How many times have you seen an article with a headline similar to “10 Things you never knew about X” or “7 steps to solving Y”. These types of articles are useful for a number of reasons. They’re usually concise, clear, and easy to follow. If you have this type of “listicle” post that has generated satisfactory traffic you can capitalize on its success exponentially simply by re-framing the way you view the list.
Let’s say the original post is has 5 bullet points that are about 75-100 word each. They’re not terribly long and no doubt there is more you could write about it that others would be interested in, but concision is the key here right?
Instead of thinking about your post as a standalone entity, think about it as a table of contents where each bullet point is a chapter in a larger work.
Next consider your distribution channels. How many do you have 3? 5? 7? 9?
For example:
- Blog
- Google+
- Snapchat
- YouTube
So in your original post you created 10 or more potential pieces of content, depending on your distribution channels. The Content Multiplication equation for that post would be 1 x 10 = 10, right?
Let’s take this to the next logical step. For every “chapter” in your table of contents you write a more in-depth post highlighting some tips relating to that specific aspect of the original post. Let’s say you keep these to an extremely manageable 350-400 words each. These things write themselves because you’ve already got the gist of it from the original article. Now you’re fleshing out the skeleton more. Once those are all published and distributed the Content Multiplication equation for these posts would be 5 x 10 = 50.
Add in the 10 from the original post and that’s 60 or more potential pieces of content from one article. If you want an easy equation to use for this: (p * d) + d where p = the number of bullet points and d = the number of distribution channels utilized. Not a bad haul at all.
The Content Doctor 
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