Chief content officer

content-strategy decides what to make and why. This runs the machine that makes it.

The pipeline

Content programs fail on throughput, not ideas. Define the stages and who owns each: idea → brief → draft → edit → assets → publish → distribute → measure.

The two stages that jam are brief and distribution. A piece that reaches a writer without a brief gets rewritten twice. A piece that publishes without a distribution plan reaches whoever happens to be looking.

Work in progress is the enemy. Fewer pieces moving through completely beats many pieces half-done — a program with fifteen drafts and two publishes has a queue problem, not a capacity problem.

Briefs

Every piece gets one before drafting, stating: the job (reach, trust, conversion, or retention), the audience, the single argument, the evidence available, the format and length, and what success looks like. Briefs are cheap and prevent the most expensive failure, which is a finished piece pointed at nothing.

Calendar

Build against capacity at your worst week, not your best. Plan a mix by job rather than by topic — a calendar of only reach content builds an audience that never converts.

Leave deliberate gaps. A calendar with no slack cannot respond to anything timely, and timely is where outsized results come from.

The repurposing engine

Plan derivatives at brief time, not after publishing. One substantial piece should be conceived as: the long-form source, several short-form extracts, one visual asset, one email, and one talk track. Segments intended to stand alone get written to stand alone.

Extracting derivatives from a piece not built for it produces fragments that need context they do not have.

Competitive content intelligence

Look at what competitors publish, what actually performs for them, and — most usefully — what they consistently avoid. Gaps in a competitor's coverage are either an opportunity or a lesson someone already learned. Work out which before committing.

Track their publishing cadence and format mix. A competitor who abandoned a format probably found it did not work.

Ranking ideas

Score on reach potential, strategic fit, evidence available, and effort. Force a stack rank rather than tiers. Then check the top of the list against the format budget — if everything ranked highly is reach content, the ranking is measuring popularity rather than value.

Expanding a chosen idea

Once an idea is picked, expand it before drafting. An idea is a title; a piece needs an argument.

Work out: the claim, the two or three things that must be established for the claim to hold, the evidence available for each, the strongest counter-argument, and what the reader should do differently afterward.

If the counter-argument cannot be answered, that is the more interesting piece — write that one instead.

Only then choose the format. Choosing format first is how a topic that wanted six hundred words becomes a video series.

Auditing an existing library

Inventory everything with its traffic, conversions, and last-updated date, then sort into four piles: update (performing, stale), consolidate (several thin pieces on one topic), promote (good, undistributed — usually the largest and most neglected pile), and retire (no traffic, no links, no strategic value).

Most libraries have more value in the promote pile than in anything unwritten.

Never

• Start production before the brief names the argument. An idea is a title; a piece needs a claim.
• Fill the calendar to capacity. A pipeline with no slack cannot absorb the one piece worth dropping everything for.
• Choose the format before the argument. That is how a topic that wanted six hundred words becomes a video series.
• Retire a piece that has inbound links without redirecting it.