"So should we just put more content out?"
I get that question in almost every one of these conversations, usually right after somebody has understood why they need to be findable and started doing the math on how many blog posts that implies. It's the wrong question, and the reason it's wrong is encouraging: volume isn't your constraint. Deciding what you're the authority on is the constraint, and once that's settled the production problem gets a lot smaller than it looks.
This is the third of these primers. The AEO one covers being cited by the answer engines and the SEO one covers the fundamentals underneath it. Both of them tell you to go write deep pages. This one is about how you actually do that without a content team, a budget, or a personality transplant.
Start with the scaffold, not the calendar
A scaffold is the handful of things your business is the authority on. Not topics you could write about. Topics you'd be annoyed to see somebody else get wrong.
Most people skip straight to a content calendar, which is a schedule pretending to be a strategy. Thirty posts on thirty topics leaves you with thirty shallow pages and no accumulated authority anywhere. Four topics, gone deep on repeatedly, compound.
CrewLAB's scaffold has four pillars: payments and registration, coach-to-athlete connection, athlete health and wellbeing, and admin communication. Every piece of content they publish hangs off one of those. That's not a limitation, it's the reason a search engine and a language model both understand what they're for.
To find yours, write down what you already explain over and over. The things you say on every sales call. The corrections you find yourself making. The stuff you'd argue about at a bar. Three to five is right. Two means you're underselling what you know, and eight means you haven't decided.
Then, under each pillar, write the questions. Real ones, phrased the way somebody would actually type them, including the slightly embarrassing ones nobody writes for. Those are usually your best pages, because everybody else was too polished to answer them.
Two people worth listening to, who don't agree
Ann Handley wrote Everybody Writes, has been Chief Content Officer at MarketingProfs for the better part of two decades, and helped define what content marketing meant before most of the current advice existed. Her position is quality-first and unmoved by the arrival of AI. Fewer, better things. A distinct voice is the one asset you can't automate, and the moment you outsource the writing to a template, a committee, or a model, you get something that is technically published and functionally invisible. Her read on AI is that it raised the stakes on human connection rather than lowering them.
Ross Simmonds runs Foundation, wrote Create Once, Distribute Forever, and has spent a decade making the opposite argument with receipts. Most teams spend ninety percent of their effort on making the thing and treat distribution as a tweet on launch day. He thinks that ratio is backwards and roughly criminal. A great piece nobody sees was worth nothing, so the work is remixing, republishing, and pushing one asset into every place your audience already gathers, for years.
The disagreement is real and it's about where the marginal hour goes. Handley says into the writing. Simmonds says into getting it in front of people.
I land in a specific place on this. Simmonds is right about the ratio for anyone with something already published, which is most people reading this, sitting on work that three people saw. Handley is right about the floor. Distribution multiplies whatever you made, and if what you made is slop, you've built a bigger slop distribution machine. So: make fewer things, make them properly, then be relentless about the second half in a way that will feel excessive and won't be.
Distribution multiplies whatever you made. That's an argument for making it good, not for making more of it.
The pipeline
This is the part people want, so here it is in order. It takes about ninety minutes end to end once you've done it twice.
- Write your prompts first. Pick one pillar and write three to five questions inside it. This is the step everybody skips, and it's exactly why their recordings ramble and their drafts have no shape.
- Record a voice note. Ten minutes, into your phone, in your own words, working through the questions. Don't script it and don't re-record. The unpolished version is the one that sounds like a person, which is the whole asset.
- Transcribe it. Any tool. This step is free now.
- Template it. Question as the heading, direct answer underneath, step-by-step below that, FAQ at the bottom. Same shape every time.
- Put a human layer on it. Cut the throat-clearing, fix the register, add the specific number or example your talking self skipped. This is the step you can't hand to a machine, and it's the difference between the work and the slop.
- Publish, then check the engines. Back to the monthly check from the AEO primer. Then go again.
The reason this works is that you already explain this stuff well out loud. You've done it a hundred times on calls. You are not short of content, you're short of capture.
One long thing, then everything else
Always start with the long-form piece and cut derivatives from it. The blog post or the video essay is the source of truth, and the LinkedIn post, the short, the carousel, and the newsletter section are all extractions from that one artifact.
Going the other direction, starting with scattered short posts and hoping a body of work assembles itself, works for a person and fails for a company. People attach ideas to people. It's why an individual with a camera now carries more weight than a network, and why nobody can tell you what a mid-sized software brand thinks about anything.
Which brings up the uncomfortable requirement. You have to have an opinion. Not a hot take, a position, one you'd defend to somebody who disagreed. Write that down first as the thing everything else refers back to, and let the rest be amendments to it. Content without a stance reads as filler to humans and gets treated as redundant by models, which have already read nine hundred versions of the neutral summary.
The archive you're already sitting on
Almost every business I talk to has years of recorded calls, webinars, workshops, and internal decks nobody has looked at since. That's usually the largest content asset in the building and it's invisible, because audio isn't searchable and nobody's had a reason to convert it.
Pull it, run it all to text, and read what comes back. You'll find the arguments you've already made a hundred times, phrased better than you'd phrase them cold, ready for the template above. It's a real project and often worth getting help with. The alternative is re-explaining the same six things to ten thousand people one at a time.
Record your meetings going forward, too. Half the pieces I publish started as a conversation where somebody asked me a good question and I answered it properly for the first time.
Where to start this week
- Write your scaffold. Three to five pillars, on paper, in twenty minutes. It'll feel too simple. That's the point.
- Pick the pillar you'd argue about and write five questions under it.
- Record ten minutes on the first question. Don't edit it, don't publish it yet, just prove to yourself the raw material exists.
You'll know within a week whether this works for you, and it costs almost nothing to find out.
If you'd rather hand the whole thing to someone, that's what I do.
Positions attributed to Ann Handley (MarketingProfs, "Everybody Writes") and Ross Simmonds (Foundation, "Create Once, Distribute Forever") are my summary of their published work, not quotes.
