In today’s episode of Distribution First, we dive deep into effective strategies to turn your back catalog into a goldmine.

You’ve got tons of valuable content, but the challenge is how to keep them relevant and engaging for your audience.

The content world will often tell you to just keep creating more and more, but eventually, we all hit a wall. There’s got to be a smarter way to keep things fresh without burning out your team—or yourself.

The truth is, you don't have to be constantly on the content treadmill.

In this episode, Justin Simon and Matt Ragland dive into strategies for maximizing your content's reach. Matt shares his insights on managing a wealth of content without all the headaches. Stay tuned as we dive into the best practices for structuring your podcast content into engaging segments and the benefits of adopting a seasonal model for efficient content creation and distribution.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• Best practices for managing older and new podcast episodes on YouTube
• Repurposing content from events for newsletters and sponsorships
• The power of batching content creation for efficiency
• Strategic distribution of content using a system and SOPs
• Leveraging YouTube for podcast content and audience engagement

***

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Hey, everybody. Before we get started, I want to thank my friends at Hatch for

producing this episode. You can get unlimited podcast editing and

strategy for one flat rate by visiting Hatch

FM. All right, let's get in the show.

Welcome to Distribution first. The show where we flip content marketing on its head

and focus on what happens after you hit publish. Each week I

share playbooks, motivations, stories, and strategies to help you repurpose and

distribute your content because you deserve to get the most out of everything you

create.

Everybody, welcome to this week's episode of Distribution first.

I'm super pumped to have another second time guest on the show this

week. We've got Matt Ragland back and we're going to deep dive into some stuff.

It's going to be really, really fun. And Matt, welcome back to distribution first.

Justin, thanks for having me. Excited to be here. Let's go round

two. Ready to get started? Yeah, I need the ding ding sound for round

two. Distribution first. Absolutely. So it's funny,

you know, sometimes these things take a while to actually materialize. But I

had reached out to you back in, man, I think it was like February or

something, trying to set something back up because you had posted something on

LinkedIn where you had just done a

summit, which I attended. It was great. It was awesome. Thank you. With all these

creators, and it was a week long thing. You promoted it and had all this

stuff, and then you actually, on the back of

that, started doing a lot of other things. You had

community built off of it, you had content built off of it, all these types

of stuff. And this is what I love to talk about is, how do we

take an event? How do we take a video? How do

we take a webinar? How do we take these things that we're already doing and

get more out of them? Not just the video clips or anything like that, but

the ideas and the things and the concepts that come out of it. And the

post that struck me was, you had this idea of, you

did these sessions, you had all these great creators and this idea that

we probably have a year's worth of newsletter

ideas that could come out of that. Talk me through that. What was your thinking

behind that when you, when you brought that up? Cause, I mean, I loved it

from the, just even from a theoretical standpoint, right. It's something

that. So just to give you, like, the raw numbers of it, we

put together a summit. It was a week long. There were

four speakers per day, so we had 20 speakers.

And each of those speakers went about, you know,

45 minutes to an hour each. And I know, and we

talked about this in our first episode together. I know

when I listen to a podcast in particular, that there

are at least four, five, maybe more

unique ideas and stories or systems described

that can be turned in to an email newsletter,

especially if you think of a newsletter like I do, which is something that can

be, let's just say, 500 words centered around

one core idea. I do think it needs to be a little bit longer than

say, like the 250 word like ship 30 that took over

Twitter and still sometimes does, but it doesn't need to be a

thousand words. And so I know when I listen to or

give an hour long presentation or do like a

digital fireside chat or a panel, I know that I can

get four or five ideas out of each

of those sessions. And so when you just do the

math, we had 20 speakers that talked for about an

hour each. If I could even just get three

ideas out of each one, then that's

60 newsletters, which is obviously more than a

year. And that's something we've kept doing at hey,

creator. And so it's become a newsletter. We

honestly have more content already than we could probably use in

two years because on top of the summit in

March, we launched the hey, Creator podcast. And that is

a 45 minutes to hour long episode

every single week. And even in that, like, that's what we're

using as source material for newsletters now. So we already

have, I think we just released our 10th episode. So we have 30

hours of creator content that are just like in the repository,

they're just in the back catalog. I don't need to write another

newsletter for two years, personally. Like, I don't need

any more new ideas. And these are newsletters that we're

selling sponsorships for. These are newsletters that

promote the community that we also launched at the end of the

summit. And it's something that whenever we

go to launch individual courses, like, we just did a launch

for like a course about how to launch courses, a little, little

meta, but it was something that people in our community had been asking about, so

we built it for them and we were able to like, run a launch off

the back of the newsletter. And a lot of the things that we talked about

are just things that we discussed in the community. I didn't even, like, really talk

about the fact that I go live four times a week in our community,

three to four times a week, which means, and again,

this, this year alone. And a lot of this isn't

newsletter writing, but just this year, alone, I

and our team have generated, yeah, I would say close

to 50 hours of content. And again, if you can get just

a couple of pieces of newsletter worthy content

out of that, then you're talking about three years. Three years of

newsletters. And we talk about social content. We can talk about short

form, video. Those things all play into it also. Yeah. And

I think that's one of the struggles. I know, even working with

folks or the, or the talking with folks who are in my community as well,

where we just had this conversation a couple of weeks ago, where

you end up creating so much stuff, it can feel

overwhelming to even be like, what do I do? Like, once the light. Cause

there's really two camps. There's the camp that is creating so much stuff and doesn't

care what happens. And then it's like you get into this mode where you start

to put those, I call them x ray goggles. And you put the x ray

goggles on, you can see all the things it can be, and it instantly gets

overwhelming. You know, I actually want you to coach me on this, like,

literally right now. Cause I have. Let's do it. I have things

that, like, I want. I want to make that I can do more about because,

yeah, I have been, and in some ways still am the person that

will make 100 hours of content in three months and be like,

well, I'm going to use some of it. And, like, on one

hand, that's given me a lot of confidence to know that I can, like,

always use, but I know that, and this is something that we're working on

with, hey, creator, this is something that we work on with our clients, and I

actually do a better job with it for our clients than I do for

myself personally. That's like a whole other life thing that we're not going to

talk about right now. Do as I say, not as I do, but approaching

it very strategically from the distribution perspective. So you say

I'm going to create these things and it's going to fit into this box and

I'm going to use it in this way. And I have a system for it

and I have a standard operating procedure. These are all things, like, we're building in

right now. But, yeah, tell me, like, what are those conversations that,

that you're having? How can I be more strategic with this, like, glut of

content that I have? Yeah. Where I always start

is since you've got, like, you've already built the creator

muscle, right? Like, sometimes. Yeah, not a problem. That's step. Sometimes that

step one is like, all right, what are the. What's the thing you're gonna do?

You've already got that. And so I think, for me, it's kind of

figuring out of those things you're doing, like, where are

your. I would call it, like, where are your distribution channels? Like, what are you

doing? Is it axe? Is it LinkedIn? Is it newsletter? Is it

email? And then of those, and then, what's the frequency on that?

The whole reason behind distribution first is, like, thinking about, like. Cause I

live this life where literally, this is when I was still in

house working in team meetings, where it was like, everybody wants to send an

email this week. Cause we've created so much stuff,

and we can't send out the amount of emails we need to send out. Right.

And not bombard people. And so, yeah, we faced that some, too. Like, we were

just saying, like, when do we send the survey email out? Yeah, well, next week,

there's the newsletter, and there's. There's the webinar. And then we gotta, like, remind people

about the way, you know, you know, how it goes. We can promote it in

mid June, earliest. I'm literally

doing this with my business right now, where I started to figure out the

rhythms. I'm starting to refigure out what the rhythms are now that I

have. Because I had the podcast, and that was a good rhythm. I still have

the podcast going, obviously. And now that I have the membership in the community,

I'm doing. So, for me, I'm doing a monthly training, and I'm doing

a monthly Q and a session. Each one of those things, you know,

this from. From yours, you're doing twice the amount, but each one of those things

could turn into, you know, multiple things. You got to promote the thing. You got

to be able to share the content out afterward. So I'm trying to figure out

what that rhythm is like for me, but just knowing, like, all right, what's our

capacity for each channel, right? Like, what's our capacity for email? It's

probably not five days a week. It's probably too much, right?

Probably. I do think, though, like, Daryl Westerfeldt, who's my

partner at hey, creator, and then Tim Forkin, who's the content producer and my co

host, we've actually been talking more about. We've put it on

the table to have a daily email, because one of my, like,

I've seen say, like, the behemoth that, like,

Ryan Holiday's daily stoic email, his daily dad email has become, I

think he said, somewhere recently, it's well over half a million subscribers, which

means it's probably since then much more than that. And

I know. So this is where you kind of go back to like, hey, this

kind of model, that ship 30 kind of

popularized, especially on the Internet, like, all of Ryan's emails,

whether it's daily Stoker Daily dad, they're around that, like 2300

word mark because like, Seth Godin has

modeled for years. That, and this I think is interesting.

This isn't necessarily about distribution. This is just about, like, consistency and

capacity is like, if you're talking more consistently,

like, say daily, then you can say things that are much shorter. They

still need to obviously be interesting. And then if you're gonna wait longer, then

it has to be like, huge. You can't, like, not post

for a year and be like, here's my thousand words. Like, it better be

like, bloody brilliant. Like Kevin Kelly's thousand

true fans, which is more than a thousand words. But you think about, like, on

the other end of the spectrum is Tim Urban. Wait, but why? Who writes like

50, literally 30,000 word blog posts,

but he only posts one per year? Maybe

Dan Carlin, hardcore history. He has like one

podcast per year, but it's 5 hours.

It's an audiobook. And so I

have been. Things like, we have enough

content maybe not to go daily because when you go

daily, you kind of got to just go for it. You can't go daily for

a month and be like, no, and you

could, but that's tough. I've seen very few people

able to keep up the daily consistency. But you do want to be shorter about

it. Yeah, I totally interrupted you there in terms of, like, the

consistency. No, but I think what you said. Cause

I preach this all the time with, with the folks I work with. And

even inside the community is like, you have to know your floor. You have to

know your floor of distribution of, like, what can you consistently get

out? Who cares if you can put out a podcast

once a week for four weeks? That's the vast majority of podcasts

sitting on Spotify and app right now are sitting there with four episodes because they

couldn't get over the hump. Yeah, same thing with email. I think expectations are

huge. So if you set the expectation with your daily dad,

it's daily dad signing up for daily. That's what you want.

Exactly. Yeah, it's built in. And the other thing, too is the value add there

where it's truly like, Ryan isn't selling you

anything. You know what I mean? Like, I think when I think of, like, daily

email and some of the stuff that I see out there, it's like, it's sales

emails, like, all the time and it's just like, like, you know, I don't

want to sign up for that and I end up unsubscribing from those folks. But

if we go back to, like, your content and what you've got going on, if

you are set on saying, like, doing four lives inside your community,

how I would think about it is starting to maybe rank those

on distribution, on a distribution level. Even if it's a very rough ranking of,

like, this is the one, this, you know, week that I

really want to be able to share out and knowing the rest are just going

to sit there, right, like, or these two are really, really good because, like,

there's probably truly for your, like, you're not

Gary Vee. You don't have, you know, a giant team of folk who are just

cutting all this stuff up and, like, blasting stuff out all the time. And so,

like, there's got to be a balance there to, like, what's realistic

versus what you can actually, like. Cause, you know, it also takes time to, like,

go through the stuff and find good things. Well, I'm so glad you bring that

up because that's something that I even like. Me, and I know

you, you as well. We're people who know how this stuff

works. I'm obviously not personally,

like, pumping out. Like, I'm still looking at, like, the time and

thinking, I don't know if I've tweeted today and, like, you don't have to

tweet every day, but, like, I know that I have plenty of stuff in the

vault that is, like, repurposable or

redistributable. But, like, the actual people always,

and I count myself in this, will often

underestimate the mental load that it takes to, like,

go find the thing, think about what's going to be the best part of it.

Do I need to rewrite this a little bit? Like, it. It's all there. Like,

I point over there. Like, it's over there. It's all there. I wish it was

right there. Put it in the tweet

machine and, like, there we go. We're done. And that is,

like, to call back to our first conversation, that was actually one of the things

I think this is, like, another thing that we were talking about in the pre

show. I live this all the time, like,

with my own newsletter content. At times when I'm working with the team on

it. And even what we do with, hey, creator, is

if you're not going to be like, a

newsletter writer writer, like, I'm thinking saw Hill

Bloom, who is like, the Vat. The main thing that he does

is write. He writes on social and he writes his newsletter, but

that's like, he started doing some YouTube stuff, but, like, he's a writer.

Ryan Holiday is a writer. James clear is a writer.

And, like, Tim Ferriss is more of a podcaster.

Five bullet Friday is not. I'm sure he looks at it. He may

still write it, but, you know, honestly, I kind of doubt it. He's like, I'm

kind of. Here are the things that I find interesting. Here are the things that

I want to promote, and that's great, but you really have to,

like, unless you are going to, like, just care

about the newsletter, writing the writing, writing, the big w

writing aspect of it. If you're more of a podcast or video

creator and you're getting hung up on, like, does this sound

like me? You don't write. So stop

micromanaging your team or even, like,

honestly micromanaging a version of yourself that wants to get

these things out. Like, just. I'm not saying that quality doesn't

matter. It does. I'm not saying that brand doesn't matter. It does. But I'm

telling you, there are people, and I count myself among them

at times of, like, you can have something done almost

entirely without your input by someone else, by a team,

or even by, like, you know, AI is getting better and better. But let's just

say people, you could have something get to, like, 80%

and actually, like, have it seen and consumed and enjoyed

and learned from, but you won't post it because it's

not getting 90%. Or even if you personally can get it to

90%, you're like, ah, it's not exactly what I want. It's not

100%. And so, like, you're not sending a newsletter. You're not posting

to social enough. These are things that, especially if you're not a

writer, get over it. Make the distribution

happen because you're doing enough stuff. You're doing. I'm

doing enough stuff. There should be more. And I need to,

like, yes, put a system in place. Yes, vet and train

people. But once that's done, I need to just let people do their jobs.

Because I know that when I send more newsletters, I make more money. When I

post more to social people sign up to my newsletter, they

subscribe to my YouTube channel, and they get the newsletters that I

send out and I make more money and the business grows and I'm able to

hire more people and lots of good things happen, all because,

like, I didn't micromanage that last little piece. I just

allowed for the work that I was doing to be distributed by

other people that I trust. And the flywheel keeps

turning. Yeah. And it's a different, there's so many

things, I think, that come back with creating content.

And people are, people get stuck

in traditional content marketing worlds where you

blogged and it was this thing and it lived on the Internet and people

come to it every month at thousands and thousands, you know, like we, because it's

ranking and the idea of content is very, like, I

gotta make it, you know, do its job. And I think one of the things

for me that I'm learning, you know, and again, you wanna make a good podcast.

I wanna have interesting conversations. I wanna write a, I wanna write a good newsletter,

of course, but no. One'S saying you don't. We're on scale.

Right? At scale. Like, especially when you're thinking about the less and the less and

the less of the content, right? Like the clip. Yeah, the clip has to be

good, but it's also disposable in a lot of ways, right? Like somebody's going to

come back tomorrow and there's got to be a new clip that the tweet, it's

got, you know, you know, it's a tweet, it's. A LinkedIn minutes, much

less the day. Yeah, 1000%. And so I think

getting over that hump, especially if you're thinking about, I've got

this stuff, I think sometimes people get in their head in terms of how do

I get this out there? How do I promote it? It's over promotional. It's like,

you know, it's like, just how do you add value at scale

and how do you get that information into people's heads? I think it's the biggest

thing for me is like, I, one of my biggest things that I said when

I started my show, for instance, was like, I actually don't look at

like, download numbers too often, like every once in a while. But like,

for me, I want to have interesting conversations and then distribute those at

scale and be able to have, like, whether it's a clip, whether it's a

LinkedIn post, whether it's a newsletter. Like, I want to, I want to, I want

the people to have the ideas that Matt Ragland has to

share regardless of whether or not you're listening to the show or not.

That's my goal. Yeah. And the nice thing is that, like, you can

distribute things in multiple platforms and multiple

mediums. Like, I do think that you're driving people

back to that newsletter or to the core

thing that you want to build, like, for us at hey, creator right now, like,

it's interesting. Like, if you looked at hey, creator, you would say, like, oh, they

have a podcast. But what's interesting, I

think, is that Tim and I, we actually

want to optimize the show for

YouTube. I want so

much more for the show to grow on YouTube

than for the podcast numbers to grow. Now, I think those two

things go hand in hand. But honestly, like, this has been a little

bit of a shift in perspective for Tim and I, and

Tim was early on this for me. He's like, we need to plan

and record the show. Thinking of it more from a YouTube

perspective than from what we might traditionally think about

from a podcast perspective. So

get right into it. Alex Hormozi had a

video about this a few weeks ago, is about

how he grew his. How he grew his audience on YouTube. And

he's, like, the beginning of every video. And he would probably say

any piece of content has to, like, be very clear about what's the

proof of what you're doing, what's the promise that it can deliver, and what's the

plan that you're going to give people. Did you see that? Did you see that?

I didn't, but it's really good. And so, like, when we write the

intros now for any of the podcasts slash YouTube

videos, we want the intro to be, like, no

more than 15, 20 seconds, and it has to deliver on those things, and then

we go right into the content. But, like, when we think about

it from that perspective, the other thing that makes it pretty interesting,

it's not quite this way when we have guests on, because we want guests to

just talk about whatever's interesting to them and kind of guide that

conversation. But when it's just Tim and I recording, we

will not quite think of it in terms of

almost like, sports radio segments. Tim and I are both sports

fans. We grew up on sports radio. I listen

to a lot of, like, sports podcasts now. And

thinking of it in terms of, like, okay, what kind of

segment style things do we want to talk about in the show

today when we outline those segments? Tim's much more of

a scripter than I am. I just like, I got the idea. I'm with

you. Let's go. Let's go. And.

But when we are planned out, at least in that

way, then we already know

these are, say, ten minutes, the show will be

60 minutes, but then we have multiple ten minute

clips that each one of those are like, this is a

newsletter. This is a newsletter. And now what we have to try and find

is, okay, what are the good short form clips? And again, Tim's background

is in short form video. So he's really good at identifying those

92nd sections that become good vertical

videos. And now we're, like, working on a plan to

also, like, extract the best short form written content from

that as well, because you can't, like, this goes back to my point of, like,

hey, if you're a podcaster, if you're a youtuber, heck, even

if, like, you're an author, authors are a little tricky because authors

have lots of feelings. Perfectly valid.

I have a lot of feelings. So I'm not saying that's a big. Authors

have a very high bar of what they want writing to be, which I

understand you're a writer, but newsletter writing, little

different than book writing. And I was like, when we

have to help ourselves get out of our own way when it comes to the

micromanaging of distribution, because the benefit

of. I've seen this twice in the past

few months of, like, the sheer volume of content

that it takes now to break through. I used to

think weekly was enough. I used to think daily. That's.

I mean, depending on the channel. Let's take social

particularly. And even, like, written social. I think

Hormozi said that I'd have to look it up. We'll put it in the show

notes. The number of pieces of content that

Hormozi and his team created in the past twelve to 18

months is just. It's staggering. Now, it's across all platforms, it's all

types, but it's. It's staggering. And the one that is maybe a

little bit more applicable because you can think about, like, oh, Hormozi is rich. He

talks about how he's rich. He has a big team. Yes, all those things are

true. True. But I can tell you there's a lot of people with the same

amount of resources or similar ones, plenty of resources

to do what Hormozy did. That still don't do it.

So, taking a step back from that, the one that stood out to me was

Nick Huber, sweaty startup. And, you know, feel whatever

you want about Nick as. As a tweeter, but

it is like. And Nick's. Nick's a buddy. I like Nick

a lot. So I'll also say that if you go back, I saw like Charlie

Light, who is an Internet ghostwriter. Charlie

Light said he shared again, I'll have to go back

and look for the number. The sheer number of tweets that

Nick sent before his account really took off. It was

thousands. It wasn't just posting it

once a day, not breaking the streak. That's nice. That's where I'm at right

now, which is an improvement over posting like two or three times a week.

It's been a year of daily posting now. Good for me. My

account has also gone from like 9000 to 16,000. So there's something

there. Yep. But I think that he was like, on

average, sending like four or five tweets a day. And we're

all of them bangers. Obviously not. But yeah, it's almost

like VC Capital. It's almost like venture capital for

your content. If you put enough out there and it still

has to be good, quality still has to be high, you have to be interesting,

you have to like, do all these things. But my guess is, like, I

can, like, I'm coaching myself here a little bit. I get, I guess

I know what I say is well founded. It's

researched, it's things that I've experienced. I'm good at what I do.

I just need to like. And that's what we're building at. Hey, creator for a

distribution model is like getting all the things that Tim and

Daryl and I and Terry, other people on the team talk about that

we know what we're talking about. And going from one post a day

to three or four posts a day. But it's not anything that, like

going back to the mental cognitive overload of it,

that's not anything that I'm putting up and producing.

But it's also not something that I'm like, micromanaging either.

When I've been at my best at both creation

and distribution, I'm batching the process.

Like I am bashing the process in a way

where, and sometimes it's shocking. If I

just put it on the calendar, I can get

all the social content, all the podcasting

stuff in pretty much less than 4

hours. It could be done. It's a personal way

to do that. And I have to be better at making that formula

work because I think that's where people get hung up. I get hung up on

that sometimes where it's like this task of like, I just need and then I

sit down to do it and it's like, I put that off all week and

it took 15 minutes. Like, what am I doing here? Yeah, I mean, I think

we've talked about this on the Internet before. I've had that same realization, a thing

that I've put off for a week or more. And then I actually do it.

It took 30 minutes. So, yeah.

And, you know, you can, I feel like I went on, I got on my

soapbox and talked about like these really big concepts of

flooding the market with your information and like having a team and

doing all these things. I do think that the way that you

brought it back right there of saying like, hey, I have

one show and I have a newsletter and I

know that I can take the content that I'm making. Maybe it doesn't have to

be four posts a day and all these different

video, but I would say if I was doing this all by myself, then I

would still record the podcast. I would youtubeify the

podcast as much as possible. And then I would say like, okay,

each show there are probably three or four newsletters

in here. I would just kind of go through and I would just break it

down and that would take time that now

I've, that I've outsourced. But, you know, you said 4 hours, I, you know,

I've done this before. I think that's a pretty reasonable estimate. But

I look at it and say, okay, out of each episode, each episode

should be two newsletter minimum, probably more like three

or four. And out of that, if I want

to, I could make some short form videos, I could have some clip

videos and I'm going to have enough social posted

content. Especially because obviously you can post the videos, both

written and video. I mean, honestly, just

one, one episode is probably at least two weeks of

content across all channels. And

there's, depending on how juicy it is, then

it could be up to a whole month. And that's just one. If you're doing

that each week, then we're talking about. And this goes back,

let's connect it back to, hey, how often should say your

newsletter be? Or how often you're posting to social or something like

YouTube? Well, if you're still just recording once a week, which I think is

great, how can we increase distribution up for that? One thing?

Can you build up, like say, after we're already

there, if we want to put forth the effort as a team at hey,

creator, like I've said, we probably have at least 50 hours of

content if we wanted to put the system in place and

we could build up the queue. This is like, really important. You have to build

up the queue to go to twice a week in

newsletters or even up to daily. I would say

for something like a newsletter, if we wanted to go from once

to twice a week, then I would want to have

two months of content, at least, probably more like three months already

batched and scheduled before we started thinking about, like, okay, now

we're going to start adding in another email

each week. Makes sense. I mean, I gave that same advice when I was coaching

some of this morning on podcasting. And he's wanting to start a podcast. And

it's like, if you're gonna start a podcast, anybody who's started a

podcast, you gotta have at least four to six of those bad boys baked

up and ready to go before you think you're gonna, you know, even, even record

your trailer on that thing and post that out. Because as soon

as you hit publish on that, you're just gonna take that natural breath of like,

okay, yeah, I did the thing. Avoidable. And that's not a bad thing.

But, like, just. No, I think. But I think it's like, be realistic. Like, I

always felt like, be realistic with your plan. We're so idealistic, you know, with our

content plans in particular, or, like, what are we going to be able to do?

And it's like, you know what? Like, let's be, you know, let's take a step

back. Let's be realistic on what we want to do. You know, when you're talking

about, like, the scaling of the content and being able to

figure out which, how much do you even need? That's a huge question. People ask

me. How much do I need? I was working with, it was a company I

was working with in Q one. And what we ended up doing was actually

doing a monthly event, you know, because they were talking

about, like, do I want to do a podcast? And I said, get your rhythms

down with a monthly event. When you can do monthly and you can get the

repurposing and you can start to build your systems

on something once a month, then you can scale it up, because otherwise

it's just going to. You're going to be in the exact same place you were

before, where you're like, I just feel like I'm running on this hamster wheel. I'm

creating so much stuff. I'm not doing anything with it. And what, you know, you're

just constantly in reset mode. Yeah. And I think something else that's cool to think

about. And this is becoming more common even in, like, B

two b podcasts is like more of the season

style model. And what seasons can allow you to do is not

just like set the expectation that you're going to take a little bit of time

off, that it's not just going to be like content hamster wheel

forever. But another thing that you can do that, you know,

we've already talked about a couple of times is batching, especially if we're thinking

about, you know, if you're doing events, maybe if it's not public,

something like, something like a podcast. Or you can just say like, hey,

we're going to meet off site or I'm going to clear my schedule for

two or three days or an entire week and I'm going to do ten, something

reasonable, like two a day all week. That's ten. That

is, let's say you get twelve in, well, just in one

week or say two weeks you've recorded three months worth of

podcasts. And again, we've talked about how

if you just take the single event and

multiply that not just duplicate, not just distribution but

multiplication of content, then like you actually

have short form social newsletter content for probably at

least six months just out of that sprint that you did.

Yeah, I mean, when I was at metadata, that's what we did with the

event. Like I used the event as the basis

to free up my schedule mentally to

then we started the podcast and started other things off of it. But it was

like we got consistent out of just twelve

sessions, four months of content because we marketed it like

a podcast after the fact and just drew people back into the content

that was in there. And I think to your point,

like circles back to like setting expectations with the audience to say

like we're doing a season and then we're going to deep. Like

you could set like really good expectations. Like I could see a world where that

would actually be even more intriguing of we're going to go

deep on these twelve thing, we're going to do these twelve things for a season

and then go deep on them for the next, you know, six months. And it's

like, oh, cool, I get to get really ingrained in this idea, right? And then

move on to the next thing. It's kind of a, it's, it's really, it could

be a differentiator for people. Yeah, I think so. And you know,

it gives, gives people the opportunity

to kind of like mentally. Like even

your listeners take a break if you're doing things well.

And that's like, yeah, I do think like when you talk about

seasons, it does matter, like, what the quality

is and if you can get really good at what you're doing, which, yeah, I

say that it's a very, it's a vague statement. I get

that. And it's a very subjective statement. Say, like, how good something

is. But if you're going to go with a season model, then I do think,

like having a very specific topic or focus rather than just like

conversational style. That's one of the reasons we decided,

at least at this point, not to do a seasonal approach to hey, creators,

because we're not doing like a topical deep dive. I do think that is like

a thing that is like, very interesting and something you

do, like we could spend. It's like, hey, for this season, we're going to talk

all about launches, we're going to talk about marketing, we're going to talk about

waitlists, we're going to talk about product development. We're going to do all these things.

So I think about it in the terms of if you were almost going to.

And Tim, bring up Tim again. Tim and I have even talked

about some of our podcast and YouTube strategy around that. Now, we may not do

it like week after week after week after week, but we are thinking about, hey,

if we were to basically like, approach the podcast

and the YouTube channel like a course in a sense, and be like,

hey, if someone like, do we have courses? Yes. Do we have a community

where you can go through that with other people who are doing the same thing

as you? Yes. But if someone came to the podcast, and especially because,

like, this is what YouTube is really great at, disco discoverability.

Playlists and YouTube are incredibly powerful and still

underutilized. If someone came to the hey,

creator YouTube channel and were like, hey, here's a playlist of

like, just go through this playlist and it's part long form

interviews, it's part highlights, it's part like how to clips and

tutorials, you could watch this and pretty much know

how to launch your course again. Like when you think about how people

get access again, like, there's a course, there's a community, there's coaching, there's all these

other things that you could do. But from a seasonal

perspective, that's another thing that we might do in the future. But it

is something we're thinking about putting together while it's in

process. Kind of like building the plane while we're, while we're falling in the

sky. Before we

wrap up here, and this has been super fun, I want to

touch on YouTube because I think it's something in particular. I know in

b two b. It's underused. And I think for podcasters, it's

still underused. I haven't done it yet. It's been literally on my list for.

Since I started the show. And it's like, do I do one more thing? I'm

so intrigued on how to think about YouTube. I know you've been doing YouTube

for years on your own, and now the hate creator stuff. So I'm

curious. Even if you don't have a podcast, like, if you're doing events, if

you're doing webinars, I think there's a way to frame them

up to be able to cut them up for YouTube. But I'm curious. Maybe talk

to me through a little bit. Coach me now. Right? Like, I've got this podcast.

I've done nothing on YouTube with this thing. Like, what the heck do I do

with it? Yeah, I mean, I think you just apply your own framework to it.

Yeah, I think with a lot of these things, especially who, people who have been

in content, who have been in kind of this world for a

while. I think once you think about it a little

bit more, you realize, okay, I kind of know how to do this, but, like,

let's just approach it from the perspective. Like, if you were to put this. If

this interview that we were doing was going to be a podcast show,

like, or be a YouTube show also, well, good news. We're already

on video, so you've already got all these videos that you can put

on YouTube. And I would like, just think about it. Like, if

you went back through, like, the show notes or the transcripts or the timestamps and

thought about, okay, first, just put the show on there.

Okay, there are other things talk about. And I'll just say one more time, you

need to have Tim on this. Like, Tim will get on here and he'll coach.

He'll coach you up and he'll. He'll help. He's actually, like, he's doing

a whole series in the hey, creator community on content multiplication

and distribution. So, like, this is, this is high on his mind right

now. So. But you just put the. Let's just say the raw

podcast goes in. It's episode dot, dot, dot of

distribution first. And here's the whole thing with Matt. As you're

going through it, like, in post production and editing, you're thinking,

like, okay, there are. So that's, like, that's one video. And

then, like, what you go through in post production is saying, like, okay, there are

like, these three places where Matt and

I were really on fire. And, like, these are like, it was very

helpful and very clear. Those become

seven to eight, five to ten minute clips. So what

we do is on Tuesdays, the full episode comes

out on Thursday. And Saturday is when the

five to ten minute short clip comes out. Same

episode. We could chop them up and say, like, it doesn't

have to, like, be that, you know, the same episode. But let's just say Tuesday

and Thursday, the shorter clip comes out. I mean, it's

still free YouTube standards. It's not like vertical short form video.

Yeah, yeah. Segment. And then look for those moments

even more granular than that. What's the short form

video? I would still personally, if Tim wasn't

doing the short form video, I personally would not do it. Or I would hire

someone like Tim to do it. If it was just me and I was

doing it the way that I described to you, then I would say,

beginning of the week, post the full episode, and then

two more at least once so that you hit that. It still matters.

It still helps with YouTube to post multiple times a week. I'll say that.

But again, like, that doesn't mean you have to create something unique every

single week, every single post. So that's what I

would do. I like that. And I've got, like you said, like, at

this point, oh, my gosh, Matt, I've got hundreds of hours of

videos. What would, like, let's say I'm like, all right,

cute. How many episodes do you have? What episode is this?

60. 60 something.

You've already got your first year of YouTube content. Now, again, like, we've talked

about, like, that doesn't mean you just throw it out there. I mean, I guess

it could more effective than not, but, like,

I want to continue to acknowledge that it takes focus, it

takes effort, it takes a mental load

to, like, take the 60 episodes that you have and actually like, okay, well,

you know, I'm going to download them. I'm gonna, oh, I

know. I'm gonna, like, upload. I gotta write, do the descriptions,

do the titles, do the, like that thumbnail. What do I do for

an end screen? When am I gonna put, like, these are all real.

Like, they're simple, they're easy, they're time

consuming. And you get like, this is one of the, this is one little, like,

little extra soapbox moment that I have is

we've been not necessarily tricked,

but I know, I'm guessing you, I'll just speak for myself,

that we've been fed this

belief, not gonna say it's a lie. We've been fed this belief that

anything that isn't, like, the highest leverage use of our time is

beneath our doing. And I do think that there's

some, and we get stuck in that, and I do think there's some truth to

it. I don't want to be on, like, the creator ranking is just like,

I'm upload, import, thumbnail title. Those are really important,

by the way. Just sort of all those things. And I'm like, I could pay

somebody to do this, and maybe I should, but the fact that I'm like,

ah. And sometimes it's true. There are other more important things that

I could be doing with my time. Or like, I'll also say I could be

spending time with my kids. I could be exercising. I could be reading a book.

Not just more higher leverage uses of my business time, but more

exciting things that I want to do. But if we look at it and

say, me not being able to do what my friend k, he

calls, like, the $10 an hour work, the $100 an hour work, because

I'm like, oh, I'm $1,000 an hour guy. I'm

$10,000 a day guy, then there

are so many things that won't happen, especially from a distribution

perspective, because either two things, you think they're beneath you,

and if you think they're beneath you, that's fine. But you micromanage the

hell out of people who are trying to do it for you.

And things that could get done, that should get done, don't get

done. So. Okay, that's. Maybe that could be a clip. That was. I

don't know. Maybe not. That's a clip. Absolutely. Absolutely.

Yeah, I'm with you. I'm with you. It's. It is.

Like, especially if you're an entrepreneur,

solopreneur. Like, you know, like, even, even maybe if you're

upper, upper level, in, in house, like, right. Like, this is not what I

should be doing. Got to prioritize what you do. Yeah, you

do. Got to prioritize what you do, and you should be leveraging your

time. But, like, that goes kind of back to the,

either need to be willing to hire, you either need to do it or you

need to hire for it. And if you hire for it, you got to let

give people training, but you got to let them do their jobs, especially if you're

hiring an expert or someone who you're paying more than

offshore. Nothing wrong with hiring offshore talent. It's something I'm

looking at a lot more. But if you're not hiring someone that you're like, oh,

this person's cheap, I can get them to do whatever I want and I can

be upset at them. If you're hiring someone that our

newsletter services $3,000 a month. If you're paying my

writers and me $3,000 and

you're going to try and micromanage us, well, everything's going to be

good. What are you paying me for? If you just want to give

yourself, like, an editor's job, you gave me the writer's job

so that you can be, like, the editor manager job. Just let it

go. Let it go and let me send you newsletters. Let

me make you content that's going to make you money and make your fans happy

because you don't write, they won't notice that. It doesn't sound like

you. Nothing sounds like you. You don't write. You talk on a podcast.

I talk on a podcast. Yep. Nothing wrong with that.

So I'm with you. I'm with you. Yeah. Even the.

Well, honestly, like, some of my best client work, they

trust me to run with it. Right? Like, we've got this blog content, we need

it repurposed. And we got this webinar content, we need it repurposed.

They, they, in that case, you know, they're hiring me because

they are. They've experienced a bottleneck and they, you know, yeah,

you are. Thankfully, if you're hiring

at a premium, then you have to let them do their

thing. And especially from a distribution perspective, you have

to let them do their thing. If they're doing their thing and you don't

end up liking it and, you know, the, like, back and forth, like

week to week or month to month, not day to day feedback isn't going the

way that you want, then you can just fire them. Like, you can fire me.

It is fine. But if you hire experts, you need to

let them, like, do their thing. And I can, you know, this would be

an assumption, but, like, at that point, it's just like I, you know,

I would just rather be fired and go get, you know, another client who

wants the work done without the micro. You know what I mean? Like, it's just

easier at that point. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, no, I'm with you, man. This is awesome.

I don't, I don't want to keep going on, like, getting on my soapbox about

things that I'm not even sure are related. No, it's

great. I got one. I got one final question. Go. Go back to YouTube here.

Selfishly, because I do have 60 episodes of this thing. What

would your suggestion be? Right. Like, what would you. I've got, like, do I

upload a few of the older episodes I've got. Because I've got old episodes and

I got new episodes coming out all the time. What do. What do I do

with this stuff? Yeah, I would start with,

say, what are your ten best

prior episodes, whether, you know, through the metrics

of the show itself? Like, these are the ones. I would think about it

two ways. These are the most popular that people have responded to,

and then these are the most important because, you know, as, as we know, unfortunately,

sometimes the most important things aren't always the most popular things, but you still

gotta, like, establish your. Establish your story, your vision,

talk about why you do what you do. Especially, like, if there's. I would say,

like, when we were doing this, if there's something where we're talking about our newsletter

agency, like, that's important. Or we're talking about the community that's important

for people to, like, see, like, oh, like, it may not have as many views,

but if, like, the title and the thumbnail, especially on YouTube, are compelling, I'd be

like, oh, well, I mean, I don't really care that it only has 100

views. I need a newsletter service. I want to join a

community. So I would, like, think about episodes

first, full episodes first, because that'll just be easier. You don't have to

edit, like, let's just say you don't have to look for clips or pull those

out and put up ten, probably week after

week for now. Like, just queue them up, batch them. Up,

schedule them out ten at a time. Or one. No, like one

per week for, like, ten weeks. Okay. Basically. Okay. Or say, like

two per week for five weeks, whatever. I would just say one per week for

ten weeks. But make it a combination of what your most popular and most important,

and then you can keep going into what I think about now. Like,

especially with the newsletter. The newsletter we're doing now for, hey, creator, I know

this isn't YouTube, but we're using podcast content

because it's more podcast YouTube content for us because it's more

relevant. But if we ever get stuck or we ever get behind a little

bit, that's where we go to, like, hey, we have 20 hours of summit content

just, like, sitting, sitting in our back pocket. Like, I'm about to

go on paternity. I'm about to take a month off

because we're having another child kick grass, man. We're

far enough ahead, but if something, what I want

to do is get another month ahead so that when I come back from work,

it's not like, hey, we used up our buffer and now it's

time. Next Tuesday, there's got to be an email going like, hey,

let's just use summit content to create

any additional podcast stuff that we need and any additional

newsletter stuff. Like, I don't personally want to look at the

YouTube channel or the newsletter

until the first week of August, and we're going to be able to do

that. Love that. And I think that, I mean, man, that's like, we could even

go way deeper on that, but I think that's something too. Like, you've got

this archive, like, we started talking about kind of, oh, it can be

overwhelming to have this archive. And I think it's like, in a lot of ways

it's a blessing because when you get in that crunch or you have

this big initiative at work or you've got to take time off, you've

got a repository to go back to and to pull from. I mean, I

did this at the end of the year. I wrote about it in a newsletter

a couple weeks ago. End of the year was, you know, it's just like, man,

December's draining. Like, I don't want to record any new show. I took all

the best episodes from the year

and uploaded them back in as best of

2023. Matt. It was the second best month of

the year. Play the hits. Play the hits.

Absolutely. It was like, it was unbelievable.

I was like, old subscribers loved them. Because they were the hits

and new subscribers love them because they're like, I haven't heard this before. This is

great. Yep. It's like, oh, man. Yeah, that episode, like, I have it because that's

the thing, is like, it's so easy to fall in the trap of, like, yeah,

you know, they've heard that and it's like, well, yeah, they heard it eight months

ago. Yeah, yeah, it's so. I think,

like, that's a, that's such a great way to think about content.

And just like, I've got this library, it's great content. And again, if

you're thinking about as you're creating this stuff and it's on brand,

it's a new pov, it's got, you know, all those things is touching

messages. You can grab anything from that. Hey, creator. Literally

anything, probably from that. Hey, and it's going to work. Yeah.

That's the beauty of it. That's the beauty of it. Matt. Super fun to have

you on, dude. We'll, we're going to make it. We're going to make it three

at some point here because I just always have a blast chatting with you. So

we'll go ding ding, round three at some point. But it was great. Yeah, love

the podcast, love the community that you built and what you put out. So,

yeah, excited, excited to see more. Thanks for having me. And yeah, we'll do it

again. Awesome. Thanks, Scott.

All right, I hope you enjoyed this episode of Distribution first,

and thank you for listening all the way through. I appreciate you so,

so much and I hope you're able to apply what you learned in this

episode one way or another into your content strategy as

well. Speaking of strategy, we have a lot of things going on this year that

are going to help you build your brand, ten x your content and

transform the way you do content marketing. Make sure to subscribe

to the show and sign up for my newsletter at Justinsimon Co.

So you don't miss a thing. I look forward to serving you in the next

episode as well. And until then, take care and I'll see you next time.