The content creators lottery

I have never really been a gambler. I don’t sink money into slot machines, I get fleeced on poker nights, and my failure to ‘get’ the Melbourne Cup is a constant reminder to people that I’m not a native Victorian.

But as what others might call a ‘content creator’ (which is not necessarily a term I like applying to myself), I’m constantly playing the lottery. For most content creators, creating content is a means to an end… and the end is money. Everything you share is a roll of the dice where the possible payoff is shares, signups, forwards, followers and likes… and, if you do a good job of this, you will then increase the odds that people will reach out and ask you to work with them*.

* I appreciate this is relatively well understood but it still feels a little icky when you write it out. So much so that three of four years ago I created an alternate website where I didn’t have to constantly position myself. If you’re interested you can find it here.

But like my other forays into gambling, I’m not necessarily doing a great job (even though I know some of you will kindly disagree). As with any form of wagering, content creation is a game of odds. And in theory, if you know the odds and you understand the system, you can ‘outperform’ other players (and if you’re really, really good you create a gambling syndicate with a turnover of more than $2billion and use the money to fund an art museum in Tasmania).

Once you start playing you find out the game of content creation is one where the odds improve if you embrace quantity over quality, controversy over consideration, and, more recently, AI generated content over genuine humanity. The best players know a better strategy to bombard people with content so your face constantly appears in their social feeds than to spend hours angst-ing over each paragraph and dot point, only to delete most of what you’ve written because you don’t want to fill the void in people’s lives with more rubbish.

* In theory the best players are the ones who can combine quantity AND quality but given that quality takes significantly more time I’m not sure how many of these players are really out there.

The end result is I have a newsletter list of three and a half thousand people, to whom I’ve sent five newsletters in the last 12 months. I’m clearly not tipping the scales in my favour if this is a game of quantity*.

* I imagine your response to this revelation is one of three options. The first, and perhaps most likely is you actually didn’t notice. The second is you did notice and were slightly disappointed but were to polite to say something, in which case you’re very kind. The third is, you’ve quite liked the silence and had forgotten you had signed up. If you’re in group three, I’m incredibly sorry, please feel free to unsubscribe here .

So, moving forward, I’m going to take a slightly different approach, which should mean you receive more valuable content, and somewhat selfishly, I get better value out of the $1500 a year I spend on email marketing and CRM system. This new approach means you will start getting three different types of newsletters from me.

1. Simon Says – This is similar to what you’ve already been (irregularly) getting. These are the posts designed to push our collective thinking about strategy, decision making and how we prepare our organisations for the future.
2. Simon Reads – This will be a (undefined) number of curated references to people, posts, research articles and books. Not only are these ideas that have inspired me, I hope they will be the ideas that inspire you as well.
3. Simon Sees – This will be a series of signals I’ve collected on a particular theme that indicate how the future might be different from today. Reading these signals will not only help you see future trends coming, sharing them at dinner parties is guaranteed to make you more interesting.

What this means is that as of next week if you’re signed up for my newsletter list, on my website, you will be getting one of these three things delivered into your inbox on a weekly basis… but which one you get, well, that will be a lottery.

… and if you’re not signed up for my newsletter list you can do so here.