the content mint newsletter

How do you decide if video or blogs or podcasts or any other medium is the best way for you to get your message across online?

Consider how you communicate IRL on a daily basis. I think most people show natural leanings for certain mediums in small ways all the time.

Some people can’t bear to be on-camera but will send the most detailed and thorough emails you’ve ever seen, while other people are terrified by a blank page or blinking cursor, but will spend an hour telling you everything about their work, unprompted, sitting across a cafe table.

Whatever mode it is that naturally gets you to spill your heart for your work is probably a good place to start, but that doesn’t have to be where you end.

Remember those toy megaphones from when you were a kid? You know, the ones with buttons to make your voice sound like a robot or a chipmunk or an alien.

It was fun to explore different voices, but they were all kind of hard to understand until you put the megaphone down and just used your normal voice again.

The internet is pretty much the same way. It can be fun (or scary) to explore video and podcasts and blogs and all the rest, but until you know how it is that you best communicate, your content will probably sound artificial and a little garbled.

I consider this the Hippocratic Oath for content creation. If we are going to participate in the so-called “attention economy” by creating content at all, it is important to respect the attention we are asking people to pay to us.

Really what this means in practice is to consider the value that we are providing through the content we create rather than simply the value we are hoping to capture.

When we focus on communicating something worth paying attention to in the first place and engineer a context in which it can be clearly understood, we are laying the foundation for a reciprocal value exchange by being the first to offer an open hand.

~ ~ ~

P.S. This is especially true for video content which has a fixed time-cost associated with it in a way that most other media doesn’t.