Not running on autopilot

You are reading contentfolks—a fortnightly blend of sticky notes, big content ideas, and small practical examples. Thank you for being here! ~fio

Hey 👋

A few weeks back, I sent out a survey to find out biggest content marketing problems you all were trying to solve. One of you replied with something I think most of us have experienced (or will experience) at some point:

My biggest problem is that our content runs on autopilot. We do things the way we’ve been doing them for years and never stop to think about why we do them, what we’re achieving, or what we’d like to achieve. I’d like to change that.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot because I’m about to do something I haven’t done before: break the format of this newsletter for the first time in 35 issues.

Depending on whether you’re new here or not, you may or may not know that the overall structure of contentfolks has been the same since 2020: a content idea paired with a 💡practical example 💡 section.

For every new issue, I spend a good amount of hours thinking through the points I want to make, then go through several drafts until I’m happy with the final result.

But in the last two weeks, I haven’t had time to do any of this properly. So instead of doing things ‘on autopilot’, I decided to break the format completely and share with you a podcast interview I did last December on the Newsletter Nerd Show.

If you listen closely, you’ll find out why I use post-its in this newsletter, why ‘joy’ and ‘silliness’ should be your new favourite content marketing metrics, and what I sound like when I read an issue of contentfolks out loud 😉

And that’s it! I’ll be back on Feb 16—and I promise to give you an update about the positive or negative effects this format experiment had.

PS: breaking format felt scary in theory but kind of good in practice. Perhaps this whole issue is the ultimate 💡 practical example 💡 of why it’s important to take a break every once in a while…