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Hitting ‘publish’ on your content is just the starting line, not the finish. Smart distribution can turn good content into powerful marketing through repurposing, resharing, and remixing. Ross Simmonds explains how we can squeeze every drop of value from what we create, and change the way you think about content.
Why Your Content Strategy Is Backwards (And How to Fix It)
My conversation with Ross Simmonds reinforced something I’ve been thinking about for a while: we spend way too much time creating content and not nearly enough time getting it in front of people.
Ross is the founder of Foundation (a B2B content marketing agency) and Distribution.ai, and he’s built his career around content distribution. During our chat, he shared some practical frameworks that got me thinking about how to better leverage the content we’re already creating.
The Real Work Starts After Publishing
As Ross put it during our conversation: “Most people stop at hitting the publish, and we celebrate it. We all get excited, press publish, and we feel good, pop the bubbly, like, life is good. But in reality, the work happens after you press publish.”
He’s got a point. Publishing content feels productive, but it’s really just the beginning. The value comes from how many people actually see it, engage with it, and take action because of it.
It’s not that focusing on content creation is wrong—it’s about shifting some focus to what happens after you hit that button.
Learning from Disney’s Playbook
Ross made an interesting comparison to how Disney approaches content. He pointed out that “the original Lion King is a spinoff of Hamlet, old story, just comes to life with animals, and then you fast forward. Now they’re 10 to 15 years, they rolled a new version with Beyonce and Childish Gambino… it’s the same playbook.”
Disney doesn’t create something once and move on. They remake, repurpose, and reinvent their content for new audiences and new formats. Meanwhile, most of us in digital marketing create something, share it once, and wonder why it didn’t get more traction.
The Three Rs Framework
Ross shared the straightforward framework he uses: repurpose, remix, and reshare.
Repurpose means turning your content into different formats. That webinar you recorded can become a blog post, a downloadable guide, or a series of newsletter articles.
Remix means changing the consumption experience. Take the audio from that webinar and put it on Spotify. Cut out the best five-minute segment and share it as a standalone social post. [I use Descript to create social clips of my guests’ best bon mots.]
Reshare is probably the most underutilized tactic. Ross’s logic is simple: if only 20% of your audience saw your post the first time (which is typical on most platforms), resharing isn’t spam—it’s serving the 80% who missed it.
The Video Question
We talked about whether video is still worth the investment, especially for B2B companies. Ross thinks it is, and his reasoning makes sense: “In B2B, you’re still typically selling from a human to human. And the other thing… it’s still very difficult to fake a video.”
While AI can generate written content that sounds human, video still captures the nuances that build trust. That said, his advice isn’t to abandon everything else for video—it’s to consider video as part of a broader content strategy that includes multiple formats.
Using AI as a Strategic Partner
Rather than using AI to churn out content, Ross suggests treating it more like a consultant. He uploads brand voice documents and asks AI to identify gaps. He shares content calendars and asks for feedback on strategy.
“I would actually use AI like a high paid consultant,” he explained. The approach is using AI to improve your thinking and strategy rather than replace the creative work.
He also mentioned recording client calls and asking AI to analyze what could be improved. It’s about using the technology to get better at what you do, not to do less work.
Search Beyond Google
Ross had a good perspective on the “SEO is dead” conversations that pop up regularly: “People need to understand that, yes, things change, but it’s called search engine optimization. It’s not called Google engine optimization.”
His point is that people search everywhere now—LinkedIn for hiring, Instagram for tutorials, Reddit for recommendations, YouTube for how-tos. The principles of optimization still matter; they just apply to more platforms than they used to.
Practical Next Steps
The conversation got me thinking about how to better leverage existing content rather than always pushing to create something new.
Start with your best-performing content from the past six months. Ask yourself: How could this be repurposed into different formats? What platforms haven’t you shared it on? When was the last time you brought it back to your audience?
Most of us probably have enough good content sitting in our archives to fuel months of distribution activities. The question is whether we’re willing to shift some of our energy from creating new stuff to maximizing what we already have.
The Distribution Mindset
Ross helped clarify something important: successful content marketing isn’t just about creation—it’s about getting the right content in front of the right people at the right time.
That doesn’t mean creation isn’t important. It means recognizing that great content without distribution is just expensive digital storage.
The goal isn’t necessarily to create more content—it’s to create content that actually reaches and influences your audience. Sometimes that means making something new. Sometimes it means finding better ways to share what you’ve already made.
Smart Content Distribution Strategies Episode Transcript
Rich: My next guest is the founder of Foundation, a B2B content marketing agency, and the founder of Distribution.ai, an innovative software helping brands and creators spread their stories with ease.
He’s an Amazon bestselling author of the book, Create Once, Distribute Forever, and has worked with organizations all over the world, ranging from some of the fastest growing startups, well-known, higher education institutions, and global Fortune 500 brands.
He’s been named one of the most influential marketers in the world by multiple marketing publications and firms like BuzzSumo, SEMRush, Moz, and more. He’s received the Harry Jerome Young Entrepreneur Award and has been named one of the top 50 CEOs in Atlantic Canada.
Today we’re going to be talking about how you can get your content in front of the people that matter with Ross Simmonds. Ross, welcome to the podcast.
Ross: Thanks for having me on. I’m excited to be here, excited to chat today. It’s going to be fun.
Rich: Absolutely. So how did you find yourself focusing on content marketing and distribution?
Ross: Yeah, I fell in love with content marketing at a young age, and I didn’t even realize at the moment that it was content marketing. So when I was in university, I had a blog, and on that blog I was creating content all about fantasy football and fantasy sports.
I was producing pieces pretty much every single day, talking about whether or not people should start this player or the next, and it just continued to be a thing that I enjoyed doing.
The moment in which I started to share that content, though, with other communities, online forums, et cetera, I started to see the traffic in the impression levels just like skyrocket. And I was like, wait, this distribution thing, the actual act of taking the content and spreading it is where the ROI comes from? And that’s when the light bulbs went off.
However, with that fantasy football blog, the traffic started to tank. The traffic continued to rise, but my marks in school, because I did this when I was in university, really started to go off and I was like, oh, this isn’t going so well. And my mom was like, you should just write about what you’re learning in school. So I turned my blog into a website called rosssims.com, where I started to write about what I was learning, which was marketing at the time.
And after that, I kept writing, kept writing, kept promoting, and people started to listen. And you fast forward, and I had a career built on the back of that blog.
Rich: Thanks to mom and her excellent advice, no doubt.
Ross: That’s it. A hundred percent.
Rich: Strangely, this weekend I was in a vintage shop and they had a Richard Scarry book. I don’t know if you guys read the Richard Scarry books when you were kids, but it is a book about what people do all day. It’s a book written for kids, and it talks about all these different jobs. I don’t think that content distribution was one of the jobs that Richard Scarry covered in his 1940 or fifties classic.
So when you’re talking to people about what you do for work, how do you describe what content distribution is?
Ross: Yeah, so oftentimes people have no idea what I’m talking about. I don’t know if a lot of people in my family know what I do. But essentially, we focus on the creation of good content for the internet.
There’s millions of people every single day who log into their mobile devices, log into their browsers, and they’re looking for information. And the question becomes, how do you make sure that information that you’re publishing is actually found?
So we like to ensure that the brands that are producing great content actually can get that content in front of the people. So I would say over the last few years, there’s been a major shift that has happened where for years there was a deficiency of content and brands needed to create content, period.
Like a lot of brands weren’t blogging, they weren’t engaging in YouTube, they didn’t have videos, they didn’t have newsletters, they didn’t have podcasts. They weren’t thinking about it in that way. But then a shift happened when people started to say that mantra, “content is king”, “create more content”, et cetera. The world listened. But as a result of that, there was more noise and more chaos and more stories being told every single day. And the question becomes for many, how do you stand out amongst that noise?
So what we do is we help brands not only create the content but also distribute it. How to get that content out there to the world on the channels where your audience is spending time in the formats that they want, with the stories that are going to resonate.
Rich: So as part of what you’re offering, it’s not just about building a higher platform, building a bigger megaphone, it’s actually about identifying where the audience is. Is that part of the overall equation?
Ross: One hundred percent. Yeah. We start every engagement with research. And in that research process we’re trying to understand what channels are the audience spending time on? What kind type of content do they want on that channel? What stories do they care about, what messages resonate with them? And then we use that to inform the way in which we show up on that channel for the client.
So if a client has their target audience on LinkedIn, then we develop for them a strategy around how they should repurpose their content into carousels, how to repurpose their content into LinkedIn articles, how to manage your sales team’s content so they can constantly be producing stories so they can use tools like distribution.ai to repurpose their stories for their clientele to attract leads. Or if a client’s audience is on Instagram, maybe we need to develop an Instagram specific strategy around how they should be thinking about reels, Instagram stories, et cetera. So it’s very channel specific based on where the audience is.
Rich: I think a lot of business owners and marketers and creators stop after they hit the ‘publish’ button. What is the mindset shift that we need to do to truly capitalize on the content we’ve created?
Ross: You’re so right that most people stop at hitting ‘publish’ and we celebrate it. We all get excited, we press ‘publish’, and we feel good. Pop the bubbly, life is good. You feel great. You just did something. But in reality, the work happens after you press ‘publish’.
When you press ‘publish’, yes, you’ve done something good, you’ve created content, but the real job is to ensure that content reaches your audience. And the mindset shift that needs to happen really starts there with recognizing that pressing ‘publish’ is not the end goal. It is not what you should even measure.
Yes, it’s great that you’re pressing publish, but the outcome of pressing ‘publish’ is how many people you reach, how many people you influence, how many people see it, how many people engage, how many people act because they heard it or consumed it. So making sure that is clear and happening is very key.
Rich: All right. Now Ross, I know you’re a fan of frameworks. Can you walk us through a simple distribution playbook that a business with maybe limited time, limited resources, could realistically implement?
Ross: Yeah, so every business probably has an evergreen asset. When you have an evergreen asset, there’s a few things that you want to do. One, you need to think about a remix, a repurposing effort, and a reshare.
So on the remix side, you’re thinking about how can this asset that we’ve created, let’s pretend for example that it’s a webinar. How can we repurpose this webinar? You can repurpose that webinar by turning it into a blog post. You can take that webinar and you could probably repurpose it into a newsletter, in which you’re taking the transcription from that webinar, you’re writing it up. You could also probably repurpose it into an eBook if you really wanted to. You could turn it into a PDF. Do a little bit of additional research, and you’ve repurposed that asset.
You could also probably remix it. So the second part is the remix. The remix is when you take the audio file from this webinar and you’re going to upload it to Spotify. So now on Spotify, you can get access to the webinar. So you’ve remixed it, you took it from an original source, which was a webinar, and now you can consume it in an audio format.
Or maybe you’re going to cut it up in different points where at one moment the person you are interviewing or the person doing the presentation had five minutes where they went on a rant and they talked about something they were passionate about and something that your audience would care about. You’re going to cut that. You’re going to share it as an individual asset on LinkedIn or an individual asset on Instagram or one of the channels that you’re on. That is, again, a part of the remix.
Now the final piece is the reshare. And this is one that seems low touch, low impact, but it’s actually something that most brands sleep on every single day, and not just brands, even creators.
I’m very confident some of your listeners already this year have probably produced things that were good. So good that when they went live with them, they got a bunch of traction and engagement, more engagement than they had in the entire quarter. But you fast forward four months, three months later, and they haven’t reshared that same post again. And that, to me, is a massive mistake.
You don’t create something that is good, that is relevant forever, and just promote it once. You need to bring that back to your audience. Because the first time that you shared it, you actually only reached a fraction of the people that you wanted to connect with. If you have a hundred followers on LinkedIn, the people who saw that was probably the 14%, 20 people, 30 maybe, if you’re lucky. So the rest of the audience didn’t see it. So if one or two people do see it again the next day, they’re not going to unfollow you because of it. They’re going to say, oh, thanks for the reminder, this piece is valuable to me.
So repurpose, remix, and reshare is a simple framework that I believe every brand should be taking when they invest in creating something that is worth sharing.
Rich: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And also, if you’ve got that piece of evergreen content, going to have a different audience six months or a year later, people who were not introduced to that content the first time around. And whether it needs a little bit of a retouch or whether it’s good to go, I can see that you’re now supporting and serving a brand-new audience with that content.
Ross: Exactly. A hundred percent it. That’s the same reason why so many movies commode 10 years later with the exact same concept, except they modernize it. Like you look at the Disney playbook of Lion King and all of these movies. The original Lion King is a spinoff of Hamlet. Old story just comes to life with animals.
And then you fast forward another 10 to 15 years, they roll out a new version with Beyonce and Childish Gambino, all of these characters playing the voiceovers, and it’s action, like real- life action motion. And it’s like, come on, it’s the same playbook.
But for some reason in the internet age, as marketers and businesses, we don’t think that we can repurpose our things and remix our things and reshare our things. And it’s a broken philosophy for sure.
Rich: I think after this interview, I’m going to reach out to Beyonce and see if she’s willing to remix and revoice some of my content for the podcast.
Ross: That might work. That might work.
Rich: Yeah. I appreciate that heads up.
Ross: I can guarantee you that would work.
Rich: So how do we decide if we’re content creators, and that can mean a lot of things, if we should lead with video, blog posts, or audio con audio content? Do you have a go-to recommendation, or does it really depend?
Ross: This is such a complex question. Because if you were to ask me probably four years ago, I would tell people, lean into your strength and own that. And I still believe that to be true.
However, I will throw out a caveat that didn’t exist before. The caveat is the internet actually wants more video. Video is where I believe the bet is to be made because it is the most repurposable asset and the most personal asset that can be produced. I built my entire career on the back of written word. I love written word. I think more people should read. I think reading is a great way of consuming content and information. I think it’s good for your brain. I love reading. I love books. I’m a massive fan. I didn’t launch my book with an audio version because I love books so much. However, I’ve been hearing from the internet that they want me to do an audio version because I know that’s what they want.
So what do I believe you should do? I believe for best practices, you should embrace video. I know it’s not easy. I know it’s difficult to do, but video is a very powerful channel, best in class. However, if you can’t turn on the video, at least record your audio. The voice is the second most impactful way. It’s a very intimate experience when I’m driving around and I can hear someone’s words in my ears. Is very powerful. It creates what they call a “parasocial relationship” where they feel like they know you, they feel connected to you. Very powerful.
On the third tier, which again is something that I love, is the written word. And the written word is personal, is connective, but it’s not as engaging as those other formats. And if you ever question like, is that true? There’s a simple test that you can run. If you ask a hundred people in the last year, “Have you watched TV or read a full book?” I can guarantee you more people have watched TV than the amount of people who have read books. Whether we like it or not, agree with it or not, think it’s good for society or not, is a whole different dialogue. But the vast majority of people consume television and video-oriented media. Thus, we should give people what they want.
Rich: I absolutely hate that answer.
Ross: I know. I see all the books in the background.
Rich: I know. And I’ve been talking about video for too many years to count. But as I think back on it, and as I look at video, it always feels to me like every social channel tells you how much they want video. And then you start doing video, and then they immediately start to deprecate the value of that video.
And most recently, LinkedIn. LinkedIn has this whole thing where they want your reels. I just wonder, I’m not saying that you can’t take video and slice it up in more ways and repurpose it in more ways than you could the written word. But I am concerned that people aren’t really watching videos, except when they’re viral TikTok videos, that may not be the right type of content for B2Bs.
I guess I hadn’t really thought this question through until you started talking, which is why I’m going round about it. Here’s the real question. Do you think that video is still the right answer if you’re in B2B?
Ross: Yeah, I do. And the reason why I think it’s still the right answer is because in B2B, you’re still typically selling from a human to human. And the other thing about this that I think is the elephant in the room that not everyone wants to talk about, is it’s still very difficult to fake a video, it is very easy to fake written word.
I can put up 20 posts in the next 20 days and not actually write a single one of them. But everyone on my LinkedIn will interact and engage and think that it was human. While some people will look at it and say, huh, Ross, you’re using lots of M dashes. Ross, this one here started with, “in the ever-evolving world of content marketing”. They’ll pick up on some of the nuances that maybe ChatGPT or Claude or Perplexity wrote this piece. And that, on its own, is something that I believe in B2B is creating friction.
However, you can’t yet today very well, fake the nuances of a video, and a human talking, and a human taking you on a journey and a story, and the mannerisms and things like that. Is AI close? Yes. I’ve seen all of the demos. I’ve seen all of the tools. I’ve played with them. I’ve leveraged them. They still have some quirks that need to be worked out, and we might get there eventually. But today, I believe the final frontier of authenticity still exists with video.
Rich: All right, fair enough. Although by the time we publish this episode, who knows, maybe it will be.
Ross: Yes, exactly.
Rich: So you launched distribution.ai to help automate and scale distribution for companies. Where do you see AI being most helpful in this content marketing piece? And where does it fall short currently?
Ross: I think the best asset and the best value that you get out of AI is that you can just do things faster. I think if you’re a creator, you should be able to, if you’re… let me break it down this way. If you are a great creator, you can create great content faster. If you’re a good creator, you can create good content faster. But if you’re a bad creator, you can create bad content faster. So the end of the day, it’s an accelerate. It’s an accelerant for all different types of marketers. Great marketers can be great, more. Good can be good, more. And bad will be bad, more.
I think there’s fundamentals that you need to have, first and foremost, that you need to practice, and then you tap into a tool like distribution.ai. And if you are great at understanding how to create a good video, how to create a great blog post, you can use distribution.ai to ensure that content is being spread effectively.
If you understand your brand’s voice, you can upload that to distribution.ai, and all of the content will reflect that brand voice that you’ve uploaded. So when it’s promoting your blog content, it’s promoting your YouTube video, it’s doing it in the style that you want, and it’s aligned with your voice.
Now, where do I see the gap? I still today think that the human should review before they hit ‘publish’. I think the human should look at it and analyze and see, does this actually fit my voice before I schedule and share this piece? But it’s very close. I think I’m also looking at this from an expert lens, someone who has been in this industry a long time and can see what good and great looks like. If I was to compare an AI to someone who’s fresh outta school, who has never read a single copywriting book and doesn’t understand the principles of IDEA, et cetera, then they probably will lose to the AI. The AI will probably beat them, in terms of creating that great content.
So I think it’s a great accelerant. It’s a tool that everyone should embrace. I think AI is going to completely change the way in which we do marketing. And for many, no one’s willing to say it, but if you aren’t willing to change your approach and grow and improve yourself and learn these tools, I do think AI is going to take a lot of jobs for those who aren’t willing to adopt and change.
Rich: Fair. If someone is just starting off with using AI in their content marketing one, what’s one task you would say they should hand off today?
Ross: Yeah, I think the one I would ask them to start with would be a little bit of an audit. Like I would actually use AI like a high paid consultant, and the prompt might be as simple as, “Hey, AI”, “Hey, LLM”, ChatGPT, whatever tool you’re using, “I want you to review this document which outlines our brand voice. I want you to review our ICP, which is a document that I’m going to upload, and I want you to give me insight into some gaps that I might not see. Do some research on who we’re actually targeting here and be brutally honest with your response. Don’t hold back. Let me know what I am missing as it relates to the approach that we’re taking to connect with these people.” And then it’s going to give you a response.
Then I’d start to go into a bit of a chained command prompt where I would say, “Okay, thank you so much for that. Really appreciate it. I’ve uploaded here maybe my marketing plan or my content calendar. Please review it. And again, be ruthless, be relentless, and give me harsh feedback on what I should be considering and how I could improve.” And it’s going to give you that, too. That is a simple thing that every business can do, and I think they can find some great opportunities from just running that analysis alone that they might not get.
Try to treat the AI as a partner in your marketing engine, as someone who you can bounce ideas off of, throw reports out for second set of eyes, visibility, see gaps. One thing I’ve also been using it for is after I have a call with a customer, using AI to summarize and transcribe and identify key things from it that one, I can use to inform a product in future decisions. But also, what could I have done on that call better to prepare, to present, and to share. Should I have said certain things? Did I talk too much? All of those things.
I’ll probably do that with this podcast. I’ll probably upload the podcast to an AI and be like, hey, listen to this podcast and gimme feedback. How could I have been better? So using it for that is a great way, I believe, for humans to stay indispensable. Because if you’re able to constantly be improving and you’re using the AI to improve, you’re going to be unstoppable long term.
Rich: All right. This show is called, The Agents of Change, and very often there’s just this parroting or echo chamber that happens in all circles, but certainly marketing circles. Is there something that people talk about when they talk about content marketing or content distribution that just makes you roll your eyes and you’re just like, that’s not actually my experience?
Ross: Yeah. One of them, I would say, that drives me insane is very recent. But someone listening is going to hear probably in the next two hours, SEO is dead. Google AI mode killed SEO. Reddit killed SEO, SEO is gone. There’s no more search engine optimization, none of this stuff matters anymore. Complete baloney.
People need to understand that, yes, things change, but it’s called, “search engine optimization” it’s not called, “Google Engine optimization”. It’s not just Google. We’re not just talking about blue links. We’re talking about the process of discovery of information that you didn’t have before.
The internet has not evolved beyond it being a place for discovery. People’s place of search might vary, but it doesn’t mean the end of search engine optimization. I go to X to find out what to read. I might go to Facebook to find out what events to go to nearby. I go to Reddit to find out where I should eat. I’ll go to LinkedIn to find out who I should hire. And I’m searching on all of these different platforms. So the way that we think about search engine optimization needs to change, where we’re not just thinking about Google, we’re not just thinking about what Google’s doing all the time.
Folks, there is search happening in marketplaces on Facebook. There is search happening on Instagram right now. If I’m trying to learn how to improve a golf swing, I’m going to Instagram, I’m going to YouTube. I’m not even going to Google anymore. So our thinking about search, the thing that drives me insane is that they’re thinking so singular instead of recognizing that search happens on a lot of different platforms in a lot of different ways.
Rich: I absolutely agree. Great point. And of course, you didn’t even really touch on AI chatbots or smart speakers, or any of these sort of tools that we have these days. For me, it’s usually Reddit. Anytime I need to fix something around the house or work on some hot sauce recipes, that’s the first place I go to. So absolutely.
Ross: Yeah, it’s a wild world.
Rich: Yes. But search will never die because we are always going to be looking for information to help us lead a better life.
Ross: A hundred percent.
Rich: Alright, so if people want to learn more about you, Ross, if they want to learn more about distribution.ai or your company, where can we send them online?
Ross: Yeah, so folks can find me at rosssimmonds.com. Distribution.ai is our software that helps brands repurpose, redistribute, promote a lot of the things we’ve been talking about with their content. And I also run a content marketing agency called, Foundation, foundationinc.co.
But the easiest place for anyone to get connected would be LinkedIn. Hit the connection, let them know that you found me through this podcast. And yeah, they can find me on all of their favorite channels. I’m all over the internet.
Rich: Well distributed. Alright, Ross. Thanks so much for your time today. I really appreciate it.
Ross: Thanks for having me, Rich.
Show Notes:
Ross Simmonds is a globally recognized content strategist, founder of Foundation and Distribution.ai, and author of Create Once, Distribute Forever. He’s on a mission to show businesses how smart distribution turns ideas into impact. Be sure to connect with him on LinkedIn, and let him know you heard him on this podcast.
Rich Brooks is the President of flyte new media, a web design & digital marketing agency in Portland, Maine, and founder of the Agents of Change. He’s passionate about helping small businesses grow online and has put his 25+ years of experience into the book, The Lead Machine: The Small Business Guide to Digital Marketing.