Developing a Content Pipeline (Podcast Review)

October 14, 2019

I work from home, so therefore I don't commute. This is typically an amazing thing, but not when it comes to listening to podcasts. The only times I'm alone in a car is when I drive up to Seattle to visit work, which is incidentally the only times in the past few months I've listened to podcast.

Today's trip was accompanied by a React Podcast, with guest Chris Biscardi, talking about Gatsby themes and Developing a Content Pipeline. Now don't get me wrong, Gatsby is amazing, and you should totally check out Gatsby Themes, but the major takeaway from this podcast was hearing how Chris has become a prolific blogger and author. He's a big advocate of "less is more" when it comes to writing, so I'm taking his advice and am going to write a short recap of the things I learned from this hour podcast.

To produce more content, ingest more content

It might seem counter intuitive, but I feel that one of my writing blocks is that I don't ingest enough content. I'm so focused on wanting to produce more that I don't take the time to listen and read the works of others. There are a few benefits of ingesting more that I want to point out.

1. It's inspiring! The last two times I listened to podcasts were the last two times I felt incredibly inspired to write!
2. The more you learn, the more you have to write about. Chris talks about how he often writes out of the things he's making, learning, and solving. If your day job isn't giving you much to write about, read a book, read a blog, listen to a podcast. Write about what you learned and give an example. Obviously don't just copy their content, but do your best to summarize the learning so that someone else reading your post would get the main points.

Focus on a continuum of content

Chris creates numerous large blog posts, egg head videos, and newsletters, but he started off by making a habit of writing small posts. Eventually he had enough small posts to collect them into a larger post. Those posts turned into videos, those videos turned into more posts, those collections of posts turned into newsletter and so on. If your intention is to eventually write a book, don't start at chapter one page one, start at /blog/thoughts-on-a-topic.html.

Keep it brief

Your blog posts don't need to be works of art. If you aren't blogging because you can't properly capture the entire topic, you're missing a chance to share. Even if you only cover 10% of the topic, that 10% is way more than 0%. And compounded over dozens of 10% posts...well you get the idea.

So with that in mind...tada!