Someone got in touch with me recently and asked how I produced quality content on a regular basis. Of course, that appeals to my ego – who wouldn’t being told they produce quality?

Some of the things I mentioned:

Read widely. I use Feedly as my RSS feed aggregator to find content. I have the paid version which means I can pull information from a few hundred feeds which are saved in a dozen or so groups. I go to it every other day or so and look for the trends which are being spoken about, especially outside of L&D. For example, I found a fabulous paper last week about the use of AI in work. It wasn’t in a L&D feed but linked from a story from another story about workplace HR.

Less is more. I might get 1500+feeds per day but a handful will be of use to me. That means they are relevant, and appropriate for my audience. There are loads of reasons for this. Firstly, there is a lot of bad AI produced content online, especially in the L&D space. It feels like people have new toys and we have a focus on producing stuff for the workplace. As a result, there is a deluge of posts which are fulfilling the demand for content. Sifting through these is essential to separate the wheat from the chaff. Next, there are limited ways to analyse and provide insight on a topic – when you’ve read a few expert opinions from the same sector there are likely to be limited new or nuanced perspectives.

Even less is even more. People don’t have time for text based blogs now. We’ve gone past the golden age of blogging where dialogue was carried out online on blogs and blogging sites. People wish to ‘consume content’ (ew!) which is quick, bright and gives us a dopamine rush. That means creating short pieces. I’ll often craft a post and edit it, edit it again, and edit it a third time. My shortest post was once one word – the title was ‘Brevity’ and the post was ‘Matters’.

Know your purpose. It seems people like the things I write; c.500k views of my posts per year suggests they hit a mark. The reasons for this are many but come down to a few principles. Firstly they’re authentic – I don’t use AI to write posts so you’re getting my thoughts. Secondly, I’m selfish and I’m not writing them for you – they’re written for me so I can go back and use them at a time when they’re appropriate. Lastly, I really don’t care how many people read them. I wrote a post a while back that attracted fewer than 100 views. I don’t care. I know, that for one person who commented, that it made a difference and that matters more.

What do you think? What are your approaches to making meaningful written content? Let me know in the comments.