Doing Content Right

Steph Smith shipped the book and course on rare, hard deadlines. Smith finished the 70,000-word Doing Content Right book and its 50-plus video course in about two months each, because without a deadline her excited projects never ship.

She sets deadlines only for big launches like these. Her articles get as long as they need, from 400 to 4,000 words and weeks to years. David Perell warns that always working to deadlines burns people out, and Smith agrees: "a deadline only has integrity if it's something that's rare."

How I Write▶ 1:27:16

The book teaches standing out through how you write, not topic. Doing Content Right covers every step of being a full-stack creator, from ideas to brand. Smith's view is that unread writing has two problems, distribution and distinctiveness, and posting daily on a chosen niche solves neither.

She asks writers for the one adjective people use about their work. Hers is "approachable," which leads readers to think they could learn to code too. She says your most distinct angle is often one a friend has to point out, the way her love of spreadsheets became one of her top articles, a love letter to Excel.

How I Write

Smith spends nearly as long distributing a piece as writing it. A 10-hour article gets 3 or 4 hours of outreach. Her cold emails to authors whose books she had engaged with got a 100% response, and keyword research gave her the title for an article on becoming great.

A top spot on Hacker News brought about 30,000 page views, but she says it spreads ideas without building an audience. Her preferred growth signal is the number of heartfelt emails she receives, not page views or likes.

How I Write