If you would not spend time looking at it, do not ship it. One of the best quality assurance rules of thumb is to avoid publishing content that you would not consume. Simple, yet so hard to execute on. My audience deserves my very best. Repeat that to yourself every single day.

Do not confuse location with direction. Location is where you are, direction is where you are going.

Design is your silent storyteller. The visual aesthetic you share with the world tells a story about the values you uphold. When your audience is not ready or willing to listen, a strong visual can capture even the most evasive of minds. Design is not ornamental or secondary: it can propel your stories far beyond the spaces you initially planned for.

I would love to tell you that being a content manager is easy. Straightforward. That you will be able to focus on what is most important and leave everything else aside. But a lot of it is learning to create something compelling in the middle of an absolute whirlwind. Learning to use a huge list of tools that need to be sharpened every day. It is about zooming out when you need big picture thinking, and zooming in when the details need to be ironed out. Managing content, business expectations, and human beings: all at once.

You can practice your grumpy face a million times, you can make a dog surf, you can explode in laughter like Chewbacca mom, and still not “go viral”. You can, however, secure incredibly valuable exposure by spending more time on distribution.

Some creators shy away from systems because they seem overpowering and rigid. However, in reality, strong systems are the only way in which you will ever have time and space for flexibility. This is true for content production, business, and many other areas of life.

Scale yourself. Go beyond what you can do and what you know. Look at your content machine and make it work nonstop, seamlessly, and at scale with or without you.

I cannot stress this enough: content creators need to stop comparing their work with that of total strangers. Furthermore, we need to stop seeing ourselves as content consumers and realize that, as producers, we need time and distance from what is already out there in order to create truly innovative work. If you are always exposing your mind to others’ work, when will you gain the strength to create your own? Find a balance between inspiration and creation, and make sure that the first is indeed inspiring. What might start as a journey to gather ideas can quickly become a shortcut to discouragement. Know when to stop.

We are faced with the incredible challenge of creating high quality content for a crowd of skimmers. The faster you understand this, the more effective your content tactics will become.

Content sparks our connections with others, our own selves, and the world. What we decide to share is a powerful expression of where we stand and where we want to go. An essential part of the human spirit, this constant information sharing is what ultimately builds the bridges between us. Every image, text, sound, or video that you have released into the world carries a part of you that others can relate to. If actions reveal our priorities, the content we share explains them.

Everyone is either building an audience or being an audience these days. Someone, somewhere in the world is thinking up content that will appeal to you as you read this. You are someone’s target audience.

Human beings are complex information consumers: they have active needs, passions, and preferences. They lead different lifestyles — some that you will never be able to empathize with unless you dive deep in qualitative and quantitative data. And that is precisely the point of persona research.

Personally, I believe in tools that close the gap between professionals and beginners, understanding that — push comes to shove — this is a world of beginners.

If you're asking yourself who the content is for, it's already too late to make an impact.