My Best Content Strategy

If you’ve tried to start a writing habit, you will get stuck on your ‘content strategy’ somewhere along the line. When you’re feeling lost, it’s easy to get sucked into the vortex of content strategy advice:

• Write when you feel inspired
• Write x5 tweets a day
• Write 2 pages

It’s why so many people have ambitions to create an audience but they rarely get past week three. Having a content strategy that helps you grow, that’s the hard bit — and some argue it misses the point altogether:

But if you’re getting stuck on content strategy and don’t know where to go, (and it’s becoming a blocker to your writing), here’s the best content strategy I know.

Step 1: Understand how focus impacts the mind

​Cornell University found that it takes a person 9.5 minutes to get into a productive workflow after switching between digital apps.

Research suggests that context switching (going from one context to another) reduces productivity by up to 40%.

The trouble with spending time on your content strategy (instead of actually writing content) is that you are context-switching. You’re going from ‘big picture’ to ‘fine detail’ and it drains your energy.

If you’re finding that every time you sit down to write your mind is taken by the concept of your ‘content strategy’ then here’s what to do:

• Pick a day in the next week to focus on content strategy
• Spend 2 hours that day planning, thinking, agreeing
• Plan to work to that strategy for the next 3 months

The trouble with a content strategy is you can spend endless hours trying to perfect it all the while avoiding the very thing that will grow your audience — doing the work.

You’re better off thinking about it once and getting on with the work than you are spending hours and hours tweaking tiny things that ultimately don’t matter.

Here’s how to do it once…

Step 2: Optimize for sustainability

According to Harvard Business Review, setting microhabits (incremental adjustments over time) can be impactful when it comes to building new habits.

Like anything, if you try to do too much too soon you’ll end up with a bad result (and if you’re anything like me) a bad mood. Developing your content strategy is no different, the aim is to build a way to create, deliver and manage content that is sustainable.

Intense short bursts of writing followed by severe lows (and exhaustion) is not a long-term approach. Here’s how I think about my content approach:

• What am I trying to achieve (growth, money, excellence)?
• How am I measuring success (see above)?*
• How long am I doing this for?

Depending on the goals of the quarter depends on the cadence of content and the approach to my content. But I set the direction for content at the start of the quarter and then don’t think about it again.

*I go more in detail about how I measure success of my content in Module 5 of the Medium Blueprint (lesson 3).

Pick a cadence you can keep up with, don’t optimize for output, figure out what you can reasonably do in a week and strive towards that.

Step 3: Hone your craft

​Judit Polgár became a grand master chess player at age 15. Her parents László and Klara homeschooled their three daughters and instilled a daily chess practice. By 2000, all three daughters were ranked in the top 10 female chess players in the world.

Intentional practice. That’s often the distinction that makes somebody great. Not just when they show up, it’s how they show up. Proof? In 1985, professor Benjamin Bloom looked at the childhoods of 120 elite performers. The features that correlated success:

• Intense practice
• Devoted teachers

When you show up matters, sure, you’re never going to get to where you want to go if you dedicate 2 hours a month to your craft. But as long as you dedicate some time, most days (I write 2 hours a day, 5–6 days a week), the more important endeavour is how you spend that time.

It’s not what you do, how you do it, how often. It’s the content. It’s the content that matters. It’s the ideas you share. It’s the stories you tell.

Whether that’s a tweet a week, a thread a day or whatever. It’s the content that makes you. It’s the content that builds your audience, it’s the content that grows your audience.