We’ve put out >250 pieces of content over the past two years.

Our first piece of content was terrible, and it’s slowly gotten better from there.

Here are all the lessons we’ve learned through this process.

• People crave aggregation. The information age has resulted in too much content from too many sources. People want curation, and those that are able to do this effectively are able to capture more attention.

• Use visuals. 70% of people consider themselves visual learners. If you only build audio or text content, you are only creating for 30% of your audience.

• Trust builds slowly and falls quickly. Content is a form of permission marketing – a privilege (not a right) to deliver anticipated, personal, and relevant messages to people who actually want to get them. It takes months of delivering value to these people in order to build trust, and it takes one bad email to lose all of it.

• Use software or freelancers to produce or clean content for you. We use Descript to clean and transcribe all of our audio content. We use Marvel to write content when we can’t.

• Repackage content to get more from less. This is something I wish we would have invested more into. Gary V documents his production process here, and it shows you how much you can do with one piece of content. We record a podcast, feature that in a newsletter, and we share high-level takeaways on our website.

• Emojis help with CTRs. We A/B tested this, and it shocked us. There is a fine balance, and having too many emojis is a good way to lose credibility, but sprinkling them into different sections makes your writing more engaging and easier to consume. Putting the same emoji at the beginning of your email subject line is a hack to get better open rates (shoutout to Nik Sharma for pointing this out).