The COPE Model: How to Create Once and Publish Everywhere for Maximum Efficiency

Do you want to know how to implement the COPE model successfully into your content creation? This article has all the information you need to get started.

There is no doubt that content is the driving force of the Internet. Powerful content is what inspires people to act and resolve their problems.

Because of the large number of channels, content distribution has become increasingly important.

How can you successfully manage and distribute highly valuable content across multiple platforms without losing its integrity?

That is where the Create Once Publish Everywhere (COPE model) comes in.

COPE: The Essentials for Maximizing Content Distribution

The COPE (Create Once, Publish Everywhere) model is an excellent way to maximize your audience reach.

COPE is an efficient content creation strategy that brings the most value out of your content.

Eventually, COPE saves time and resources. It also allows you to implement a more efficient CMS (Content Management System).

There are 7 effective steps to implement COPE as part of your content system:

• Understand your audience;
• Separate the design from the content;
• Fine-tune your content;
• Structure and filter your content;
• Publish your content;
• Measure the feedback data;
• Repurpose, optimize and repeat the process.

Implementing these methods in a sequence is key to enacting a successful COPE strategy.

Let’s take a closer look at each step individually.

How to Create Once and Publish Everywhere Efficiently

Through COPE, you can make your content more reachable.

But even though it may sound straightforward, many pieces move the COPE machine.

A successful COPE strategy involves several steps.

Understand your audience

There is an important distinction between knowing and understanding your audience.

Understanding your audience first is key to creating and managing a successful COPE strategy.

It will help you decide what shape and type your content should be and target your audience as effectively as possible.

Understanding means going deeper, beneath the technical information of your audience, and learning their:

• Goals
• Needs
• Challenges
• Behaviors
• Paint points

The key advantages to understanding your audience are:

• They will get the content they need whenever they want;
• They will feel close to you because of your personalized approach;
• They will convert more easily because of your targeted content approach;
• You will build trust and authority around your brand;
• Your brand and content will gain a better position in the market;
• You will gain significant experience by creating important content for your audience.

Methods to better understand your audience

There are several research methods you can focus on to expand your knowledge and understanding of your audience.

Use surveys and questionnaires

You can analyze and understand your audience through surveys and questionnaires.

Create a simple survey or questionnaire, for example, using Google Forms.

Send that survey through an email list to your contacts, or post it on social media platforms and forums.

You can ask three important questions:

• What is your problem with X (identify the problem)?
• How do you expect the problem to be solved (learn what they think the solution might be)?
• Ask them how difficult this problem is for them on a scale from 1-10
• Ask for their email (if you’re posting on social media or forums), so you can help them with your content directly.

Research social media platforms

You can research social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or LinkedIn to better understand your audience.

To achieve this, access social media groups interested in your specific content.

Read through the comments, and analyze their problems, opinions, and pain points.

Research various forums

Researching forums is another way to understand your audience.

Forums are special online communities where people with problems gather and share their opinions.

You can search for the right forums, depending on the type of content, and analyze them like the social media platforms.

Do live interviews if possible

Doing live interviews is one of the best strategies for understanding your audience.

A live interview will connect you directly with your audience and their pain points.

You will immediately know what they need and how you can provide that content, so choose to perform live interviews as much as possible.

Separate the design from the content

The next important step is to separate your content from the design.

This is vital because each channel your content displays has separate specifications and mechanisms.

If the content is not separated from the design, loading the entire structure of the page will certainly be difficult across multiple channels.

For example, if one channel does not support XML/HTML publishing processes, the page will load slower and be structured poorly.

Instead, you make the content separately, on one file, and then proceed with the design, considering each channel’s specifications.

How to separate the design from the content

You can achieve a successful and efficient separation of content from a design by publishing smaller chunks of content on different channels.

This is done by breaking the content into structured blocks and fields.

These blocks and fields can later be repurposed, which I will discuss later.

Smaller content allows you to repurpose important content across multiple channels while optimizing speed and delivery.

If you’re using WordPress to build your site, then the chunks of information called blocks are perfect for implementing COPE.

Follow the example above for similar content construction tools.

Fine-tune your content

Once you understand your audience and develop a separate content-creating system, it’s time to fine-tune that content.

What I mean by fine-tuning is that you need to adapt your content to your target audience and the mechanisms of each channel.

I’ve already covered that you need to separate your content into small chunks to fine-tune it for specific channels.

But fine-tuning it for your audience is another thing.

How to fine-tune your content for your audience

Use heading hooks

The best way to capture your audience's attention is by implementing unique heading hooks like:

• Differentiating your content and why it is beneficial to them;
• Simplifying what your content is and how it differs from others;
• Highlight the most important benefits;
• Show them how valuable your content is;
• Use contrasting compliments;
• Stay behind your content and confirm its uniqueness;
• Show them what they will learn from your content;
• Pinpoint their pain points and offer a solution.

These heading formulas are a strong way to hook your audience on any platform or channel.

Write short and concise(on the point)paragraphs

Short and concise paragraphs are the best way to deliver content.

Being short and concise is also better for data rendering.

Better data rendering will improve site optimization across all channels and platforms.

Structure and filter your content

Once you assemble and fine-tune your content, it's time to structure and filter it properly.

The structure is important because it gives your audience quick access to information on multiple channels.

To make their experience effortless, you need to make the structure easy to understand.

For example, you can implement a contents table as a reusable block. It will provide quick navigation around your content.

It is also important to structure your content in a meaningful order.

Start by:

• Introducing the topic;
• Answer vital questions about the topic;
• Elaborate deeply on the topic;
• Conclude the topic.

After structuring the content properly, you need to filter it.

Filtering includes checking for undesirable content that you need to remove or restructure.

For example, you can filter your content for spam information and remove it before publishing.

Email spam information in your content will have a negative effect on your audience.

Proper filtering also optimizes your content and site for faster loading times and a better platform experience.

Publish the content

This is a self-explanatory step.

Try to publish your content on every platform or channel simultaneously.

Parallel publishing is key to setting a good COPE strategy and seeing how the content performs across multiple channels.

Measure the feedback data

Now that you’ve published your content, it’s time to measure its performance and how the audience reacts.

Depending on the channel and platform, you can use multiple analytics tools.

The most common are:

• Google Analytics;
• Facebook Insights.

Use Google Analytics

Google Analytics should be at the core of your COPE strategy.

It is an essential tool for measuring performance and statistics, and you can use it across multiple channels.

You can gain valuable insights into how your content performs by analyzing multiple parameters:

• Your audience - their gender, age, and geolocation;
• The impressions your content has made;
• How well-optimized your content is;
• You can perform A/B testing and analyze which content model is better.

Use Facebook Insights

Facebook is the largest social media platform, with almost 3 billion active users.

Using Facebook as a channel is important to gain content authority through COPE, and Facebook Insights provides valuable information about that content.

Facebook Insights works by using one main parameter - the audience.

By using it, you can:

• Analyze your audience’s habits;
• Learn how your content impact specific gender and age;
• Target custom audiences and lookalike audiences to maximize your COPE efficiency;
• Use marketing campaigns and paid ads to reach more people on multiple Facebook channels.

Other social media platforms have their analytical software and work similarly.

Forum channels like Quora or Reddit are also implemented with analytical tools you can use to track your COPE strategy.

Repurpose, optimize and repeat the process of content delivery

Once you measure how your content performs on multiple channels, it's time to repurpose, optimize and repeat the process.

Repurpose and optimize the valuable content

The chunks of measured data you receive from metric services should indicate how well your content has performed across platforms.

The content that you can reuse is the one that is repurposable. You rarely need to optimize this content.

On the other hand, you need to revise, remodel, and optimize the content that did poorly across a certain channel.

For example, the way to do that is to change its structure.

You can also investigate what that specific channel requires, analyze the parameters and restructure the content to them.

It doesn’t mean that content that is measured poorly is not valuable.

On the contrary, it means that content needs better optimization on a certain channel, and you shouldn’t immediately discard it.

Repeat the process

The last step is to repeat the process.

Keep monitoring your content and analyzing its performance across all channels.

Optimize it and delete invaluable parts.

Keep adding new content to keep your audience hooked across all channels and platforms.

Advantages and Disadvantages of COPE

The COPE strategy has many advantages, but it also has several disadvantages.

Advantages

It expands your audience

A key benefit of COPE is that it expands your audience across multiple platforms.

Using only one channel, like a website blog, is not enough to achieve high traffic in today’s world.

Instead, expanding your content on other platforms will also expand your audience.

For example, Facebook and Instagram are both linked together and owned by Meta.

This means you instantly have a network of over 3 billion people to show your content to.

Expanding your audience to Quora or Reddit is vital as well.

These forum-like platforms are oriented more toward educational content, while Facebook and Instagram include educational content.

It increases your content’s authority

The more channels or platforms your content is on, the more authority it will gain.

How do you get this increased content authority?

Let’s say you post your content on Facebook and reach thousands of people.

Many of those people may be professional bloggers or social media managers.

Once they see your content and assess its value, they will link back to your content on their websites.

This backlinking strategy helps your content increase its authority.

Aside from relevance, authority is one of the important criteria for Google.

So, when you pair high-quality content (relevance) with authority, you get higher rankings and better traffic.

It’s more efficient in the long run

Using the COPE model provides consistency.

What does this mean?

It means that all your channels and platforms will provide the same type of high-quality content oriented toward a specific audience.

This will help build your brand and authority because your audience constantly expects new content from you.

The more quality content you publish, your relevance and authority will rise.

However, spammy content is an important thing to avoid.

Users don’t respond well to spam emails, chat messages, or ads.

Instead, retain them by focusing on their pain points and retention through the benefits of your content.

Disadvantages of using COPE

It requires restructuring

As I mentioned in this article, the COPE model is based on small chunks or blocks of content.

Blocks of content are what make COPE possible and effective across multiple channels.

This means you must get used to transforming your large chunks of content into smaller, more manageable blocks.

Restructuring the content takes time and may seem tedious for many people.

Many people also believe that the COPE model brings other irrelevant content to their business model, which is why they avoid restructuring.

It may need a new CMS (Content Management System)

Implementing the COPE model may require additional investment, such as a new CMS.

Not all CMS are designed to support COPE, and implementing a new one will require additional resources and time.

Not implementing a new CMS will result in longer content creation and adaptability to COPE.

You will also have to manually remodel older content and repurpose it for the COPE model.

Separating the content from the design will also take significantly longer.

This complete restructuring of content seems discouraging to many people and organizations.

That is why they give up on implementing COPE, which is a huge mistake in the long run.

It may have a negative impact on your audience

Exaggerating with COPE may have a negative impact on your audience.

In other words, placing the same content on all channels may seem overwhelming for them.

Beginners often make this mistake, and it may cost them to lose their audience in the long run.

A way to avoid this is by managing the time you display the same content.

For example, showing one article on Facebook in the morning and on Instagram in the afternoon is better because of the time gap between them.

Analysis of your audience is crucial for a positive impact.

You must know what they want, and the time of day they are most active.

Conclusion

Using the COPE model is essential, whether you’re an independent blogger or own a large company.

Random content distribution is a dead-end street, and you will make zero progress in the long run without the proper strategy.

By implementing COPE, you will also start to automate the content creation process.

In time, you will add a new CMS to fully utilize COPE’s potential.

Now that you know how to implement COPE, I hope you will maximize your content distribution and gain the maximum benefit possible.