic. And most recently, the results have just skyrocketed. Why? Because Google partnered with Reddit and now Reddit is generating

More traffic than it has in all time. So it's generating over 500 million visits on a monthly basis now. And there's no question that it's going to retain that. If you're in software, Reddit is now ranking. This was an older slide, but it recently surpassed G2 where Captera is the only software review site that ranks higher than Reddit for best Zapier alternative, best Linktree alternative.

best elastic search alternative. And why this is important is because now, instead of just thinking about how you can scale these on your own websites, now you can be thinking about how you can scale this type of content that lives in subreddits around your business. So for example, if I run a survey software, I should be going to a subreddit like our SaaS or our marketing or growth hacking and submitting a post that says, these are the best survey monkey alternatives.

use ChatTPT or Claude to write my message, modify that slightly so it's in my voice and in my tone and seems a little bit more Reddit usury, and then you're going to submit that content directly into the community and rank. As you can see here, Reddit is showing up in the surf for keywords that are relevant to software owners, to Indy hackers, to developers, builders, et cetera. So best disk cloning software for 2004. Back in the day, this would have been all blog posts. But now you can see that there's a handful of Reddit links that are now showing.

So what do you have the opportunity to do? Ideally, can install some type of AI, you can install one of the various Chrome extensions that you can use for like content creation within your browser, whether that's Jasper, whether it's ChatGPT and you're just using the desktop version. There's a ton of them out there that you could use. There's one that I was recently using called, let me see if I can find it, Merlin. There's a lot of these different tools that you can use where you can go into,

these answers and then start to write responses that align with your own software and your solution. And you can start to do that at scale. Here's a GPT that I created. So on the backend of this GPT, I essentially took a bunch of best practices around social media creation content. And what you're able to do, and if you look for this now directly in ChatGPT's GPT store, you can find it. It's free to use, et cetera.

you can go in and you can upload a blog post directly to it. And it has all of the best practices that are in my book, Create, Want, Distribute Forever, like powering it, so to speak. And when you go in, you can upload a blog post and you can say, turn this blog post into an X thread, turn this blog post into an email or whatever you might want it to be. And then it does so in best, using best practices. So I took an example where I took a blog post, I wrote this piece called 14 Life Lessons from my Nana where,

When she passed, I wrote down like all of the lessons that she had taught me and I uploaded the blog post to this GPT. I said, take this blog post that I wrote about lessons from my grandmother and turn it into all the different types of content marketing assets you can think of and come up with. I pasted the full blog post and then I started to create them. What I like about this is most times when you are using ChatGPT, you get pretty cheesy corny threads. Like you get things that are like whack.

you would never share this on your account. The voice is off, the tone is off, et cetera. But this one actually turned out pretty good. And I think it's because in the backend of the GPT, we have uploaded best practices across LinkedIn, X, email, carousels, and I'll show you one of those in a second, all directly in it. So it gave me this standalone tweet that I can now schedule through Buffer to automatically schedule over the course of the week. It gives me the thread, all of that content is in there.

It even writes the email newsletter for me. So it creates the email newsletter to make it easy for me to jump into that, has the link, it even follows my voice and my tone, which is amazing and great. All of those things are in there. But it also gives me a LinkedIn carousel. And this is one of the things that we've been doing, which has been very interesting and seeing lots of traction, is you leverage ChatGPT or Cloud or any of those tools to help you develop a LinkedIn carousel.

And then once you get the carousel, you're going to ask for it in like a spreadsheet format. So when you get it in a spreadsheet format, you have every single carousel slide, the text broken out. In the backend, we have taught the GPT about AIDA, Attention, Interest, Desire, Action. So it follows that formula as it kind of crafts the story. And then from there, you can actually take this and create a carousel. Now,

in the olden days, this alone would feel like magic. And you'd be like, wow, you just created a LinkedIn carousel for me in a matter of seconds. I just now have to paste all of these things into a Google slide and call it a day. Thanks to AI though, you can actually go to mid-journey and you can take the suggested visual ideas, have a prompt created where you're using a similar style. So you can see here, I'm using the exact same intro to my mid-journey prompt where it says create a warm minimalist.

illustration with soft muted tones, blah, blah, blah. And then I just have like a placeholder text that allows me to paste in this, whatever's in the suggested visual idea. And then it gives me these graphics. They all have the same brand aesthetic. Of course, if your brand aesthetic is different, yours, you would do something different here. But I paste all of this in, and then I'm getting all of these graphics. Now, instead of me just saying, that's it, I'm done, I would ask ghtpt to export this.

as a spreadsheet. I now have a spreadsheet with all of this information. I take that spreadsheet, I download those images. I'm gonna go to a tool called Canva. They have this feature called Bulk Create, where I would upload that spreadsheet that I got from ChatGPT with all of the lessons from my Nana as well as the quotes. I start to associate certain data sources with a template that I would find in Canva that matches my style and the aesthetic I'm looking for.

I then would import all of the images as well and give them names that would assign associated with each lesson and Canva would create this carousel for me within the matter of seconds. So that is one of the things that you can do again using AI that unlocks a ridiculous amount of opportunity in the matter of seconds. Another example. So this is a post that went live yesterday in the subreddit our marketing. If you go to the post today, you will find

I believe I might be wrong. I might not be number one, but I'm probably number two. An answer to this question from me that has the second most upvotes, which was written using ChatGPT. So this question shows up in our marketing. Someone's asking what skills do I need to, what skills are most sought after? So I go in, I say, hey ChatGPT, what are four most sought after skills? ChatGPT gives it to me. In this case, I use Jasper, so I have a Chrome extension.

for Jasper and Jasper allows me to just like do it directly in the browser. Write a list of four sought after skills. I hit generate. Jasper writes them for me. I then modify my response so I don't get blocked immediately from Reddit for sounding like a robot. if you ever have, so in the backend of our GPT as another example, it has clearly stated, never say the word Delph. I know there's drama around it, but like we don't want to say Delph. We never say in the ever evolving world of like that always gets cut.

So in the backend, it ensures that none of those things are showing up because those are just common AI phrases. And then we say write a list of sought after skills. Write this out, modify it, tweak it, wrote it like this. As you can see, it's like data analysts, here's some of the skills that I would recommend. You can notice there's a few things that I added in. The book story brand is good, so is Create Once Distribute Forever. So now I have a shameless plug in Reddit. This subreddit I think has over 40,000 people.

40,000 people now see this post, it gets some upvotes, gets some likes, et cetera. And now ideally some people will see this and potentially even buy the book. So you start to scale that over time, you record a loom and you train some of your folks on your team to be able to do this and it becomes a gold mine of opportunity. So I'm gonna skim through this a little bit faster. So I'm not gonna spend too much time talking about Reddit, but I do believe that Reddit is one of the massive opportunities today.

that a lot of brands are sleeping on that they should be tapping into. But you can create highly valuable content on Reddit, community driven content, share your links on Reddit. I've been tinkering with paid media on Reddit and have found some decent results. Always create your own subreddit that focuses on your own story. Here's a few examples of like the type of content that goes well here. So watch eight hours of MrBeast's content. Here are seven psychological strategies he used to get 34 billion views.

That goes into a copywriting subreddit. It gets hundreds of thousands of impressions and tons of upvotes, tons of people commenting. And in fact, it's a repackaged repurposed version of a podcast. So this is essentially a repurposed package of a podcast called Nudge where they listen to it. They could have easily downloaded the transcript, asked ChatGPT to summarize it, Claude to summarize it, et cetera, and then repackage and repurpose it for Reddit. Same thing here. This is like 99%.

all chat GPT, but it generated tons of engagement. Someone goes into a subreddit and they're like, here's some of the lessons that I've learned. And then again, they're just like breaking down in detail some of the things that they should do to hire someone in a role. This is basic and easy, but it's something that's efficient. Go in and start to submit your content directly to subreddits that make sense for you. This is the sponsorship side of things. We're seeing most success with the editorial based ads on Reddit.

but it's also something that you should consider. Why am I talking a lot about Reddit? Because I believe that generative engine optimization is real. What is generative engine optimization? If you do a quick Google search, you'll probably find a piece that I wrote on generative engine optimization, which talks about how to influence the outputs from all of these LLMs. And the best way to do that is twofold. Embrace the idea of expertise, experience, authority, and trustworthiness. So the content that you create need to have those factors.

but it also needs to be distributed into the channels where these LLMs are partnering and scraping their content to inform the backend of their site. Google and OpenAI have announced that they have a partnership with Reddit. So if you have more content showing up on Reddit, then you are more likely to be able to influence the outputs that come through the responses that your customers and your audience are asking. So if I ask ChatGPT, who is the best B2B marketer in Canada?

Hopefully I might be wrong here and you guys can shame me, but I think it's gonna say me if it doesn't then okay That's all right. I failed and I'll work on that later But like these are the things that that you want to be able to influence some of the other ways that you can get ahead of this I believe is distributing your content into other channels that they might not already have a agreement with There's a ton of open AI partnerships that have taken place some of them with the brands that you're seeing here But I think that this is the final

frontier in which they're gonna be targeting and getting those licensing agreements. Create once, distribute forever. I'm not done yet. So another opportunity that exists for you to leverage AI comes with a bit of a caution. So one of the biggest mistakes that I see people make when it comes to AI and finding ways to distribute their content in Reddit and Facebook groups and things like that is that they're using ChatGPT, Clot, et cetera, as a research tool. You can't today.

use those tools to say, what are the 10 most popular subreddits for digital marketers? Because it doesn't actually take the time and know and study and analyze the data behind Reddit to know who has the most subscribers, et cetera. You would actually need to use a tool that's going out and scraping Reddit and looking at the number of subscribers. And Reddit's API is now a little bit more costly than it used to be, and it can be a bit of a drag. Same with Facebook groups. If you ask it, what's the most popular Facebook groups,

All of these things are little bit challenging. So you want to find groups and pages that are relevant, you might have to do that organically. There was a great question from, I believe, Abraham asking about the sales side and how this can lead to opportunities. Since the beginning of me using Reddit, like I have consistently been able to use Reddit to generate net new business for my companies.

as well as for clients. And the way that you do that is a few ways. One, if you own a subreddit, you can include links on the right hand side that take people directly to communities that you want them to or pages that you want them to. So for example, if you go to the subreddit, our web hosting, which is a subreddit dedicated to web hosting services, on the right hand side, you'll see a bunch of URLs for web hosts in the US and web hosts in

Europe and other regions. Those web hosts have partnerships with the mods of that subreddit and if anyone clicks on those links and they buy, then they get an affiliate kickback. If you're sponsoring a subreddit called web hosting, who do you think is going to be in a subreddit called web hosting? People who are interested in hosting, et cetera. So if you have a partnership with them and you're able to manage and own the conversation, then you can increase your amount of conversions in sales. So that.

is a play and a methodology that I oftentimes see consistently. One of the other areas of opportunity is if you go to subreddits like Artulio, you can see that Artulio has their own subreddit where they have customer service and they're managing and communicating with their customers on a regular basis. You can see subreddits like there's an account called Keith from Sonos and Sonos, I know it's more B2C, but they have a

massive subreddit and they're in there communicating and engaging on a regular basis with actual customers. And then for a business, if you go into these subreddits and there's hundreds of thousands of people, let's pretend for example, this is where I go cowboy. So I'm going to share my screen.

It's easy to go, the live demo stuff, it always can throw you a loop, but we'll see how this goes. All right. What's the right slide here?

Okay, so I'm going to Reddit. So let's say for example, I run a software for contractors. If I am running a subreddit for contractors, I would go into here. that's not the one. Let's do construction.

There we go. So let's say I'm targeting construction professionals. I have a software that helps them with their managing their builds, sending invoices, things like that. What I would do and what I would be thinking about is how can I jump into these dialogues? So I would look at what are the most recent content, what are the most recent posts, and I would look for questions and answers that are, or questions that are relevant to me. So,

These ones, let's see if I can find one that's relevant. Beginning career advice. So this is someone who's just getting into the construction industry. I would jump in here, I'd be like, here would be my advice. You need to do these four things and you need this type of software and then that software would be mine. I would then make sure that I get a bunch of upvotes and then from those upvotes, people would see my software. So if the content is good enough, you tend to see the ROI. But if the content itself is mediocre, then I would say you're gonna have a hard time seeing the results from.

So my advice and my guidance would be to go in there, add value, find content or find questions that are relevant to you, answer them, and use that as a place to subtly plug your business. And that is one thing that I would say on Reddit as well as in Facebook groups that you actually do have to keep in mind. Like try to keep things subtle, not overbearing, or you'll be on a fast path towards getting blocked and banned from these communities.

All right, let's jump back into Facebook. So Facebook groups, massive opportunity. There's hundreds of thousands of people in these different communities, especially within your niche. Go into them and find ways to seed your content in there as well, but also embrace the idea of repurposing and repackaging. So there's a ton of solutions like Goldcast, et cetera, that allow you to remix your podcast interviews into video content. I would encourage you to check that out.

I did create a blog post that lists 30 of my favorite tools and there's a few in there that are specifically around AI. Let me pull it up. There you go. I'll drop it in the chat. So there's a bunch of my favorite tools in there that break down how to repurpose your podcast content, how to repurpose your content into carousels and things like this, like slides. One of the things that you want to do is if you're creating eBooks, et cetera,

grab the stats and the visuals from them and start to share them on social. Don't just let them live and die in your eBooks. I hate when I see that. Like a lot of brands will create great content and then they won't reshare this. So let's use this as an example. Like this is not advice for Ben, but it's advice for Ben. The way that I would approach this would be like, all right, if Ross had a slide in here that was gold, a screenshot of that slide is going up on LinkedIn. The slide is going up on X, et cetera. And then I'm gonna have a link to the...

bends by page that talks about this session. And what I would be able to do is screenshot, because this is like has slides, like 10 different slides that are interesting and might have a little bit of value to the audience natively. You repackage that and you share it like literally for the next 12 months. It's not just a one time thing. You don't just promote the asset, the time that it happens. You're able to repackage and repurpose that literally forever. And that would be the goal.

You could also take the transcript, write it as a blog post, but the blog post doesn't only live on Ben's Bytes, the blog post would also live on LinkedIn under LinkedIn articles. Why? Because LinkedIn's articles actually have a domain authority that is higher than Ben's Bytes does. So by publishing a repackaged version of the same blog post that lives on Ben's Bytes, you're now going to have that blog post lived on LinkedIn. On LinkedIn, you're going to use a different title, but you're going to go after same keywords. It's more likely to rank. You do the exact same thing, AskChatGPT or one of those tools.

to rewrite it, take that same content and upload it to medium.com. Now you're publishing a blog post on LinkedIn, on Medium and on your original website. And on Medium and LinkedIn, you're also linking back to your website so they can be converted and go into your funnel. So those are the ways in which that you would be able to do it. Again, you create something once that is valuable, but you distribute it forever. Another opportunity, if anybody has ideas on how they can do this at scale, I would love to chat with you because I've been thinking about this literally all week and I can't crack it, but.

There's a massive arbitrage opportunity for newsletters. There's a massive opportunity because a lot of newsletters and folks who run newsletters have never monetized and have no idea of the value that they're sitting on. What we have done is we manually will go in and type in SaaS, open up a bunch of tabs with all of these people, use Zoom Info or some other tool to identify what their email is or Hunter to find their emails, their names, et cetera, and then we'll reach out to them.

and try to figure out their rates, and then we build out a spreadsheet, and then we present those rates to our clients, and then our clients buy ad space within their newsletters. Very manual today. I believe there's a world where you can automate some of this, and if you can do that at scale, where you're sponsoring sub stacks, where you're looking through Google and identifying anybody who has a newsletter plus the title of your ideal customer, and you're reaching out to them the same way that you would a sales lead, but just to get pricing for their newsletter.

I think there's a massive opportunity to reach out to these individuals, sponsor their subreddits, because you're probably the first money in the door for many of them, they're going to undervalue their rate and they're going to give you a deal even though they think it's a gem, you're going to be one of the first money in and that's gonna give you a massive opportunity to distribute your content. So you reach out, you do that at scale, get their rates, sponsor their newsletter, get your content featured and let it spin.

turn your, turn trending posts into your own content. So I'm in a community on Facebook about TikTok or about digital marketing. My abouts are flaring up, so I'm Canadian, it's been disclosed. But essentially you go into these communities and you're able to find people who are talking about things like TikTok and you can turn that into more content. So if I see that this post has 56 comments over 177 likes, I'm going to turn this into a blog post or into something else that I can share.

and that I can recreate. But again, one thing I also wanna flag is that not all assets are created equally. Stripe's blog posts generate the fewest amount of visits to their site while their documentation generates the vast majority. So if you're listening to this and you're targeting engineers or developers, don't get it twisted. You don't need to create blog posts to be successful. You can optimize your documentation and your docs to rank in Google and unlock some ridiculous returns as well.

Across the board, there are a lot of docs that generate hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of traffic, meaning you would have to pay Google hundreds of thousands of dollars to capture the traffic that they generate. And this is what you have the potential to do if you target engineers. So let's say that you've been sleeping on the project that your team has been talking about for a long time around how you should have a developer hub or that you should have documentation on your site that is optimized for search. I hope that this is your wake-up call, that it's probably something that you should invest in.

That all said, you can also take that documentation content and start to create some video content on the back of it. Shopify's dev account has 1.8 million views. And if you are currently targeting, again, engineers and developers, I would encourage you to recognize that more people go to movies than they read books. I don't know if that's a good thing or not. It's probably not. I'm a big book fan. I've wrote one, but...

People like movies. So what does that mean? It means the vast majority of people would rather watch something than read something. So you should probably consider whether or not all those blog posts you're creating should actually be converted into video content as well. And if you don't like yourself on camera, I would encourage you to check out Hey Jen. I have used it to create a handful of deep fakes of myself.

where I talk about things like generative engine optimization and instead of people saying, hey Ross, I hate that this is AI, they're saying, hey Ross, I like your sweater, your hoodie, all of these things, nice glasses, and it's because people can't tell anymore. So what I would encourage you to do is to take all of your blog posts, your documentation, download it, upload it to a service like HeyGen, et cetera, or to ChatGBT first, at ChatGBT to write a script, but make sure that the script doesn't include all of the things like.

the camera panning and stuff like that because then it's gonna say it and you don't want it to say it. And then you upload it to HeyGen and get HeyGen to create deepfake versions of yourself talking about things. You then take these pieces and embed them in the blog post and the assets that you already published. Why are you doing that? Because Google happens to own this site called YouTube.

They bought it for a billion dollars and because of that it's worth a lot of value to you to have your video content in your blog post because Google gives preferential treatment to Google-owned properties and assets. Again, not all assets are created equally, but they can all be developed with AI. Whether it's a podcast, whether it's a quiz, whether it's sales enablement, long-form video content, I am convinced that every single asset that you can think of today can be developed with AI and they're worth considering as a part of your distribution mix.

I'm not gonna spend too much time talking about this, but essentially if you do want more insight around the distribution process and how you should do it, check out the book. But if you must blog, why not turn them into other assets, right? Like if you are creating blog posts, make sure that you are taking these blog posts, you're turning them into LinkedIn videos, or LinkedIn blog posts, and then you're turning them into video content as well. And sprinkle AI over all of this. It used to take me hours to write a script.

Now I can go to chat.gbt, I can go to Claude and I can ask it to write me a script. I've also been using Vimeo's AI tools for script writing. It's been trained on like script writers and their materials, which has been really good. And that's been gold. Then again, as I mentioned, embed that content into other articles so it's all over the place. Plan it all in advance, create once, distribute forever. How else can you weave a bigger web? Does anyone remember this ad that Burger King ran a few years back?

where they had like that moldy burger and stuff like that. It was like disgusting. They were trying to say like, our burgers get moldy, you should buy our burgers. They're not gonna last forever like McDonald's. Hilarious creative, but that's not the creative. I used AI to create that ad just to show you the realism of tools like Mid-Journey today. You can leverage Mid-Journey to essentially create any image, any visual that you can imagine. And I encourage you to leverage these types of tools to create creative.

I worked in traditional advertising industry many years ago when I first got started and we used to get paid like 500 grand for a shoot with celebrities and things like that. And even just like 200 grand just to come up with a concept. You can now come up with concepts from your laptop in a matter of seconds. Tools like Figma AI as well are making things a lot different. Here's another example of how you can use this stuff to scale out your content. I uploaded to ChatGPT back when it was GPT-4. All of...

some of my most popular tweets where I started with the best marketers and then I told Jachi Petit to write them for me. I then asked Jachi Petit to turn that into a spreadsheet. I took that spreadsheet, did the exact same thing I talked about earlier today around using Canva to export all of that information. I found a template that I liked. I looked at this photo and I was like, that doesn't look that great. I wanna make something a little bit less corny.

So I went and found a picture of someone that looked a little bit like Don Draper from Mad Men. I was like, cool, Mid Journey, can you describe this for me? It described the visual to give me a prompt that I could use. I looked at that prompt, it said, that's great, but I wish he had some melanin. So I told Mid Journey to make him look like me, told them to create some that look like my sister. They created a bunch of them. I started to throw these quotes directly into it. I did this in 20 minutes, was able to schedule these pieces out to the foundation account. We had 18,000 impressions, 30 new followers in a matter of 20 minutes.

That is the power of AI if you're willing to use it. Take the content that you've already created, leverage it to do more, better, more accelerated, more efficiently. You might be thinking, Ross, where in the world do I start? You just brain dumped on all of us. I get it. Start with research. Start by diving in and understanding your audience, and then tap into tools. One of my favorite tools, I'm very biased because I'm building it, distribution.ai allows you to essentially do a lot of the things that we just talked about.

We're still just onboarding folks who are wait list, but essentially you can take a blog post, you can take a podcast, you can take anything that you create, upload it, select generate, and in a matter of seconds you will be met with a handful of tweets, LinkedIn posts that you can schedule, images based off of the content, you can schedule that to be shared on LinkedIn, X, et cetera, all of those different things. Strongly encourage you to check it out. But folks, at the end of the day, it's a new day, right? Like the...

old way of working where you could just create something once and call it quits is over. You now need to create highly valuable assets, stories that are engaging, educational, entertaining, and empowering. Sprinkle AI all over it to distribute it, repurpose it, and repackage it. There's no question that the industry is in absolute turmoil. Marketers back in 2019 had it good, but as of 2023, it was absolute chaos and it has continued.

People want more with less and we need to leverage AI tools to do that. We need to embrace this framework of research, creation, distribution and optimization. And if you can do that, I believe you can win. Definitely check out my book, Create Once Distribute Forever. It's available on Amazon. I think you'll get a few tips about it, about how to distribute in some of the ways that I think. And if anybody has questions, we've got a few minutes. I'd be happy to jam up.

Ben (41:19)
That was a whirlwind, but a really good one. That was just like jam packed with so much stuff that I'm like, yeah, we should do that. We should do that. We should do that. We should do that. So yeah, I really appreciate that Ross. Yeah, if people have got questions, pop them in the chat. A couple of questions I have. And the first one I thought of earlier in the chat, and I don't know if it's as relevant now, but I was going to ask.

What's the best first piece of content you can create then? Is it generate a video with someone like this? And then from there, there's ultimately like there's many.

Ross Simmonds (41:56)
I think is. Yeah, I think video content, human video content is still the best. And I think it's the best because it can be easily repackaged, but you can't today. AI has a hard time replicating the human nuance, right? Like it doesn't today. You can't use Hey, Jen to create a video that's as dynamic and engaging as a real conversation. And there's something to be said for like human creativity where ideas come up and dialogues go places that

and AI might not take it. So I would encourage folks to start with video. And if you are someone who hates being on video though, then you start with long form written text. So if you can get over the hurdle of being on video and talking to a camera, then do it. That's number one asset that you should start to repurpose. The number two would be just a long form blog post and creating that type of content.

Ben (42:51)
that makes sense. And then sort of as a by product or as like a consequence of doing all of this stuff, I think, I mean, I tweeted something about this last week or week before, just like, just so much going on content wise, absolutely everywhere. yet creating ones, distributing in all different formats forever adds to that. Like how...

Ross Simmonds (43:15)
Yeah.

Ben (43:20)
Maybe I don't know what the exact question is, but how do we avoid adding to the noise and feeling like, or is it just like you have to because everyone else is doing this, you have to do that and get on top of it? Like, how do you think about that?

Ross Simmonds (43:31)
Yeah, think it's, yeah. Zuckerberg's law was something that they came up with probably 10 years ago, which was the idea that every year there's going to be double the amount of content on the internet that was the year before. And I believe that law has proven true because mobile devices allow us to now create more content than ever before. More people are getting them because the costs are lower, et cetera. So we're never going to get out of a point where there's less noise.

It's impossible. The noise is gonna continue. The amount of noise is gonna continue and the amount of channels is gonna continue to go up. So you have no choice but to say, okay, I need to get over that mentally and just say, I believe the things I'm creating is good. I believe the things that I'm creating are worth reading and that they can help people. Thus, I'm going to be relentless at distributing these things where my people are. And while it might feel like to you, you're spreading noise, the truth is,

Nobody actually cares. Nobody even sees it. You think that people see your content, but there's billions of people in the world. So your one post that might have reached 30,000 people doesn't actually matter because 25,000 of them were actually just scrolling by. 25,000 of them had another tab open. Five of them had a baby that was crying in the room next door and they weren't even paying attention when they were watching your content. For some of them it was a holiday so they weren't actually online.

browsing through their phone, they might not have had volume on. like, I think a lot of it is actually just an internal game that people need to get over, which is the fact that like, not everyone is paying attention as closely as you think. And when you realize that, it gives you the freedom to say, all right, yeah, maybe I should be increasing my volume on this channel and that channel. Now I'm not saying go on X and publish every two seconds, but every hour, 100%, why not? The algorithms go into

reduce your reach anyway so you may as well continue to produce more content.

Ben (45:33)
Yeah, I think this is similar to what Robin asked, which is there's growing low, mid-range content. So how do you ensure your content really resonates and stands out going into 2035?

Ross Simmonds (45:42)
I think it starts with finding content market fit. And when you think of content market fit, it kind of sounds like theory. So let me try to get tactical with it. Understand your audience and who they are. And then think of the biggest pain points that they struggle with, the things that they hate the most, the things that would really help them. And then create that asset. Of course it has to be educational, engaging, entertaining, and empowering. But like try to create something ridiculously valuable.

that makes your competitors even say like, wow, how'd you get approval to create something that good? Like, how'd you spend two months to create that? Like, that's insane. And then you take that thing that you've developed and you repackage and you repurpose and you reshare it. But to get there, you have to do the research. So I talked about how to go into Reddit and sort content by top posts. You do that and it shows you what that community cares about. If I do that sort in the subreddit, rsass,

I am very quickly going to see the people in SaaS care about how to get your first 1,000 customers. I can also do a sort of some newsletter. So I might go to Lenny's newsletter and sort by which one has the most backlinks. I might go to Ben's content on Twitter and do a search to see which content has been produced on X that generates the most retweets. Or I do that with some other influencer. And now I see that this content is competent to market fit. People loved it. So what can I learn from it?

How can I get better than it? How can I do something better than it? And how can I give that to the market? I've done this time and time again. It was like many years ago, there was a piece, people started to do breakdowns of like how companies scale. I wrote one on Canva that broke down how Canva was able to grow their business through backlinks, et cetera. But it wasn't me who originated the concept of breakdowns. But my breakdown went more in depth than anyone else's at the time. I found emails, I found.

job postings, I found all of this stuff and I brought it all to life. And the internet went wild. That piece alone generated like multi-millions of dollars worth of business because I reverse engineered what people wanted and then I made something better than that. So if you can do that, there's no question that your content will resonate. You just have to put in the time and the work to do it. And if you can sprinkle AI on it, makes it easier to do.

Ben (47:56)
Yeah, mean, part of that whole research piece is kind of like what you were talking about with building your GBT is stuffing all the best things in there and all the right things and everything that fits your audience and how you want to write. Yeah.

Ross Simmonds (48:06)
Exactly. 100%. Yeah, that's it.

Ben (48:10)
Amazing. yeah, apologies for the shorter lesson today, I think, yeah, think you were value per minute was through the roof. So I think that that works out. Yeah, I really appreciate you coming on. I'll see what I can do with content repurposing with all of this. And thanks everyone in the chat. I'll have this edited and uploaded in at least one format in the next couple of hours and see what we can do from there. But yeah, cheers.

Ross Simmonds (48:14)
It's okay.

Thanks for having me on, Ben. Folks, if you have any questions, find me on all your favorite social media channels. And yeah, I'll see you all on the internet. Cheers.

Ben (48:44)
Cheers man, bye.

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