Content Creation Strategy: How to 10X Your Reach

All right, so here's the deal. I've spent the past 8 months creating what I call a content machine. And basically what this enables me to do is something pretty magical. What I'm doing right now, I'm sitting in my office, uh, we have a concept for a video and I have a rough outline. I'm gonna record this video over the next 20 to 30 minutes. I'll click stop, I'll upload the video, and then in the next week or two out will come a newsletter draft that I can review and publish, a LinkedIn post that I can review and publish, a Twitter thread that I can review and publish, a long-form YouTube video and out will come a bunch of clips and I get to see them all. And then I say, okay, go ahead. Those are exactly what I want. And I send them. This is what I want as a creator. I want to just work on creating great content and then have it squirt out the other side, just ready to go. So this is my journey to create this machine and here's how you can do it yourself and how it works. Let's go back in history. About a year ago, I was a solo creator just writing Twitter stuff and I'm having to do everything all by myself. I would have to figure out what the idea of, uh, of the thing I wanted to write was. I would have to go research that idea. Then I would have to put together a rough script and an outline. I would draft the thing, right? And I write it out and then I come back and like, I'm a weird Twitter creator. So I would go through over weeks for each Twitter thread, 3, 4, 5, sometimes 7 or 8 different times that I would go through and iterate and change my writing on that thread. And then depending upon the platform I was on, you know, I'd have to come up with the right thumbnail, then I would have to schedule it. And then I would have to go back to that thread or go back to that thing that I had written on Twitter later on and figure out like, did it work? Like I'd gather data from it, look at the replies, all that kind of stuff. And I started to hear rumors and see stuff where people like everybody from Dave Ramsey to a lot of the, the Twitter creators, especially the ones that have branched out to other platforms, like, I saw what they were doing was actually starting to build a level of, well, just like automation behind them. So, okay, in 2023, like, I want to do a couple different things. And one of those is, uh, number one, I want to scale how much contribution I'm making on the Twitter platform. And number two, like, I want to diversify away from Twitter, right? Like, you don't know what's going to happen. They could turn off the servers tomorrow or whatever. Okay, so fast forward to a year later, and here's what we have today. And basically, as I said before, I can record a video right now and then content for all the different platforms like squirts out the other end in my voice that I get to approve. When I decided to build a machine like this, I had some like core principles. I want it to be my messages, and if it's somebody else's ideas, like, that's just BS. Like, I, I don't want to misrepresent it. And that's, that's just a core value of mine. I don't have any problem with people like hiring a ghostwriter, but that's just not how I'm gonna do stuff. Any machine that I had to create has to exclusively be my content, my ideas, my messages, uh, and my original stuff. And otherwise, like, that's a big no. Whatever I create through this content machine, I want it to feel like I'm just working on stuff that's super high value. The ideation, basic rough outline, and then, and then building the content itself. Like, that's the stuff I want to do. Like, I don't want to be there choosing words or fixing typos and stuff like that. I don't want to be publishing stuff. I don't want to be doing stuff that feels like, well, somebody else could be doing it. With those design principles in mind, today here's what we have. Um, starting with nothing last year, a year later, I now have a team of 4 people, and the team of 4 people runs this machine. So to go through who each person is, we have an admin who functions on admin and operational stuff. Her name is Marina. We hired her through one of my businesses, which is an offshoring company called Near. We'll put the link below. Hire with Near.com. Call them, they're terrific. So she helps us through this whole process with posting stuff. If we're going to rerun content or whatever, like she will schedule all that stuff and help run those type of things. And then she helps with the admin of the company as well. So, you know, just like any real company, we have to do payroll and all that kind of stuff. Person number 2, he is located in Toronto. His name is Will Staunton. Um, and basically what he does is he functions on everything written word. Over the past 9 months, Will has basically learned through lots of one-on-one time with me, uh, how I think about stuff, also how I write, which is one of the reasons why I want to do all this stuff in-house. Because if he can take my written word and edit it but still let it sound like me, that's like super important and the thing I really focus on. And again, the design of this machine is it needs to be authentic communication from me and not somebody else's words. So Will doesn't write his own words and masquerade it as mine like a typical ghostwriter does. He functions more as an editor and processor of stuff. So he will take things like this video, take the words that I'm using, and then distill those down, draft things in my language, uh, that I can then edit and have reflect exactly what I mean, and then click send at the end, right? He's there for ideation. He's there for research. He helps with scripting and outlining, all that kind of stuff. And what's interesting is each week Will is part of a content creation meeting and we plan out the calendar of stuff I'm going to publish over the next weeks and months. Just what Will does for the written word stuff, we have a gentleman who focuses entirely on video, and his name is Dalton. So he functions exclusively as the general manager for video stuff. If, if he could choose to do anything in the world, it is fiddle around and get in the weeds in YouTube and video analytics. And he's the one that's in there like playing the games that you have to play on YouTube around thumbnails, around the right hooks, around all that kind of stuff. When I got the prompt to do this video, he basically has a set of hooks that I'm I'm supposed to record at the beginning, and we'll see how well those work, uh, when they get A/B tested when we publish the thing. Anyway, we'll come back to the details around that. And then lastly, there's the person who's all of those people's boss. I do not want to be CEO of the content creation machine. The good news is I was able to hire somebody who is CEO of my media company, and his name is Ty. And what's awesome about Ty is this is the right time in his life to be doing all that kind of business building stuff that I'm not excited about anymore. He also manages the monetization side of all of this, which is, look, if I'm going to be paying all these people to work on generating more content, I don't I don't necessarily need to make money, but I don't wanna lose money. So we are monetizing different stuff through ads. I sell some courses and stuff like that. The good news is I don't really wanna work on any of that business building stuff either, uh, or business selling. And Tai just takes care of all of that. So it's kind of beautiful in the way the machine works. Okay, so let's go through how these 10 steps of content creation work and what happens with each one of the people, uh, in the content machine so far. And remember, this content machine is basically taking a video like this and turning into content for all of these platforms. So kind of beautiful. So the ideation Creation phase happens every Monday. So every week we have this 90-minute content creation meeting. It covers our entire content calendar of what we're gonna put out. Along the way, we've had our Slack channel where we've been talking about ideas. We've been sharing brainstorms, uh, and things we've seen working or not working, uh, on social media and putting ideas there that we can then talk about in that content creation, that calendar meeting. From that, maybe we'll go and research some stuff. How is this being done for other folks? That sort of thing. Or if there's things and data we need to gather, one of the team members, whether it's Dalton or Will, may go gather that data and then bring that back for the next step, which is the prompt/script, which most of the videos and stuff I'm doing now is totally just a prompt because we discovered when I was reading a script that I sounded too robotic. So now I just sit here and I pretend like I'm teaching somebody who's in our target market something. And yeah, from that there's typically a prompt that gets sent to me and it shows up in my inbox, in my email inbox. The team sends me an email and it's usually a Word doc. Here's the idea. Here's the thing we need you to record. I will type some notes into that as an outline that I will then talk to. And so some people talk about this, like Ali Abdaal is, is a person that uses this as well, where it's just like, I'm just going to have a rough outline and I'm going to talk to you like a real person following the outline. And so we have discovered that's the best thing that works for us. So from that prompt, that like 1 to 2 page document that the team sends me, I now have a work item. I sit down, I record it, and then when I click stop, I have a draft of this video. And basically because I'm recording here at my desk, I click stop, I upload the video to an online file sharing service, and that goes straight into the team for the machine to start working. And the different people take the video that I'm recording here, and then they use that to build the next steps. Dalton will take it first, and Dalton starts to build a narrative out of this, cutting out where I talk in circles or repeat myself or, you know, make bodily noises or whatever. And then he comes back and we have a rough cut of the video. Where he's taken the narrative that I've created here and put it down into something pretty tight, right? And people will give him feedback and he iterates with the editor that we have on staff. 'Cause I haven't mentioned this, we have a full-time editor now that we just hired, um, who just only works on my YouTube videos and Shorts, full-time person. So that revision comes back through and we may go through that process several times. Along the way, we are generating thumbnail ideas and, uh, title ideas. All right, so that all gets revised, all for the video side, it gets approved. And then we have a narrative content, all that stuff ready to go. And then we have an authentic video for me. There'll be some Shorts that also come out and go through the same process. At this point, the written word team takes over, and that's Will, with help from Marina. And they go through this video and they start to turn this into a script and a set of narrative, written narrative that comes out of exactly the content I have here. And they do their best to write it in my voice and they basically like create a draft at that point. Like what comes back to me next within the next week or so is they have taken and written this content as me that I then get to review. I edit it. Sometimes it doesn't sound like me and I edit it to be more like me. But after 9 months, they've actually gotten really good at sounding exactly like me. The only way we really got to that point was just lots of iteration. Like Will has been great about like, okay, he sends me stuff, I edit it, and then he gets a little bit closer to my voice each individual time. And after hundreds of times of doing that, like he's gotten to where he's pretty darn good. And you don't get that with an agency process. That's one of the things I I like about this is because these people are on my team, they only work on Girdley stuff. Like we're going to produce really high stuff. And that's the last kind of design goal of a content machine thing that I think is really important. So at this point now we have seen, you know, the video, the thumbnails, those are getting published by Dalton. Uh, then we have our second set of stuff, which is the written word stuff. We do not publish everything content-wise at the same time. So because we're. Are not synchronous. Some of the written stuff shows up sometimes, the video stuff shows up sometimes, and that's totally okay. Sometimes people will be like, hey, I saw this on your video from 3 weeks ago. It's like, yeah, that's supposed to work that way. And it goes back to this idea that when you're generating content as a content creator, like, you got to rehash your, your stuff all the time because you're advertising. So stuff gets published, and then at the next meeting on, uh, on Monday mornings, uh, we'll look at the data from some of the stuff in the previous weeks. And some of them go crazy. I'll get like 1,000 likes on Twitter, 2,000 likes, million views, whatever. And some of them totally bomb, and you learn from that stuff and you go on. Failure is just part of the process. Some of this stuff works and some of the stuff doesn't. But again, like, social media is a special place. It's just the hits that matter. So you just got to keep iterating, get good, and then one or two posts will drive everything for you. And that's just perfectly normal. And you have to love to get into the grind. And I think what's beautiful about this is I can grind at the stuff I truly love— creating, helping, ideating, right? And then working with a great team. And this makes it much more fun for me to scale. And frankly, it was just going be impossible for me to scale beyond Twitter at the content quality level that I wanted to be at without having this sort of help in this sort of machine.