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You invest your time writing or recording authority content for a reason: to grow your business while helping your ideal clients and buyers.
Which means you’re not interested in scatter-shot pieces that dilute your impact and waste your time. So how do you ensure your content is working for both you and your ideal audience?
Start limiting your output to three distinct lanes of content—themes—to guide your production.
At first, it feels counter-intuitive, but when you force yourself into the right lanes—not too narrow, not too wide—you can start building not only a body of work, but a sustainable business.
And it’s the opposite of boring: focusing inside some comfortable guardrails still gives you plenty of depth to explore and build out your expertise.
Obviously, it helps if you’re exquisitely clear on your target audience. And the more niche you go, generally the better. (If you struggle with clarity on that, you might try my Client Avatar worksheet which you can download here.)
You’ll also want to articulate your point of view: how you see the world you and your target audience live in. What’s the transformation you make in your audience—fleshed out into a belief system?
Maybe you believe that creativity isn’t just for the chosen few (creativity consultant). Or that everyone is a leader and our job is to find our leadership voice (leadership consultant). Or that going cheap costs too much (graphic designer).
Taking your lead beliefs and translating them into an articulate, well-thought out point of view will give you a giant neon sign pointing to the stickiest way to design your lanes of content.
Let’s take that creativity consultant for example. If his niche is B2B SaaS technology companies, he might decide to write about increasing creativity in teams, mindset (how to think about creativity), creativity for software developers…you get the idea.
By choosing no more than a handful of themes, his writing becomes more deeply interesting to his SaaS audience. They’re not wading through creativity articles written for Fortune 500s or speeches designed for ad agency creatives.
And that focus is like catnip to those who can help amplify his message: B2B SaaS tech founders, media platforms targeting that audience and tech founder podcast hosts.
Pro tip: if you’re not sure you’re designing the right lanes for yourself, set a timer for 10 minutes and start drafting headlines for possible stories. If you can come up with at least 10 tempting ideas without trying too hard, you’ve probably got a winner.
Sure it’s easier if you get the lanes right first time out, but that’s actually not the goal (remember, perfection is the enemy).
The goal is to start: to experiment finding your voice and your audience. Right now.
Related: Why Your Podcast Pitches Might Not Be Working (And How To Fix Them)