Introduction
Are you stuck in the never-ending grind of content creation?
What if you could transform one piece of content into countless valuable assets?
Enter the world of “Master Content”! 🎉
Join host Mikkel Svold—founder of Montanus—as he dives into this game-changing concept.
In this episode, Mikkel reveals how to repurpose your content like a pro, reshaping your entire strategy in the process.
He shares his own journey, tackling past challenges and explaining how hiring an editorial assistant flipped the script for him.
Get ready for actionable tips on:
🔹 Leveraging team roles
🔹 Using calendar tools
🔹 Template communications for lightning-fast productivity
If you’re ready to escape the chaos and build a streamlined, cohesive content strategy, you won’t want to miss this!
Tune in and revolutionize your content game! 🚀
What You’ll Learn
1. Discover the power of Master Content for repurposing.
2. How to streamline content planning and production.
3. The role of an organizer in content creation.
4. Efficient use of calendar tools for scheduling interviews.
5. Tips for templating outreach emails effectively.
Episode Transcript (AI Generated)
Welcome to the content universe. Today I want to talk about how you can get content material enough. And when I say content material, in particular I mean master content material. What is master content you may think? I’ll explain that in just a minute but before that I want you to know who I am. I am Mikkel Svold and I’m the owner and founder of the content production agency called Montanus. And we produce content, all kinds of content. Including podcasts, video etc., blog posts, you name it. For high knowledge companies typically. Alright so what I mean by Master content is the piece of content that you can use to produce other pieces of content from. So that would be for me oftentimes that’s going to be a podcast episode and that podcast episode can then in turn become, well, blog posts, different well more than one blog post or oftentimes it can become email, it can become Social Media posts etc. So how do you get enough of this type of content to feed your so to say content machine. That is one of the big questions that is something that I’ve actually been really struggling with and I’m quite sure that I’ve been struggling so much with it that I’ve actually … I’ve probably already had one episode about this because I really do think that getting that master content nailed down getting that done, it’s just super critical and it’s well obviously it’s critical if you’re gonna if you want to have something to repurpose but it’s also super hard to do simply because it takes time it’s a logistic nightmare, it’s planning it’s is a lot of the old all of those things all of those things. Okay so today I want to go through just three simple steps that I’ve implemented in Montanus to kind of help us ease the way of recording a podcast episode recording a video interview, recording something that will then in turn become the master content that we will use either for ourselves or on behalf of our clients, that we will use to produce the rest of the thought leadership content that that we create. So first of all I want to tell you how I did it a year ago, or actually less than a year ago probably half a year ago. I would have a long list and that’s something that we do on a strategic workshop, so I would have a long list of content ideas and ideas to interviews that we want to write about or we want to interview about, we want to create content about this topic. Now with that list I will also have a column where it says all the people that we need to contact in order for this to happen, so who is going to be the interviewees to give us the input that we need in order to create this content. That is all good and that is probably as it should be. I’m not sure you can actually do it in any other way. Well hit me up if you can, if you know some brilliant way, but that’s how we do it anyway, but it still leaves behind the problem. You have to arrange all of that and you have to reach out to all of these people. Sometimes you even have to find the people, right. Sometimes you don’t know the person, you just know the topic, but knowing the person that you want to interview, that’s probably that’s not always obvious, who’s that gonna be. So you have to do a lot of footwork. To first of all find the right person you want to interview and then afterwards finding those contact information and then again afterwards trying to nail down a time of interview. And those are really hard and it turned out that there were so many times especially for my own podcast Big Ideas Only where we simply didn’t get the job done and it just stranded in the planning phase and I think that’s what happens a lot of times, things strand in the planning phase and I bet like look inwards, look at yourselves, can you recognize this pattern. If you can recognize this pattern well give this give this episode a like or a thumbs up somewhere because I really love to hear from you guys. Also just to not feel alone on my stranded at planning stage little island here. Alright so what we did was I did three things and the first of them is the one that has really taken the the biggest or had that had helped us leap the most and it’s something that’s been frightening me quite a lot that’s why I have hesitated to do so. I’ve hired a producer or I’ve hired an organizer or an editorial assistant. These kinds of people have many different titles but in essence what they do is they help out with planning. They help out reaching out to interviewees on behalf of me who would often be the interviewer or the host of the interview so they reach out and do all that ground-work, logistics, planning, all that. They also find the right person to talk to in this interview and when I say they, for me the they is a lovely woman called Olivia and she’s just helping me so tremendously much with reaching out to people and the reason why today is the day that I want to talk to you about this is I just received a Slack notification two days ago on Friday where she said okay I’ve now reached out to five of these people and four of them has come back. I just have a single question what what should I answer to this email do we do this or do we or don’t we do this blah blah blah whatever it was and I was just like I was blown away completely blown away I was like I’ve spent probably six months procrastinating reaching out to well 20 people but simply because I didn’t know who I wanted to reach out to just you know the the Paradox of plenty I know there’s a book called so the Paradox of plenty opportunity so I could have reached out to the 15 other people but I had such a hard time choosing that I procrastinated finding out who is the person gonna be what topics should we go with and this episode and blah blah blah and now Olivia she just reached out to them she just took them from the top and say okay we’ll just reach out to see five people and she did and now we have bookings in the book with those people and I just find that such such a brilliant tip and I know it’s kind of obvious but hiring an organizer hiring a editorial assistant or someone who can do the planning a secretary whatever you call it but someone who can do the planning of each episode, of each interview. That it’s just critical to us and then when you’ve done that when you’ve implemented that you can make his or her life easier by of course giving access to your calendar so she could book directly into your calendar or like we do we use a calendar booking app the plenty of them out there Calendly, cal.com, I think even Microsoft has an in-built booking system so you can use all kinds of booking apps that your well editorial assistant can then kind of use in the planning, so it won’t. So booking an interview will be super easy and it won’t obstruct anything in your own calendar. So that is like tip number two. Tip number one definitely hire an assistant and tip number two use a calendar and then of course the last one, this is the lowest hanging fruit, so that you can go implement right away. Template your emails. When you reach out to prospective interviewees or to prospective guests to your podcast have a two-step email series coming out to them. The first one being very short, super brief, just saying hello I am this, you know I’m the producer of this this and that podcast. We would love to have an interview on this and that topic and we thought that might be you. Would you be interested? Click here to hear 4 more episodes. Right, so that simple simple email just saying do you want to do you want to participate or not. Because then they can easily just say no thanks and you’re not taking up too much time. In the second follow-up email if they says yeah I’m interested. Let me know anything more. Well have another email templatized to to follow up with all the practicalities in it. So how long is the interview going to be, what’s the platform, is it online, is it or is it in real it. You know in person is it is it a team’s meeting. Is that a river side blah-blah-blah all of this so have that in a second follow up email and then also have the Calendly link or the the calendar booking app link whatever software you use, have that also in that email so their guests themselves can go book their interview time and then of course make sure that that link has been set up so you so they can only book times that fit your schedule and then what we’re doing now because we are very very strict on which days you can book we can only book Monday or Wednesday and we can only book one each day so that means that sometimes the guests they’re not able to book the interview until you know in three weeks or in four weeks time but that’s not a problem because you want to have an ongoing podcast so it doesn’t really matter whether that guest gets on episode number you know 40 or episode number 55 it’s not important the important thing is that they participate so we can get that knowledge into our Knowledge Bank into our Content Universe alright that is it for today’s Content Universe I hope you enjoyed and yeah just biggest recommendation of them all get an assistant to handle reach out to handle booking in your calendar that’s it’s just I’m blown away it’s just so amazing and just really seems to really work for me and I’m sure it will for you as well thank you so much for listening and if you enjoyed and want to follow up on future episodes please do click the subscribe button on your Podcast player you know where it is it it says subscribe also of course give us a review it will be lovely to hear from you if you think it’s crap if you think it’s think it’s something you can use give us a review anyway and yeah we can kind of amend a change and and adjust the Podcast that we have right here to to fit the purpose that you find the best that’s it for now thank you so much for listening and I’ll see you on another content universe planet