Hello friends,

This is a slightly different kind of post. It’s one of those good(ish) news/bad(ish) news kinds of things. (It’s also probably longer than most of you need, so TL;DR at the end.)

The bad(ish) news is that this will no longer be a daily newsletter. I started ​the content mint​ over the summer for a handful of reasons, one of which was to force myself to start blogging in some form—which I had intended to do for many years. Another reason was to solidify some of my ideas related to what it means to create worthwhile content in the current internet landscape and publish them in a place where my prospective video production clients could glimpse my thought process before beginning a project with me.

While I believe I have accomplished both of those goals, I have also discovered a couple of downsides to writing a specialized daily newsletter—namely, that it is specialized and daily. In the first place, a daily newsletter must, by nature, be quite concise for the sake of both the author and audience, but I’ve found that, like Pascal, I don’t everyday have ​the time to make it properly concise​. In the second place, the time that it does take to write every day leaves me little extra time to write about other things that interest me but which fall outside the scope I established for this newsletter, i.e. content marketing and media communication for small businesses.

The final consideration is my audience, y’all. There are less than a dozen of you on the list and nearly every one of you I know personally. According to my stats, every one of you open my emails almost every day, which I very much appreciate, but at the same time, since I know you all, I know that the majority of you aren’t creating business content—you just know me and want to know what I’m up to.

So that brings me to the good(ish) news, which is that I am starting a new blog that will not be daily or specialized. It will just be updates on things that I’m thinking about or doing whenever I deem that they are interesting enough to write about. You know, how blogs used to be.

As an indication of the sporadic nature of the content, I’m calling the new blog: ​Now . . . This​.

If you are one of the few subscribers who don’t know me too well yet (thank you especially for subscribing!), you can expect writing on this new blog to be related to film, literature, communication, and technology, mixed in with armchair philosophy and maybe even some original fiction, who knows. I currently have a handful of Christmas-related posts I will be trying to release in the next week or so. (Working titles include: “Home Alone and the Fear of the Unknown”, “The Most Important Character in A Christmas Carol”, and “A Grimm Tale to Read at Christmastime”.)

In the interest of not wasting your time in case you aren’t interested in the same myriad of things I am, you will not be automatically subscribed to the new blog. Which is to say, you’ll need to manually subscribe to the new content ​here​, if you so choose. Alternately, just know that it exists and feel free to check in periodically without letting it assert itself into your consciousness (or inbox) through push notifications. Whatever you like.

Again, I appreciate you all for your daily attention over the past several months. I don’t expect the content mint to go away entirely; anytime I have something to share which falls in the category of business media, you’ll still get an email from this list, just not every day.

So with that, I’ll wish you all a Merry Christmas, a Happy New Year, and, in case I don’t see you, good afternoon, good evening, and good night.

There’s a classic board game called Balderdash wherein one player holds a card with an extremely obscure, but real, word and its definition.

The goal of the other players is to write down definitions for this word which sound like they could be associated with the word to try to fool the other players into voting for theirs as the correct answer.

In case you were unaware, this is (simplistically) how AI LLM systems like ChatGPT work. They scour their language database and mountains of internet metadata to provide responses to questions which sound like they could be the right answer, but in reality they have no way of knowing how accurate it is, although they do a pretty good job of getting pretty close, most of the time.

So, while everyone else is getting could be answers to their questions via AI and trying to figure out how accurate it might be, your job, expert, is to show the card with the real definition on it.

Yesterday we looked at the value, and even excess value, that can be generated by highly technical educational content.

What makes that content so valuable though?

The details.

In a digital world designed to make the creation of extemporaneous and surface-level content as quick and easy as possible, those who take the time to see and show the details are a breath of fresh air, and that makes people pay attention.

As Sherlock Holmes puts it:

There is something inherently interesting about watching someone who knows what they’re doing explain something in precise detail.

This can be so interesting, in fact, that it can attract attention even if the educational information being presented is not immediately (or even potentially) relevant.

To illustrate, I’ve collected a handful of examples of highly technical long-form content which people have attested to watching, despite the irrelevance of the subject:

From The Beginner’s Guide To Latte Art* – 40 minutes

From Your dishwasher is better than you think (tips, tricks, and how they work)** – 27 minutes

From World’s Most Advanced Video Editing Tutorial (Premiere Pro) – 4 hours 19 minutes

~ ~ ~

So, expert, what is it that you know so well you could explain it in a way that makes people pay attention, even if they don’t really care?

* – To be fair, this channel is very personality-driven, meaning those inclined to learn about the overall topic (coffee) are more likely to watch videos like this one which may not be specifically relevant.
** – This is one of four videos on dishwashers from this channel. All (except the one mentioned above) are over a half hour long and all have similar comments. In fact, comments like this for these videos are so prevalent they have spilled over into Reddit and I started wondering if it was some kind of running gag I wasn’t aware of. I still don’t know, you tell me.

If you are a local small business, chances are your content is only one part of your lead generation process, and maybe not a very big part.

Maybe most of your leads come from referrals or warm network outreach.

If that’s the case, your content might even end up being an afterthought that you have to force yourself to remember.

Maybe you force yourself to post on social media to stay top-of-mind for past customers and those who already know you, even if those people aren’t looking to buy right now.

Maybe you force yourself to post on social media frequently so those who have been referred to you will have something to look at and know your business is still running.

But maybe, if your content is an afterthought, maybe it’s not being as effective for those critical mid-funnel prospects as it could be if you took the mental energy from that forced posting routine and put it towards strategically developing one or two quality pieces of communication that clearly express what a prospect wants to know when they are in the act of shopping for your offering (i.e. when they are on your website.)

And maybe—just maybe—your social followers who aren’t actively shopping for your offering wouldn’t even notice you took a few months off.

One way (but not the only way) to develop interest in your content is to formulate it as a story.

Now, a lot has been said about story in the world of marketing in recent years. Usually these focus on the posturing of the customer to the company (as hero/guide respectively) and the framing of customer need/desire (“you want x, y stands in the way, z product or service can help you overcome y and obtain x.”)

But there is a more basic element of story that is important to remember when formulating content. A story has a beginning, middle, and—maybe most importantly—an end.

As Aristotle puts it:

Consider the difference between these two content headlines:

Join me as I trade this penny up to the most expensive thing I can get – Part 1

Or:

Trading a penny up to a house – Part 1

One of those headlines is a story because it has a clear ending. Once the penny becomes a house, the story will be over. The first headline might be interesting, but it’s not a story because has no definite end. It may be a story at some point, but it’s a lot harder to follow along with something in progress if you have no reasonable expectation of an ending.

Story is not the only way to develop content, it has a ​linear structure​ whereas perhaps a ​circular structure​ may be more appropriate for your offering, but if story is what you’re after, find a way to set expectations by defining and constraining the scope from the outset.

Back in the 1920s, a group of efficiency engineers wanted to figure out if they could increase factory worker efficiency by improving their working conditions. So they went to a Western Electric factory called Hawthorne Works and did some improvements to the lighting and various other aspects. As expected, the workers’ efficiency increased.

However, when they returned the factory to its original conditions and observed performance again, the efficiency increased again.

This study has become pretty well known in the social sciences for describing the “observer’s paradox,” the phenomenon wherein the act of observing an event changes the unfolding of the event itself. In this case, the fact of engineers observing the workers increased their efficiency regardless of what changes were made to the environment.

Now, could you use the Hawthorne Effect to your advantage?

Creating content for your business is like having an ever-present efficiency engineer watching over you. If you felt that the work you were doing would be seen by anyone online, it might change the very way you do your work in the first place.

This is another result of the meta-value of content.

We all know that the best way to really learn something is to teach it to someone else.

Well, teaching also happens to be the best way to prove what you know.

Afterall, prove means both

to give evidence for

and also

to test or learn by experience

So . . .

If you market your business on a claim of expertise . . .

Prove it.