It must be a decade ago that Ross Simmonds began espousing his DREAM mantra in his marketing seminars. It stood for “Distribution Rules Everything Around Me.”

Years have passed and Simmonds is still preaching about the importance of distribution, now in his new book Create Once, Distribute Forever. The book establishes concisely and effectively that distribution is the key to state-of-the-art digital marketing.

Simmonds, for those of you who don’t know him, is the Founder of Halifax-based Foundation Marketing and a bit of a legend in tech/marketing circles. He’s a wonderful and witty speaker, an insightful mentor, and literally has the coolest Twitter/X handle in existence (@thecoolestcool). He’s even a congenial Philadelphia Eagles fan. (We knew there had to be at least one somewhere.)

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His lucid prose brings out his congeniality, but more important it delivers an impactful message to anyone interested in reaching potential clients. Simmonds’ sweet spot is B2B SaaS marketing, but his methodology extends well beyond that narrow focus. It pertains to all marketing. Personally, I found a ton of useful information for the marketing of my novels.

At no point in his book does Simmonds diminish the importance of quality of content in digital marketing. He simply believes it’s more important to get that content out there to more people using proper channels and techniques. And as the title suggests, he believes in repackaging and recirculating content again and again, in various forms and on various channels.

“Today, I can reach millions of people and earn millions of dollars without dropping a penny on paid media because of the distribution channels I’ve built,” he writes.

Create Once, Distribute Forever is a step-by-step guide to maximizing the return on each piece of content. A dedicated fan of Sherlock Holmes, Simmonds has devised what he calls his Sherlock Homeboy Method of marketing. In other words, you become a sleuth researching the best way possible to capture an audience, then you attack those channels doggedly.

“Don’t assume you know where your audience is spending their time,” Simmonds advises, adding the marketer should reverse-engineer marketing channels to discover where they can reach their target audience.

The holy grail for Simmonds is to unlock the content-market fit.

Once you discover the best channels, find ways to use and re-use the content you’ve created, he says. For example, say you wrote a blog. You published it, and it had a few hits, and your friends liked it when you pushed it out on Facebook.

That, says Simmonds, is only the beginning.

Put pithy quotes from the blog on other social media channels, linking back to the original article. Use the blog as the basis of a YouTube video. Take clips of that video for Facebook and Instagram stories. And don’t feel you can only post this stuff once. As the title says, you create the content once but you can use it FOREVER to capture the people who missed it the first (second, third, fourth, etc.) time. 

“Content marketing remix is the act of taking one asset and turning it into multiple, slightly adjusted assets,” writes Simmonds. “The written word is extremely versatile. And a long-form blog post could become a shorter blog post, which in turn could become the basis for status updates on all of your social media channels and platforms that operate in short-form text posts.”

The strengths of this book are its detail and its practical application. Simmonds takes his readers through each distribution channel – from emails to social networks to Medium and Reddit – discussing the strengths and weaknesses of each, and how to use them to your advantage.

If there’s a shortcoming to the book, it’s that Simmonds mentions these tactics can generate a lot of money, but I was left wondering how. Was it that they drove sales for a product? Did they bring clients to his marketing company? Or did the content itself generate revenue when crafted and distributed properly? I get that real marketers and social media specialists already know the answers, but I would have liked the point fleshed out.

I’m picking nits here, because this is an overwhelmingly splendid book.  It shows how to market content properly and sounds a call to action to get out and do it.