Gary Vaynerchuk has been saying that brands need to create 20,000 pieces of content per year to take advantage of the opportunity at this point in the history of business and marketing.
20,000 pieces of content per year.
Do the math and that’s 50+ per day.
The reasoning behind this number is that social media and the Internet offer an opportunity for anyone to reach people all over the world. And to really take full advantage of the opportunity that is the number you need to hit.
For example, Gary often says that back in the early 2000s he would buy the keyword “wine” on Google for 5 cents per click. That was an opportunity. He took advantage. But he looks back and sees that he left a lot of opportunity on the table. He could have done more.
If you’re serious about social media and creating content, 20,000 is the number.
Quality vs. Quantity
The first excuse you’ll see when it comes to this topic is that we should focus on quality and not quantity.
I first wrote about this debate in 2016.
You will never reach quality unless you commit to quantity. There are just no shortcuts when it comes to anything quality in life and that’s true for content.
Dolly Parton claims to have written 5,000+ songs thus far in her life. She says she’s written 5,000+ in order to get about 5-10 great ones.
Most people are afraid of those results. They’re afraid of being judged on the 4,995 that are a sub-amazing.
People will pay attention to the 5 that are amazing. And if they don’t…who cares. Those 5 amazing things can carry you through life.
Now, let’s get into some tips on how you can create so much content per year…
Tip #1. Documenting
Perhaps the best way to create content for any channel is to document. For a second, don’t think of a channel such as Facebook or Instagram. All social media is basically text, audio or video. Sometimes a mixture of two or all three.
The channels will change. New ones will come. But for the most part they’ll always be one of those three types. So if you focus on those three you will always be able to adapt.
Documenting with video allows you to create the video. You can also pull the audio out and you can transcribe into text. Or you can create text first and record the video and audio later.
But the thing that is nice about documenting is you go about your life. Someone videos you and someone edits it to create the pieces of content you need.
It’s a little like a reality tv show. You document just about everything and edit later for effect.
Now, obviously that’s quite a bit of work and most people will need to hire to make it work, but more on that later.
Tip #2. Repurposing & Snippets
Let’s say you’re a dentist. You’re having someone document via video a procedure you’re doing on a patient. You can post the video. You can strip the audio and post as a podcast. You can transcribe and turn it into a blog post and also use the text on channels like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.
You can also snippet the video from, say, a full 10-minute version into 5, 2-minute snippets.
And on and on and on…
This is how you can help yourself get to the 20,000 pieces of content that you need per year.
I first wrote about The Snippet Strategy for blogging and social media back in 2013.
From documenting, you can get how-to information. You can create list content. You can create all kinds of advice and tips. You can break it up however you want to.
You could focus on how-to content and lists on their own. But you can often get this via documenting.
Tip #3. Hiring
Something that you will likely need is someone to documenting (videotaping) and someone to edit the content. Sometimes that can be the same person. But both are important. You may be able to have interns handle it, but understand that they may want to move on in the future and you’ll have to start over with someone new.
People want to get paid and they should get paid.
It gets back to what Gary said about the keyword “wine” back in the day at 5 cents a click. He didn’t want to pay for all the traffic because it seemed expensive. But looking back he realizes that it was incredibly cheap.
That’s what hiring someone to help document what you do is like today.
Final Thoughts
There is an opportunity today with creating content. There is more demand for content than ever before. Even in a world with seemingly too much content, there isn’t enough. Think of your favorite Netflix show. You watch all ten episodes in two days. Then you have to wait 12 months for more. It kills you to wait. There isn’t enough.
The number of pieces of content that you could make to fully take advantage of the opportunity is high. You don’t necessarily need to create the full amount, but for nearly 100% of the people and businesses out there the number is way higher than what they’re creating today.