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The Content OS

The Creator Funnel & Content Psychology

Think about being a content creator as a long-play game.

A creator funnel is a simply journey that your online audience goes through, increasing the chance that they become a customer with each step.

Step-1: Get discovered

Being found across social media platforms.

Create valuable content where people are already consuming.

Learning to stand out online is part of modern marketing.

If nobody can find you or discover your content, the rest of the funnel is meaningless.

Step-2: Build trust

Showing your expertise in a particular niche or topic.

Trust simple means your expertise.

To deepen trust, use longer-form content like newsletters and how-to guides to show your expertise.

Step-3: Deepen relationship

Community-led growth

Step-4: Monetise

To make your content easily discoverable, you can play on 4 primary human emotions:

Teach the reader

Entertain the reader

Challenge the reader or make the reader think

Understand the reader or empathise with them

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Content OS Architecture

There are 4 primary steps to regularly creating and publishing high-quality content.

Curate

Templatize

Create

Distribute

Curate

Twemex helps you find and capture people’s best tweets.

This makes it easier to understand their highest performing tweets, so you know what’s already working.

The idea is to quickly find out what’s working and the kind of tweets they’re putting out.

You should always, always tweak it to your audience and your requirement.

Use these tweets to identify high-performing templates.

Save to Notion when you see something interesting, so all good ideas and templates are captured in a single place.

Suggested tool:

Save to Notion⁠

and

Twemex⁠

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Templatize

Once an idea is captured, make sure it’s sent to a single place in Notion that is yet to be templatized.

Segment each template into one of four categories: Teach, Entertain, Challenge, Empathise

Make a list of all the broad topics you have decided to write about for example: productivity, solopreneurship, no-code tools, personal development, finance, relationships, mental health and so on.

Pick a topic, and then use the templates to quickly churn out a piece of content.

Distribute

You could just publish natively, but it lacks certain growth tools that will significantly help you scale faster and reach a larger audience.

Hypefury helps you auto re-tweet, if your tweet reaches a certain milestone, this helps it reach an even wider audience. 24 hours after it has been re-tweeted, it will also automatically delete the re-tweet to keep your feed clean.

Hypefury also as ‘auto plug’ feature that will plug anything you want, just below your tweet, only when it reaches a certain milestone. This can be used to plug your products & services, your newsletter or your other channels.

Hypefury can also auto publish to LinkedIn.

Suggested tool:

Hypefury⁠

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Chapter-1: Ideate, Research, Write

Ideate

Coming up with great ideas for your long-form content: articles, newsletters, YouTube videos, podcast etc.

The point is to use this pillar content to generate other pieces of content.

The best way to come up with great ideas is to use ‘predictable systems’.

The easiest way to do this is to pre-schedule blocks of time, around 45-60 minute blocks to generate ideas.

Note down all these ideas in an ‘idea basket’ so as not to lose these later.

Use the ideas from this basket to constantly create long-form content.

This helps beat the issue of staring at a blank page when writing out your newsletter.

How to generate ideas

Go through the following sources to simply ‘brain dump’ some ideas. At this stage, the ideas don’t need to be good, you’re simply collecting the best ideas and putting it in a place you can refer to later.

Readwise: Use Readwise to save content ideas from the internet.

YouTube: Browse YouTube channels of people who publish content similar to yours. On their channels, search for content that has resonated with their audience, look for their most viewed content.

Newsletter: Read newsletters, especially curated newsletters.

Curated emails: Check our curated emails:

Morning Brew⁠

MailBrew⁠

, Hypefury etc.

Your own popular ideas: Go through your own content to figure out what’s worked in the past, use tools like Twemex to sort your ideas by popularity.

Suggested tool:

Twemex⁠

and

Readwise⁠

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Use these ideas to come up with your own unique piece of content. Add your own spin or ‘flavour’ to it. The purpose of ideation is to identify what type of content might work.

Once you have ideas, store them together so when you’re working on the next steps, you just need to pick from one of these instead of having to stare at a blank screen.

Research

While writing content, you should always put your own views and opinions, but it’s always helpful to go through other content of popular creators to see if their ideas back up your own views and/or opinions.

At this stage, store pictures, books, articles, tweets, quotes and other material published by other popular creators or reference materials, anything that can be used as social proof to back up your opinions.

This helps build authority in your work, since the things you’re saying have already been validated by others.

One method is to use

Advanced Twitter Search⁠

to figure out what other creators have been sharing in your field.

Suggested tool:

Advanced Twitter Search⁠

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Using other people’s content within your own, as a means to back up your argument or discussion is a good way to show people that other creators agree with your viewpoint, this builds confidence in the eyes of the reader.

Write

Always schedule out time in your calendar to write out the long-form content, such as a newsletter.

Make & save a few templates or copy templates used by other popular creators to make an outline for the newsletter.

Using templates makes it easier to make long-form content such as newsletters, YouTube videos, podcast etc.

It’s impossible to start creating your hub content from a blank page, so lean on templates to make this easier.

You can either stick to a template or experiment with different templates.

Suggested tool:

Typeshare⁠

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Template example

What I’m going to teach

Why it matters to the reader

Why most people fail

Strong topical statement

Bulleted list of takeaways

Convert the bulleted list into topic headers and write out the newsletter

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Chapter-2: Edit, Pre-CTA, Post-CTA

Once the hub piece of content is complete, generating other pieces of content from it becomes a whole lot easier.

Editing

Do your editing at a different time from your writing

Giving 1-2 day gap between the writing and editing makes it easy to edit because our perspective changes, and we see the content through a different lens

Always ask 4 questions during the editing stage:

Have you added appropriate visuals?

Always break up your content with visuals such as tweets, LinkedIn posts, graphics, images etc.

Make sure the visuals are relevant and make sense.

Are your sentences concise, grammar corrected and understandable?

Read the content out loud to yourself, watch for when you’re tripping over words.

When you’re done editing, ideally you should cut out 20%-30% of the original content.

The end result should be tight, clear and understandable.

Did you stick to the main topic, reduce going on tangents

Avoid going down on rabbit holes.

People don’t have large attention spans, so it’s important to stay on point.

Make the content clear and concise.

Did you deliver what’s promised in the headlines

Make sure you deliver what’s promised, and that the readers have a small win.

Give the readers an action step they can take for themselves.

If you don’t deliver on the promise, they will avoid opening your future emails.

Always ensure that the URLs and outbound links on your content is working and that they’re linking to the right thing.

Pre-hub CTA

The purpose of the pre-hub CTA is to promote the upcoming piece of content to make sure that we increase the number of people who will expect it.

Intended to tease out what’s coming the next day.

Usually published a day before the hub content comes out.

The 1st line of the pre-hub CTA should be thought of like the subject line of an email. It should intrigue the reader and basically punch them in the face.

The 2nd line is a contextual statement, something that plays on human emotions and gets the readers interested.

After this, just list down the primary take-aways from the next day’s hub content.

Tomorrow, I’ll show how to reach this specific outcome.

Always give them a link to the newsletter.

You can change the pre-hub CTA slightly based on the platform you’re publishing for: for example, you might want to give a little bit more content when publishing on LinkedIn because of the increased word limit.

When writing out the pre-hub CTA, it’s best to use templates so you don’t end up spending a ton of time.

Example template:

[Email subject line opener]

[Contextual statement]

[Takeaway-1]

[Takeaway-2]

[Takeaway-3]

[Takeaway-4]

Tomorrow, I’ll show xx,xxx people how to [outcome]

[Catchy takeaway]

If you want to join us, subscribe here:

Post-hub CTA

The intention is to reach out to people who didn’t see your previous post or they didn’t find it interesting.

Think of this as the last chance to convince someone that the hub content you published earlier is worth seeing.

Tease out what they missed and let them that it’s valuable.

Here’s an example template:

Email subject line opener

Content sentence-1

Contextual sentence-2

Yesterday, xx,xxx people learned how to [intended outcome]

Missed the issue?

Grab it below

Direct link to the newsletter

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Chapter-3: Thread, Post, Publish

Thread

Threads are a great source of growing fast on Twitter, because generally it’s much harder to write.

Suggested tool:

Hypefury⁠

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Look for headings within your hub content while trying to make threads.

Take steps or lists from your hub content and turn it into the headers for each thread.

The content in threads should be tight and precise, remove all fluff.

In some cases, you might need to split a single heading or list from the hub content into multiple threads.

It’s much easier to write threads if you’re making it based on a hub content as the points are already clear to you, and you’re just dividing it into multiple equally interesting bits.

Short form content

Story

The best way to write a story is to use this 5-part template:

Pain/attention: use a personal story ot start with a problem

Agitate: share how things got worse and what happened to you/someone

Intrigue: show them a now perspective to think about that's intriguing

Positive Future: show the future benefits associated with the Intrigue

Solution: bring clarity to how they can achieve a positive future with a solution

In the solution stage, you can redirect the reader over to your website or newsletter, this is called ‘de-platforming’.

Stories are especially useful on LinkedIn, as it’s an ideal platform for these types of content.

Suggested tool:

Publer⁠

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Observation

In this piece of content you talk about something interesting you noticed while going through the hub content.

This observation needs to really intrigue and catch the reader’s attention, so make it catchy.

Contrarian take

What’s a commonly held belief about this topic that you think is wrong.

Listicle

What are some tools, newsletters, channels, tweets, podcasts about this topic.

These are generally easier to make and they work.

Don’t overdo listicles, just 1 per week at most.

Past vs present

The juxtaposition between how things were vs how things are currently OR how things are currently vs how things will be in the future.

This content resonates with the audience, so it’s an interesting piece of content.

Publishing

Structure each piece of content into a schedule, so they don’t compete with each other, don’t bore the readers and are providing a way for them to discover your hub content.

Never talk about the same content straight for a week, stagger it across weeks.

When publishing, you get two broad categories of content: CTA and No CTA (zero click content).

No CTA doesn’t link back to the original hub content, you’re simply building trust & authority in your topic.

You don’t need to always link back to the hub content.

If you’re just building out your platforms and have just started writing, use more of zero-click content to build trust and authority.

At this stage, don’t ask people to take an action, because you’re just building out your traction.

The more traction you get = the more actions you can ask of your audience.

When starting out, make 95% zero-click and 5% CTA content.

When you link back to your hub content, you re-direct traffic over to a platform you control, which means: increased traffic + increased engagement = better monetary performance.

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Cost of suggested tools