The quick kickstart guide to creating content & sharing your story

When I meet someone who follows me on social media in person for the first time, they often say the same thing:

“I have no idea how you create so much content!”

I get countless LinkedIn messages asking for tips on creating content. I usually just deflect and say, “well, I was a writer in a past life so it’s just easier for me.” And that is true—I have a degree in journalism, wrote on deadline, and created social content for a living for years.

But that’s a cop out answer. 

Today I’m going to share a few frameworks and ideas for you to start sharing your story.

Why you should share

I get so tired of seeing LinkedInfluencers only posting about how creating content will change your life. Posting about posting is banal, and it’s not storytelling. To really see gains, you need to consistently share elements of your story. The first problem here is that most people think their story isn’t interesting enough to not share.

Let’s be clear—everyone and everything can be interesting with good storytelling.

I follow Jason Premo on LinkedIn who talks about machining aerospace parts and does it in a way that is fascinating. I don’t know a thing about aerospace engineering, but love his content.

Claire Coder is the CEO of Aunt Flo, a feminine hygiene company, and while I don’t have personal experience with her products, I follow her for the thoughtful content about building the company.

Ray Li runs a fashion company—something my wife would assure you I don’t understand—and when he posts about the challenges, fails and wins of his company, I read it.

Sharing content 3 to 5 times per week (especially on LinkedIn) will, without a doubt, open up doors for you that were previously closed. No one else is going to tell your story for you. When I go to conferences now, many meetings kick off with people talking about how someone loves my LinkedIn content or saw a recent update about my company. I’ve raised awareness for not only my passion, but the company I’m building. I get more introductions and connections than I even have time to act on because I have dedicated the time to sharing. I’ve raised money from investors who loved what we do before I even pulled up the first slide of the pitch deck, all because they follow me on LinkedIn.

This is not unique to me—you can tap into it. Let’s talk about how.

Step 1) Find your niche

I always encourage people to think about three things they’re good at and can easily talk about at dinner. I’ve seen Justin Welsh frame this up as “what topic can you present about for an hour without prepping?” All three things don’t have to be work related. I post a lot about smoking barbecue, for example. One of my recent barbecue posts was silly, took about 5 minutes to write, and ended up reaching nearly 50,000 people, and garnered 600+ likes and about 160 comments. The post also mentioned my company, and led to many people downloading our app.

Most of my topics hover around startups, leadership and culture. I don’t religiously stick to that, as you’ll sometimes see me write about family, music, outdoor pursuits and, again, food. Think about what you’re passionate about and enjoy—it’s critical to not force yourself to create content that you don’t like.

A few ideas for you:

• Leadership
• Sales tactics
• Marketing funnels
• Customer experience
• Parenting (can be extremely viral on LinkedIn)
• Culture
• Technical topics (for engineers, for example)
• Networking
• Work life balance
• Salary negotiations
• Talent acquisition / retention
• Industry specific

This is just a starter list. It’s hard to build out anything too specific without knowing your background, but hopefully between looking at my personal list and this list, you have some ideas. Your topics should be relevant to your audience. I’m not digging into defining audience today—just let your common sense guide you here.

Step 2) Find the conflict

You chose topics that you’re comfortable with, which means you have personal experience within these narratives. If you chose work life balance as a topic for example, you likely have experiences of times when you’ve been in situations where that balance was off kilter. These situations are often times in your life that were painful, frustrating, scary, etc. If you remember nothing else from my guide to storytelling, remember this:

The good stuff lies within conflict.

These moments in our lives are where we learn the most. Think back to how you felt at the time, and know that there are people going through that right now—they’re feeling that pain or strife. How did you conquer the situation? If you worked for a company that didn’t have a great work life balance and it was causing unhealthy stress, the content is in sharing what you were facing, how you fixed it and the lessons you learned.

The biggest challenge for people who haven’t shared often is that they think their story isn’t unique enough. Please erase this thought from your mind—every day, there are thousands of people who are trying to figure out something that you’ve already accomplished. It doesn’t matter if you are fresh out of college, you still have experiences and lessons that can help others. By finding the conflict and sharing your story of conquering it (or even how you’re working through it now), you will build an audience that admires what you’ve accomplished.

Many of my recent posts about getting fired have resulted in dozens of people reaching out through comments or direct messages to say, “Hey, I read that post/blog, and I just want you to know, I really needed that right now. Thank you.” Remember—someone needs advice on a topic you understand well.

Writing content that serves others is the best way to help yourself. Give first.

Step 3) Capture your creative moments

Once you start thinking through this, you’ll realize you have more moments coming to mind. Once you start sharing regularly, you’ll start thinking of content all of the time. This is where I have a secret weapon that is so stupid simple, it may even sound dumb. But this is my key to always having post ideas.

Create a note on your phone (it must be on your phone so you you can access it whenever you have ideas). I use Bear Notes to maintain my list but your general notes app is fine.

In this document, list out your topics you chose in Step 1, and under each one, start writing out your conflicts or post ideas. A sample from my list looks like this:

Culture

• How to maintain culture between remote / office team members
• Avoiding the vacation “emergency” from coworkers
• Measuring input (bad) vs. output (good)

These are real post topics I have written down. Ideas come to me while reading other content, scrolling Twitter, mowing the lawn, cooking dinner, hunting, etc. Whenever I have an idea, I jot it down to review later. This process helps me in a few ways—it banks ideas for when I sit down to write, and it also gives me some distance between ideation and creation. Sometimes my original ideas for a post are awful, and I delete the idea altogether. The godfather of modern advertising, David Ogilvy, said you should never write and turn it in on the same day.

Step 4) Just start posting

I’ve seen some people drop weekly reminders on their calendars to post Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Others who do this well just have a routine of cranking out a post with their morning coffee. Find what works for you, and start using the system above to ideate and create content about topics you’re comfortable with. Don’t listen to the content gurus who say to stay in your lane, either. It’s OK to step out of your lane sometimes. Some of my most viral posts have been the ones where I just post something quick and silly, but even those posts are valuable. Showing your personality again builds relationships with people, and show that you’re human. There is nothing better in content than being relatable, so don’t forget to have fun with it.

And for the love of Pete, don’t use ChatGPT to write your posts. That’s the surest way to sound unoriginal and robotic. ChatGPT is awesome for ideating, but you need to write your content in your natural voice. Also keep in mind that ChatGPT is literally looking at what’s already been done, and rewriting it. Create something fresh.

One final tip

If you’re still intimidated, I have one more writing tip for you. It’s called creating a hook.

Think about your conflict—whatever it is—and put that front and center of your post. Make it short, punchy and let it leave the reader wanting more.

To quote Ogilvy again, the job of the first sentence is to get you to read the second sentence. Your first sentence should absolutely hook your audience, and make them think, “Alright, what is Brad talking about?” A good hook stops the scroll, and makes people racing to tap “read more” (a key metric for LinkedIn’s algorithm).

One of my more popular posts from the last 90 days led in with me having an anxiety attack:

“This photo was a few hours after my first anxiety attack.”

It’s a solid hook, because it’s vulnerable (people can identify with it) and the drama is so palpable, the reader wants to know more about why I had an anxiety attack. It’s like reading someone’s diary.

Another post from the last 90 days led in with this line:

“5 years ago I put in my resignation letter. Today, I wish I could send this letter below back in time.📝”

I hit you with the fact I resigned (which sounds like drama—people love drama), and it’s highlighting I have lessons learned from the event. You have to read on to see what those lessons were. Also, the stupid emojis help catch attention in busy feeds—it is what it is.

I’m not an influencer, but because I heavily invest in creating content, I’ve had 1.2M impressions on my content over the last 90 days. You won’t start with those kind of stats out of the gate, but if you finally start today, you can get there sooner than you think.

This post gives you everything you need to start sharing your story. Any other doubts you have are excuses. Just start sharing, and learn as you go. Remember, social content has a short shelf life, which means your bad posts die soon. What has a long shelf life is the relationships that form with your audience. Try it for 90 days and just see for yourself.

3 tips to creating great social content

1) Focus on topics you understand really well

I unfollow people who meander too much in their content, clearly posting about that which they don’t understand or have little experience with. Lean on your content topics you know in and out, and don’t deviate into topics that are going to create shallow content.

2) Lean on the conflict

Overcoming adversity creates the best lessons in life. This experience is valuable. Find your moments of conflict in your career, and share the lessons learned.

3) Hit them with a hook

Your posts should generally begin with a quick, punchy hook. Don’t be so brief it’s vague—making someone click “read more” only to find they don’t care about the topic is annoying. You want to use your hook to catch the attention of your desired audience.

Who I’m listening to: Lake Street Dive

What I’m reading: “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” (I’m so close to being done with this one…)

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