Chapter 9: Content Strategy

Learning Objectives

After reading this chapter, you should be able to:

1. Explain what a content strategy is and state the job a given piece of content does for the venture.
2. Derive content pillars from a positioning statement and evaluate them with the pillar test.
3. Assess a format’s fit to a platform using the platform’s incentives and the audience profile.
4. Draft the content pillars for your own venture, with each pillar traced to a clause of the positioning statement.

Thirty Days in January

By the end of 2014, Yoga with Adriene was two years old and had done everything Unit 2 describes. The position was set: free, beginner-welcoming, acceptance over performance, a new video every week with no gimmicks (Omega Institute, 2019). The audience had answered. Weekly uploads had brought the channel to roughly 200,000 subscribers, the point at which it started to become commercially successful (Meltzer, 2020). If the story ended there, it would just be a Chapter 7 story. What makes it a Chapter 9 story as well is the decision that came next, which was not about who the channel served or what place it claimed. It was about what to make.

In January 2015, the channel ran its first 30 Days of Yoga series, one practice a day, every day, for a month (Plante, 2020). It became the channel’s engine. The profile that later reconstructed the channel’s growth identified that first January series as its second tipping point. Five years on, the series’ day-one video was still the channel’s most watched, at 22.9 million views (Plante, 2020). The series returned every January after that, under a new name each year, an annual ritual the channel’s own archive documents a decade deep (Yoga With Adriene, 2026). A paywalled channel couldn’t have made it, and a performance-oriented channel wouldn’t have wanted to. The series is not a growth trick that happened to be attached to a brand. It is the position, translated into a format.

The first 30 Days of Yoga was a content decision that paid off. The timing borrowed a commitment the audience had already made. A January series doesn’t have to convince anyone to want a fresh start, because the New Year already did. The daily cadence removed the hardest recurring decision a beginner faces, which is not whether to practice but when to come back. For thirty days, the answer was always tomorrow. The endpoint made the commitment finishable, and a commitment you can finish is one you can start. And the format held everything else constant (length, level, and tone), so that the only thing that changed each day was the practice itself, and a beginner was never lost.

None of this required new values. Every design choice traces straight back to the position. A channel built on removing the obstacles between wanting to practice and practicing had built a month that removed them one day at a time. That translation of position into content is this chapter’s subject. Your venture now has a positioning statement too. Unit 2 ended with it. The question the positioning statement alone can’t settle is the one Mishler answered in January 2015, and it is the question this unit exists to answer. What should you make?

9.1 The Strategy Question

Before the calendar, before the camera, before the first idea gets written down, a creator has to decide what to make, and the answer has a name:

Definition: Content strategy. A content strategy is a creator’s answer to three questions: what the venture makes, who each piece is for, and what job each piece does. It connects the positioning statement to the actual work of making things.

Most new creators believe they have a content strategy because they have a posting schedule. The two are different documents answering different questions. A schedule says when. A strategy says why, and why comes first, because a perfect schedule of unexplainable pieces is nothing more than Chapter 8’s brand drift with a timetable attached.

The test of a strategy is that every piece can be explained. For any video, post, or episode the venture ships, you can say why this piece exists and what would be lost if it didn’t. Threadbare’s yarn reviews, the ones the Chapter 8 brand review caught and cut, would have failed that test the week they were made. Each had a reason of its own (free samples, an easy upload), but none had an answer to the strategy question.

Hank Green, whom you will meet later in this chapter, expresses this in five words, “different things do different work” (Tiny Matters, 2023). A piece of content is not just on-brand or off-brand. It is doing a job or failing to, and the jobs differ. Some pieces exist to reach people who have never heard of you. Some exist to deepen the relationship with the people who have. Some exist to test an assumption, using the discovery cycle you have practiced since Chapter 3. A strategy is what lets you say, piece by piece, which job is which. The rest of this chapter builds the tools that make the saying precise.

9.2 From Position to Pillars

The positioning statement you wrote in Chapter 7 states the audience you serve, the place you claim, and the reasons your audience should believe you. It doesn’t say what to film on Tuesday. Between the positioning statement and the schedule sits one translation, and it is the central tool of this unit.

Definition: Content pillar. A content pillar is a recurring category of content, derived from a clause of the positioning statement, that the venture returns to on purpose. It is broad enough to hold many pieces and specific enough that a viewer could say what belongs in it. Most ventures run on three to five.

The word to emphasize is derived. A pillar is not a topic you happen to like. It is a clause of your positioning statement given a production form, and deriving one is a step-by-step procedure, not a creative leap.

Watch it work on Threadbare, the knitting venture whose positioning statement you saw drafted in Chapter 7 and reviewed in Chapter 8. The positioning statement promises patient repair-and-rescue knitting instruction for beginners. Break it into its three clauses (repair and rescue, beginners, patience), and each yields a pillar:

1. Repair and rescue: Sharpened by the brand review’s finding that the audience prizes the diagnosis, not just the fix, this clause becomes a rescue-diagnosis pillar (the “autopsy” episodes, now a stated promise rather than an accident).
2. Beginners: This clause becomes a guided first-projects pillar (complete, patient walkthroughs of the first scarf, the first hat, the first thing worth giving away).
3. Patience: Turned proactive, this clause suggests a mistake-prevention pillar (the errors beginners make, caught before they make them).

Deriving pillars from the positioning statement produces candidates, not a finished plan. Each candidate pillar faces three questions, the pillar test, before it enters the plan.

1. Does it serve the position? The pillar must trace to a clause of the positioning statement. A candidate with no clause is one of two things, and you have to decide which: drift arriving early, or evidence that the positioning statement itself is incomplete. In the second case the candidate goes to the brand review rather than into the plan.
2. Does the audience want it? The claim needs audience profile or lens evidence. Threadbare’s diagnosis pillar rests on the review’s watch-time evidence, and its first-projects pillar rests on what regulars said when asked. The prevention pillar has no evidence yet, so it enters the plan as an assumption to be tested. That is how the discovery cycle from Chapter 3 treats any unverified claim.
3. Can you keep making it? This is a first, rough check of capacity. Do you have the skills, the equipment, and the hours to make this kind of content week after week? We will go into this in detail in Chapter 11. Here the goal is to quickly weed out pillars you could never sustain, such as a weekly documentary from a creator with three free hours.

Now let’s apply those three questions to a fourth candidate pillar for Threadbare: yarn reviews. The supplier relationship exists, the videos are easy to make, and other knitting channels do them. But which clause of Threadbare’s positioning statement do yarn reviews serve? None. The candidate fails the first question. That is the verdict Chapter 8’s brand review reached about the same videos, but the review reached it after they had been made. The pillar test catches the same drift before anything gets made.

In Chapter 6, you read how Binging with Babish won its niche with a single flagship format (cinematic recreations of the food seen on screen). That format was the venture’s first content pillar. A year later, the venture added a second pillar: Basics with Babish, a different format doing different work (direct cooking instruction instead of cinematic recreation), but it still served the same position. Rea knew by then that roughly 80% of his viewers were young men aged 18 to 35, and he built the new series for them (Han, 2021; McGurk, 2022). Note the contrast with Threadbare’s yarn reviews. Both are new categories of content, but one extends the position to new work and the other changes the subject.

9.3 Formats, Series, and Where They Live

Pillars say what categories of work the venture does. The next three concepts govern the shape that work takes.

Definition: Format. A format is the repeatable shape of a piece of content: its structure, length, and conventions, held constant from piece to piece.

Holding things constant is a constraint, and students tend to hear “constraint” as the opposite of “creative.” The record of working creators says otherwise. Vlogbrothers, the channel Hank Green has run with his brother since 2007, holds its videos to a hard limit. “We have a four-minute time limit, and that means just really cramming it in” (Tiny Matters, 2023). Nearly two decades later, Green credits that constraint with training him in the compression his short-form work depends on. “I feel like I trained my whole internet career for TikTok,” he says of the one-minute and three-minute limits that platform imposed (Tiny Matters, 2023).

A format helps a creator build skills by repetition. The tenth episode of a format is better than the first, and faster to make. By then, decisions such as how the piece is structured, how long it runs, and how it opens have already been made. All of the remaining effort goes into the one part that is new each time, the substance of that particular episode. Each repetition leaves the creator a little faster and a little better.

A format also makes a promise to the audience. A viewer who has seen a few episodes knows what the next one will look like, how long it will run, and what it will deliver, before pressing play. That predictability is part of the appeal, because choosing what to watch takes effort, and a familiar format takes the risk out of the choice. Keep in mind, though, that a viewer who has come to rely on that promise notices when it changes, which means format changes are brand changes. They belong in the Chapter 8 review, decided and communicated, not slipped past the audience.

There’s a special case of the format that does more than any other shape of content:

Definition: Series. A series is a format with a schedule and an endpoint. It is a run of connected pieces the audience commits to as a unit, rather than encountering one at a time.

A single video asks for a view. A series asks for a commitment. A viewer who commits to a series has decided once to keep coming back, so each later episode reaches an audience that already plans to watch it, instead of having to win every viewer again piece by piece. The endpoint is what makes the commitment easy to make. A viewer who would never say yes to forever can say yes to thirty days. Brotherhood 2.0, the project that began the Green brothers’ YouTube careers, was a yearlong exchange of videos between two brothers, with an end date attached from the first day. A word of caution: an abandoned series is a broken promise in the Chapter 8 sense. Chapter 11 will help you plan so that your series commitments are ones you can keep.

Every format has to be published somewhere, and platforms are not interchangeable. The same format can thrive on one platform and die on another.

Definition: Platform fit. Platform fit is the match between a format and a platform. It asks whether the platform’s audience, conventions, and recommendation system work with the format or against it.

You already know from Chapter 4 that platforms have incentives and recommendation systems have preferences. Platform fit puts that knowledge to work before you decide on a format. To assess it, ask three questions.

1. Is this format’s audience on that platform? Every format is made for a particular audience. Your audience profile says which platforms those people use, and the population-level data from Chapter 5 confirms it. Platform user bases differ by age, and a common mistake is to publish a format aimed at one audience on a platform that a different one uses (Pew Research Center, 2025).
2. Does the format’s shape match the platform’s norms? A four-minute essay and a sixty-second demonstration are different kinds of content, and moving one to the other’s platform without rebuilding usually fails.
3. Does the platform’s system reward what your format does well? A format built for watch time is at a disadvantage on a platform that rewards shares. (Recall that Chapter 4 taught you how to determine what a platform rewards.)

Those three questions give you a best guess, not a final answer. Hank Green’s experience shows why the guess has to be tested. Green arrived at TikTok a public skeptic (“I don’t think that you could do science communication on TikTok”). After a few days of watching what the platform showed him, he changed his mind: “I am so wrong and need to apologize” (Tiny Matters, 2023). The platform’s short format was not a barrier to building knowledge. It was a different way of doing it, and he couldn’t know that from outside. His second finding is harder to explain, even for him. Making broadly the same kind of content on both platforms, he reports his YouTube audience running about 70% male and his TikTok audience about 70% female. “And is that a platform difference? Or is that an audience difference?” (Tiny Matters, 2023). He doesn’t know, but that’s the point. Fit is tested using the discovery cycle, not deduced.

One warning before we move on. Platform fit works in one direction. You start with the format your position calls for and then ask whether a platform suits it. The mistake is doing it the other way, choosing a format because the algorithm happens to reward it this month, even though no part of your position calls for it. That mistake is referred to as “chasing the algorithm,” and Chapter 12 will show you how to tell it apart from the legitimate craft of working with a platform’s recommendation system.

9.4 Different Pieces, Different Work

A venture has two things to accomplish with its content: finding new people and keeping the ones it has. A single piece rarely does both. The last tool of the chapter is the one that balances them.

Definition: Content mix. A content mix is the proportion of a venture’s pieces given to each of its two jobs: reaching people who have never heard of the venture (reach content), and deepening the relationship with people who have (depth content).

Reach content and depth content are built differently. Reach content is built to travel: legible to a stranger with no context, findable by someone searching, low-commitment, the piece a non-subscriber can enjoy. Depth content is built to keep viewers. It rewards familiarity, serves the regulars your audience profile describes, and asks for more than a passing glance because it gives more back. Picture Chapter 6’s nested rings, market outside, audience within it, true fans at the center. Reach content works at the outer edge, drawing strangers into the rings. Depth content works inside, moving people toward the center.

A content mix can fail in two directions, all reach or all depth. The failures are symmetric, and each is hidden by the metric that favors it. A venture that is all reach can show spectacular numbers while building nothing. Green’s warning to creators who design every piece for virality is that “maybe you’re building a really tall skinny tower” (Tiny Matters, 2023). A venture that is all depth has the opposite problem, an intimate space for regulars that no new person ever finds. The regulars are served, but the audience shrinks by attrition because nothing at the edge is drawing anyone in.

Neither failure is visible in any single piece, which is why the content mix is checked at the plan level. Label every planned piece with its pillar and its job (reach or depth), and count how many pieces do each job. If nearly every label says reach, or nearly every label says depth, the plan has one of the two failures, no matter how good the individual pieces are. Consider Threadbare’s plan. A sixty-second “one mistake every new knitter makes” short is labeled prevention/reach, since it comes from the prevention pillar and is built to travel, findable by a stranger. A full forty-minute rescue episode is labeled diagnosis/depth, since it comes from the diagnosis pillar and is unintelligible without context but treasured by the regulars.

As for the right ratio of reach to depth, it’s not one-size-fits-all. The right content mix depends on the venture’s stage, its platform, and what the position is for. What applies to every venture is that the content mix be chosen, reviewed at the Chapter 8 cadence, and never inherited from whatever the last month happened to produce.

Summary

This chapter opened Unit 3 by connecting the document Unit 2 produced to the work you will plan in this unit. A content strategy answers what the venture makes, who each piece is for, and what job each piece does. Its test is that every piece can be explained, and its absence is brand drift no schedule can fix (LO1). Content pillars are the translation tool, derived clause by clause from the positioning statement. Each candidate faces the pillar test: does it serve the position, does the audience want it, can you keep making it. Unevidenced pillars enter the plan as assumptions, and clauseless candidates fail immediately, before a brand review has to catch them later at a higher cost (LO2, LO4). Formats build skill and make promises, and series convert positions into finishable commitments. Platform fit is judged with three questions about audience, shape, and reward, then tested rather than assumed, because even veteran creators cannot predict it reliably (LO3). The content mix assigns every piece a job (reach at the rings’ edge or depth toward their center) and balances the portfolio against both the tall skinny tower and the intimate space nobody new finds (LO1). The content pillars you draft in this chapter’s Semester Project are the first component of Milestone 3. Chapter 10 teaches the craft that fills the pillars, Chapter 11 the calendar that sustains them, and Chapter 12 how the work gets found.

Questions for Discussion and Application

1. Derive content pillars for Yoga with Adriene from its position as this book has documented it (free, beginner-welcoming, acceptance over performance, obstacles removed). Then check the 30 Days series against your pillars: which pillar does it serve, what job is it doing, and what made January the right platform-fit decision even though it is a timing choice rather than a platform choice?
2. Run the pillar test on Hank Green’s TikTok channel using only the spotlight’s facts. Which clause of his position does it serve, what evidence did he have that the audience wanted it by the time he committed, and which of the three questions did his initial skepticism get wrong?
3. Should a brand-new venture weight its content mix toward reach or depth? Build the case for each side using the chapter’s concepts, then choose a side and state the evidence from a real venture’s first year that would test it. (There is a defensible argument in both directions.)

Semester Project

Derive three to five content pillars for your own venture from your positioning statement. For each pillar, run the pillar test in writing: state the clause it traces to, cite the audience profile or lens evidence for audience demand (or label the pillar an assumption with a planned test), and state in one sentence whether you can sustain it. Then list five planned pieces, each labeled with its pillar and its job. If your positioning statement cannot yield three pillars, document that finding instead and state what the brand review should reconsider. If you are working from a comparable creator, derive the pillars their venture’s public position implies. No accounts, posting, or spending required. The pillar set is the first component of Milestone 3, the content plan, which Chapters 10 and 11 will extend with a produced sample piece and a one-month calendar.

References