The average American reads approximately 300 words per minute. The average time that a speaker talks per slide of a presentation (one with slides, of course) is at least 30 seconds, and, depending upon the complexity of the content, up to three minutes per slide. For the purpose of this blog post, let’s assume it’s 2 minutes per slide, so for a 30 minute presentation you would use approximately 15 slides.
Now let’s do the math. If you talk for 2 minutes per slide, that’s approximately 300 words x 2 minutes, or 600 words, which is longer than the optimal length of a short, SEO friendly blog post. The image at the top of this post is a good example.
The image is one slide out of 45 slides that I used to deliver a 3-hour seminar on “Advanced Social Media Strategy” at General Assembly last week. (Shameless plug: the class is offered again Wednesday, May 13 from 1 – 4pm). From this one slide, highlighting best practices for using YouTube videos to market your business, I was able to create a 622 word blog post, which is a 2-3 minute read.
Unfortunately, I can’t make a blog post from every single slide in that presentation, since some are topic introductions, session dividers, examples, etc.; however, if I can use even half of those 45 slides, that’s a series of 20+ posts on one subject, each post a short, easily-digestible chunk of usable information.
This technique is what’s commonly known as re-purposing your content. I spent about 3 hours creating the slide presentation, and about 20 minutes creating this first blog post, which can be shared over and over and over, not to mention I’ll be teaching this session again.
If you or someone at your business presents slide presentations regularly, you already have TONS of content, and that doesn’t even include video of the presenter in action!
How much content do you have? More than you thought.
Leave a comment