How new content creators can produce more (and better) content

Illustration by Dezzy Jones

For a long time, I did things backwards.

While trying to kickstart and sustain my content creation journey, I was drowning trying to keep up with posting on all the social channels, writing and producing YouTube videos, studying lead funnels and email campaigns–and everything else in between.

I’d look at other creators who were producing massive outputs (I’m talking like multiple posts a day on multiple channels, well-crafted video essays and blog articles on a weekly basis, and a book launch on the horizon) and I was stumped trying to figure out how to make this work. 

I’m an ambitious person.

I’m full of ideas.

I’ve got the skills to write, produce, and publish just like anyone else.

So what was my bottleneck? How do content creators produce so much stuff without having a team to back them? While, yes, many content creators grow to a point where they have a dedicated staff of writers and optimization specialists to keep their ship afloat, they had to start their journey somewhere. And more often than not, they began their journey alone. 

Just like you and I.

The Wrong Approach:

The issue with my approach (and a trap that a lot of new content creators fall into) was that I focused on cosmetics.

This means starting with the surface-level or less essential components of content creation. It’s pouring all our time into garnishing a dish that hasn’t even been cooked yet.

It makes sense why we (entry-level content creators) do this. When we’re on the outside looking in at successful content creators, all we see is the storefront that they have in place. We see the formatting of their landing pages, the cadence and style of their social posts, and the layouts of their newsletters. And since they’ve “made it” in content creation, naturally, we feel that we must study and emulate their techniques in our own infant brand. 

We start trying to recreate the tip of their iceberg. We spend hours consuming content on the bells and whistles of a successful content creation business, and overlook the foundational “meat” of their success, which is:

The sometimes unglamorous, laborious, and repetitive state of deep work.

In other words, the main priority of a content creation journey is content creation. Focus on that to the fullest extent, and everything else comes later.

The Right Approach:

As I mentioned in the beginning, I went about this whole thing backwards. I tried to pump out partially-developed ideas on every platform, every week. It became a hamster wheel, and I always felt like I had a deficit of collateral. 

Not enough stuff to post.

No new YouTube scripts written.

The content calendar is drying.

Finally, I decided to just stop and go back to the drawing board:

What can I do differently to make this ship sail smoothly and sustainably?

The Prioritization Pyramid. 

This framework draws inspiration from Gary Keller’s The One Thing, and is all about taking the time to conduct a quality assessment to find the one thing you can do that would make everything else on your to-do list easier or unnecessary? What’s the one thing that’s more essential than anything else in your business? Strip away all the cosmetics–what is the driver of your content creation model?

For most of us, it’s probably sitting down, and spending large spans of time writing, thinking, and producing valuable pieces of content.

It’s once you’ve built a strong, impenetrable foundation of valuable content generation that you can ascend upward through the pyramid, and worry about other things like administrative work, marketing strategy, partnerships, and whatever else.

Here’s a simple prioritization pyramid I made for my content creation business. This restructuring has allowed everything in my business to progress with a more natural flow. The foundational requirement is that I write a lot.

Then, once I have a growing library of valuable ideas in written-form, I’ve got a ton of collateral to build out the other areas of my business with. Those long-form writings become blog posts, book chapters, social captions, YouTube scripts, and Twitter threads, effectively fueling my social presence with ease.

There’s no more scrambling trying to figure out how I’m going to feed all of these beasts. I do the brunt work at the beginning, by writing everyday. Repurposing this written content into other areas is the easy part.

Everything else is lateral stimuli until you’ve gotten the most important thing under control.

Ali Abdaal has a great podcast episode that touches on the importance of exclusively focusing on and attacking the bottlenecks of your business. I recommend giving it a listen.

This shift in approach feels so painfully obvious and simple once applying it. It’s an easy switch prioritization that results in better outputs at a higher volume. 

It’s the key to compounding value, and it’s something you can implement right now.

— Dezzy

There’s more to explore.

I make content to help people identify the mental blockages that prevent them from doing great work.

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