My Content Map: A Tool for All Creators and Make No Mistake, Everyone will be a Creator
Investing in yourself is more than just about money. It’s about education and self development. Taking David Perell’s “write of Passage” was a game changer for me and kicked off this newsletter. I’ve continued to invest in my own education outside of the masses of books I buy and read.
I am taking classes from my buddy D aka “Art of Purpose” aka AoP on how to get good at Twitter. AoP is a former public school teacher turned Twitter master and millionaire online educator I met at my buddy Eric Siu’s Leveling Up Mastermind. It’s been an eye opener and raised my admittedly crap Twitter game. But the classes have also helped me understand social media and audiences better too.
One of the exercises we had to do was a content map. What are you deeply interested in and enjoy thinking and researching? It has to be personally interesting or else you will not work at it and be consistent.
That is why we see the rule of 5 in the creator world: most podcasters, bloggers, and newsletter writers quit after releasing only 3-5 pieces of content.
But it also needs to hang together in some narrative and overarching theme. This part was incredibly challenging for me as I am pretty much interested in far too many things.
History, the technology and media industry, company building, sales/marketing, personal finance, geopolitics, psychology, self development, creator economy, entrepreneurship, venture capital and startups. Way too many strands which don’t really tie together and explains the mess of my content and brand. It’s like that old Napoleon saying: “he who defends everything, defends nothing.”
That is why the Content Map was such a painful but helpful exercise.
Here is what it looks like:
Why does this matter? Everyone needs to be a creator in some form and build an audience. A very targeted niche audience. You are building a movement and community, a place to share your ideas and knowledge and to get feedback. Figuring out what you stand for and what your content map is will be the first step.