The Highest Leverage Content Strategy For Writers In 2026

Here's where I am really starting to spend a lot of time and think about moving forward is, and this is a combination of a handful of different things. Did anyone see the chart recently that showed the social platforms that people use the most by demographic? It was released for like the past year. Anyone want to guess what the number one social platform was? For every single demographic, it was the same platform for every demographic, was the number one most used social platform. It was YouTube, which is, which is very surprising. It was YouTube for every demographic. I think that, and this, this is where it's like I'm saying this as a writer, you know, I think that as AI becomes more embedded in everything that we do. And AI is clearly impacting text the most first. I think that YouTube is, is having its moment and going to have its moment because it's a, it's a medium where, like, for the time being, it's very hard to fake that with AI. It's, it's a medium where you, you actually are like, that's the real person, you know. And so I think that even if your goal isn't to be a YouTuber or anything like that, I think that there is tremendous value in creating video content. And it doesn't have to be high production quality. It doesn't have to be like you playing the YouTube game. Whenever someone asks me, I just had a friend ask me this last week. Whenever someone asks me how to get started on YouTube, I give the same advice every time, which is you should write a handful of long-form pieces and then you should open Loom and you should talk over the long-form piece that you wrote. So you basically just like solo podcast. Let me just riff on this thing that I just wrote section by section. And you should do that like 50 times in a row. Your first 50 videos should be that. Now, why? The reason is because, and this is coming from someone who has invested a lot of money, like probably north of a quarter million dollars at this point in various studios. And we had our studio in Miami and we had all the equipment there. And then I moved to Arizona and I rebuilt my studio here and I've tried a bunch of different things and technologies and hired people to help. I've, I've tried everything. Okay. Video is such a different skill and requires such different skills that it really doesn't matter how high of production quality you have. It doesn't matter because for the first 50 to 100 videos, all of the skills that you have to build have nothing to do with production quality. They have to do with you getting used to talking to a camera. They have to do with you building the endurance and the muscle of of doing it. They have to do with you understanding like the different little workflows. They have to do with you writing out the content ahead of time and then being able to sort of riff on it. Like all of those skills have nothing to do with production quality. And so you might as well save the money and just do that in a Loom video and build all of those skills. And then once you become proficient, you can always level up the production quality later. Okay, now why am I saying— why am I saying this? I think that the magical pairing and where I am gonna start shifting our whole internal content strategy, I think the magical pairing is long-form newsletter with long-form YouTube video. And YouTube video could be Loom, it could be high production quality, doesn't matter. It's long-form newsletter with long-form video.

Okay.

Yeah. Honestly, Dan Coe has props to him because he's executed this model really well over the past few, few years. The reason is because the newsletter is really the forcing function for you to clarify for you to clarify your thinking. It's like, okay, I have to— what am I really trying to say? And the newsletter is this big bucket of clarifying what you're trying to say. The Loom video is you're doing a bunch of different things. One, you are allowing— you're able to reach a very different sort of person because you're in such a completely different medium. Some people love to read, some people want to watch YouTube videos, right? Some people want to read, some people want to watch. So you're, you're already sort of like doubling the amount of people that you can reach with the idea because it's in two completely different formats. Second of all is you— the, the two can compound on each other because when you send the newsletter as a newsletter, you can embed the video. So it's like, hey, you could read this or you could watch this. What does that do? That means your newsletter list becomes the engine that starts to bump every single YouTube video that you put out. That external traffic increases the likelihood that the video will perform well on YouTube. So it becomes a very virtuous cycle. Okay. The third thing that happens is that that YouTube video then allows you to unlock all of these other forms of leverage. You're like, oh, I have this video. Now I can splice it apart into opus. Now I have this video. I can repurpose this video on other platforms. Like if you notice here on X, this is what we do. Like I took this whole YouTube video from last week and I just put it on X. I put it on another platform. You can do the same thing with newsletters, and you take a newsletter and you go, I'm going to post it as an article on X. And so the, the high-level idea is basically, how do I once a week write the highest quality newsletter I can, which builds my list, which clarifies my thinking, right? All of these things work in your favor over time. And then how do I create a YouTube video or even just like a Loom video talking about, talking over the thing that I wrote? That is the big step one. And like the highest leverage thing you can do is that because what are the highest leverage things? The highest leverage things are you come up with the idea, you clarify the thinking by writing out the long-form version, And then you record the video because, like, you're not gonna have your VA record your YouTube video, right? So you do the highest leverage stuff, and then from there you build the process of, all right, and now what are all the things that I can squeeze out of it? So that newsletter, inside that newsletter, or actually that entire newsletter, can also be an X article. Inside of that newsletter is probably also a handful of standalone text posts. So you pluck out another 10 or 20 of those, you schedule them out. Those text posts of the highest performing ones become screenshots on Instagram. Those screenshots on Instagram also become images on Pinterest. Your YouTube video becomes Shorts that go on YouTube and TikTok and Instagram, which you can schedule from right inside here. The highest performing ones, maybe you also post on X or you also post on LinkedIn. So does everyone see like how, how all these pieces start to click together? Where you want to end up is you want your role to be the highest leverage activities. You're the one who comes up with the ideas. You're the one who clarifies the thinking in a long-form piece, and you're the one who creates the YouTube video. And then you either have a VA or a small team, or a VA plus the robots, or a small team plus the robots, or maybe just you arming the robots, helping you take all of those high-leverage things and go, now how do I squeeze as much juice out of it as possible? And this is one of those things where like the first time that you do this, it is going to take you a while. It's gonna take you like a whole afternoon, like 5 straight hours, you know? 'Cause it's the first time you're doing it. And you're like, "All right, so I gotta do this, and then once that's done, wait a second, I gotta reorient. Now I'm going to this platform. Oh, okay, but wait, I forgot a step. I gotta go look at the analytics, then I gotta—" It's gonna take you a while the first time. But the goal is then as you do it more and as you document your process more, A, it becomes faster, and B, you can add in more leverage. And that, that is how one person, that's how an individual all of a sudden is able to, to have content going out on every platform. And it looks like, whoa, they have a whole team behind them. It's like, not necessarily. You just took the time to build the processes and now you have leverage, right? You, you're able to take the, the, the content that you spent a lot of time thinking about and working on, and now you just chop it apart and distribute it.

By the way, if you're brand new to writing online and want a really easy place to start, I recommend reading The Art and Business of Online Writing. I wrote this book after I'd been writing online for over a decade and accumulated over a billion views on my work, monetizing my writing in all sorts of unconventional ways. And I wrote this book to give other writers like you a way to skip all the lessons that I had to learn the hard way and start seeing success from your writing a whole lot faster than I did. So if writing online is something you're thinking about or something you're actively practicing, I recommend picking up a copy of The Art and Business of Online Writing.