How To Grow A Following On Multiple Platforms At Once In 2024
Insights and guidance from my 3 years in digital marketing
Your current problem isn’t consistency..
Its distribution
Right now you’re most likely slaving away at 1 or 2 social media audiences
You’re leaving thousands of followers, subscribers, and customers on the table..
All because you lack the ability to repurpose
I get it, content repurposing is tiring
Just because you posted something on one platform, doesn’t mean it will perform well on a different platform
The result is you building your social media brand 3x slower than you could be
For Medium you need to write long form
For Substack you need to write long form and short form
For YouTube you need to edit videos and “feed the algorithm”
For TikTok you need to do silly dances
No platform is the same, which is exactly why its better to focus on only 1 platform right?
You’re only right to a certain extent
For someone who has no marketing background, the platforms all look different I’m sure.. But if you’ve been in marketing for 3 years like me, over time you notice all the similarities
The above post is a good example of something I see on every single platform
The biggest creators have a network. Whether they are doing it on purpose or not, networking is one of the most powerful weapons at your disposal when building a social media brand
When I started out I encountered someone who could see I had potential
That person has now helped me gain over 200 email subscribers (35% of my audience)
If I had never reached out to this person, I would be 3x smaller by now
Building an effective content repurposing system will take 6 months to several years
Luckily I’ve been in the trenches for 3 years now, so now I’ll break it down for you
Using Substack As The Catalyst Platform
Despite convertkit and beehiive using the same data proven methods as substack, substack still has the highest potential for traffic generation
If you want people to see your work, substack can make it happen
In a way, substack is already the perfect hub for content repurposing
Let’s go over methods you can ABUSE substack to expand to different platforms TODAY
First we need to break down the content that’s been statistically proven to perform incredibly well on substack
Long Forms
As much as people hate on long form, article based content creation strategies work
It’s the reason why people like Justin Welsh and Dan Koe can make 6-7 figures selling digital products to their newsletter audience
They’ve built an audience that LOVES reading their long forms, gain a lot of valuable knowledge from it, who then eventually invest in their products or services
Not only does long form perform incredibly well on substack (over 15,000 views), it also performs well on other platforms like medium and YouTube
The issue with long form, is that people are unsure how to write a good one
How do you format your writing so it creates a compelling argument?
How much is writing too much?
How much is enough writing?
How do you never run out of inspiration?
How do you stay consistent?
These are all issues I addressed in my previous writing framework article
Feel free to give it a read then come back to this
But if you understand how to write a long form, you can already start repurposing.
According to data analytics, medium has much better SEO function than substack (without using indexing)
Now that you’ve written your long form on substack, all you need to do is:
Take the long form article you wrote on substack
Optimize the title for SEO visibility
Move it over to medium
Remember what I mentioned about networking? This is a perfect example of how medium does EXACTLY the same thing as every other platform
You see, on medium to grow you need to abuse networking
Sure, you can write alone and slowly grow your following..
But if you’re serious about building a brand on medium, you need to get into publications
On medium, publications function as news publishers who promote good work to their followers
Your job is to find a publication that has a lot of followers, has a lot of active readers, and like your work
If you can pull this off, you’ve got a ticket to virality on medium
Virality means views, views means subscribers, and subscribers means customers or clients
Find publications with plenty of followers and views who align with your writing
Spend at least 15 minutes a day applying to be a writer for them
Get accepted after many tries
When you repurpose to medium, pick the publication you want to submit to
Repeat
But when you publish a long form on medium, you need to link people back to the original article (this can be substack or your blog)
If you can do this depends on the publication guidelines
What this does is create backlinks
This is a term used in SEO. Basically the more websites link to your article, the more important the google search engine thinks your article is..
And the more individuals click on the link to your article, the higher of a priority Google gives your article
Set this up right, and you’ll have a stream of article readers on a monthly basis that can be converted into subscribers or customers, purely from Google Search
This means you need to optimize your articles for the google search engine
Write titles that people are googling for, research how many people are googling certain terms, and use those keywords in your titles
Getting featured on a publication, is how to see exponential growth on Medium
Now take your original article idea, and turn it into an educational YouTube video
Repurposing to YouTube takes practice, its not going to be a walk in the park
If you’ve built a long form audience on substack, you can create a separate section in your newsletter for YouTube videos (data analytics prove this WORKS)
This circle of promotion then forms part of a larger circle
You can take the longform in YouTube or substack, format it for audio listeners, then use substacks in built Spotify and apple music repurposing system to get even more followers, subscribers, and clients in the long term
Your audio files then function as podcast episodes, so then the content repurposing process looks like this
And this process only takes a few hours a week
That’s 5 different platforms based on 1 long form
But that’s not all you can do.
Short Form
If you go to x or twitter, you can divide up the ideas in your substack article/long form, into 4-7 ideas
Then turn those core ideas into long forms for X
Then you summarise those long forms, turn them into pictures, and post them on X as well → This can then be taken directly to Instagram as a short form post, and you can turn those into linked posts (if you want)
Now your content repurposing process looks like this
That’s 7-8 platforms you’re posting on, with a few hours of work a week
These methods are based on data analytics, as well as results I’ve produced myself
That’s all for today, I hope you found this breakdown valuable as a creator and writer
Enjoy the rest of your day, Ian
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