The ultimate guide to content batching fast across Instagram, Podcast, YouTube and MORE!

Here's the honest truth: if you want to grow your online presence, on any social media platform, the hardest part is going to be creating enough content to get noticed, and doing it on a consistent basis. Over the years of working in social media marketing, chatting with clients or folks that I've done coaching with, the trend that seems to be present among pretty much much every creator or online entrepreneur is that they'd like to grow their following online quickly, but they don't have a lot of time to invest in content creation. And this is the ultimate problem, because you need to publish a lot of content over a long period of time to grow, and it takes a lot of time to create content - or does it? Okay, yes, it does take time to make good content, but there are some strategies and processes that you can use to make everything more efficient. And that's exactly what we're going to do a deep dive into in this blog post.

I'm going to walk you through the process that we use for content creation here at Creatorly - this is how we create our in house content for our brand - we use modified versions of this process for our clients depending on what sort of content they're looking for - this method that I'm going to teach you today covers a whole bunch of different platforms, from Instagram to blogging, to youtube and podcasting, and evening TikTok and Twitter. We post a lot of new content each week, and at the moment, I'm doing it almost all by myself, since my team is busy working on client projects. So what I'm about to describe can be done by one person, but I'll be honest it is a time commitment, probably two days a week. But, it's definitely a lot faster than if you were making every piece of content from scratch, instead of using the four-step process that I'm about to walk you through.

Develop your cornerstone content plan

As promised in the title of this blog post, we're going to talk about content batching. There are many different approaches and methods to content batching - the one that I'm going to share with you today, in my opinion, is most effective for brands or businesses. It can certainly be modified for a personal brand, but for the sake of full transparency, I wanted to share with you that this was not the method I used for batching content for my personal brand. This is a method that I think is super effective for business owners or social media managers looking to get more efficient and the get the most bang for their content buck - it's not necessarily the way to be your most free and creative self, if you get what I'm saying. This is a structured, step-by-step process that will ensure you have a lot of content to share. If you want more creative freedom in your process, then by all means there are different approaches to consider. But for today, let's talk about how I create about 30 content pieces per week and stay somewhat sane while doing it.

The first step in this process is deciding on what I call cornerstone content. This is content that is longer from, high value, usually educational or maybe inspiration content. This is going to be the biggest time commitment in your content creation process - but it is so worth it to invest in because it will allow you to power through the rest of your content creation process, and repurpose so much content across several different platforms.

Cornerstone content can live on multiple platforms. Let me give you an example to make this more clear: for Creatorly, our cornerstone content is this blog post! A bit meta, right? But we also record this, and publish it as a podcast - the exact same content. Already, this makes the content do twice as much work. The thrid part of our cornerstone content is the email newsletter - we send this out each week with a short summary of the blog and podcast, and with a call to action and link to see or listen to the full content.

Already this cornerstone content is working triple duty to reach our audience on different platforms, and we haven't even gotten into the microcontent repurposing yet. But before we get there, let me walk you through the steps I take to make three pieces of content in one.

Writing

Cornerstone content step 1: I start by writing the script to this podcast. In a previous planning session, which I tend to do a month or so at a time, I'll have already decided on a title or theme, so I'll sit down each week and start writing the script. This script is going to be the script that I read from while recording, and it's also the copy I'll use for the blog post and the email newsletter.

Recording

Cornerstone content step 2: Once I have the script written, it's time to record. I'll sit down and read from my script - sometimes adding in a little extra flare here and there, but for the most part I have a script for a reason, to keep it concise and valuable.

Editing

Cornerstone content step 3: Once recording is finished, I'll edit the podcast. I'll add it whatever intro, outro or sponsored messages I've got planned, and then I'll export it.

Usually, while I work on editing this, I'll actually multi-task and start working on some of the more admin pieces, which brings us to publishing.

Publishing

Cornerstone content step 4: preparing everything for publishing. While I'm editing the podcast, I'll start formatting the blog post, I'll create a custom graphic header for the post, and a thumbnail for the podcast episode. At this point, I'll start crafting my email newsletter as well, picking out parts of the blog to quote and writing the call to action. I'll get everything set up in Squarespace so that once I export the final audio file of the episode, all I need to do is attach it and then schedule everything for release.

And that's how I create my cornerstone content for the week. In addition to the blog/podcast/email combo, we've also just recently launched a YouTube channel for Creatorly. So after I've got all of this content complete, I'll script my video, film it, and edit it as well. I've been playing around with the idea of repurposing the podcast episode as a YouTube video as well, but I also feel like the Creatorly channel is not necessarily a podcast channel, and I want to make sure our content there is really taking advantage of the video format, with interesting visuals and helpful tutorials. So for now, these processes are separate for us. But know that if you don't have plans to create other types of YouTube content, then creating a podcast channel is a good way to broaden the reach of your show.

Okay, so we've got the podcast and blog posts complete, we've got the YouTube video scheduled and ready to go - all of our biggest pieces of high-value content are ready for distribution. Now it's time for step 2 in our batch creating process, which is developing our microcontent.

Develop your microcontent plan

Once you have all this great, long-form content to work with, there are countless opportunities to repurpose all of this for social media. Now, it's important to know that when I say "repurpose" I don't just mean, export shorter clips and post them everywhere. I mean, use the content or the theme of the content, and create content made for each individual platform. This makes the process a lot faster because it means you're not starting from scratch, but it also means that your social content will still actually be meaningful and valuable, and not just a big billboard that says "go watch my video" or "go listen to my podcast" - that's exactly what we want to avoid.

Options for microcontent:

Make a graphic carousel highlighting the biggest takeaways from your blog post or podcast
Create a story series highlighting the biggest takeaways from your blog post or podcast
make a tweet graphic quoting a memorable sound bite from your podcast
make a meme that references a relatable problem mentioned in your blog post or podcast
Share a brand photo with a caption crafted using main takeaways from your podcast
Create a listicle style Reel using the main takeaways from your podcast
Create a Reel talking to the camera about your most interesting and attention-grabbing talking point from your blog post or podcast

You can see that all of these different ideas use your original, cornerstone content as the basis to the microcontent, but they also provide value in their own right.

Enjoying this post so far? Check out this video:

Plan your custom social content

Once you've completed all your micro-content creation, you can fill in some of the blanks in your strategy with custom social content. This might mean making a few more Reels, or screen-shotting some relatable Tweets to share. Having a few extra spots in your content calendar allows you to share some more variety, and break up any of your microcontent that might start to feel a bit repetitive.

Repurpose as many places as possible

By this point in the process, you've created a ton of unique, custom content, but hopefully in a way that kept you inspired and consistent.

And before we get into the final step, which is where you can get a lot of value out of the work that you've done - I just want to address any concerns you might have about being too repetitive or even "annoying" your followers. If you use this method: that will not happen.

The final step is to repurpose, repurpose, repurpose. Everything that you've created so far, probably could get posting to another platform that has its own audience. For example, for everything that you've posted to Instagram, you can use a platform like Tailwind to share it to Pinterest. Your Reels can be posted as TikToks and YouTube Shorts. Quotable lines from your blog post can be scheduled and released throughout the week as Tweets. A lot of your Instagram content can go on LinkedIn as well. There is a ton of potential to make all of your content go further than you had previously expected if you look for it, and take just a bit of extra time to schedule it with the formatting that feels custom to the platform.