Your content should work harder than you Keeping up with all of the shoulds and coulds and woulds of content strategy is sweaty work. It's a Sisyphean task, except the boulder keeps changing shape and size and the mountain is actually a volcano about to explode.

Also the boulder keeps yelling back at you:

⚠️You MUST have a newsletter with 100k subscribers. Like yesterday.

⚠️ Don’t forget short-form video…

⚠️ Actually, LinkedIn carousels should be your focus.

⚠️ Oh, sorry, we’re doing Threads now. No one told you?

⚠️ All aboard the yap train!

If all that last one literally sounds like Greek to you, looks like you've been spared the onslaught of yapping videos. Allow me to explain:

Yap Queen Jessie Jean has reportedly raked in upwards of $6 million by teaching business-minded Instagrammers how to “yap”. What's that? Well, the format is hauntingly familiar: grab a recording device, talk through an idea, don’t overproduce it, and let people get to know the way your brain works.

I describe the yapping approach as “hauntingly familiar” bc: um, isn’t this the ghost of podcasting past, present and future wrapped up in new window dressing that leans into the vertical video format?

No shade on yapping, truly.

Jessie Jean is 100% correct: talking through your ideas in public builds trust.

Also 100% correct: podcasters who have known for literal decades about the trust-building power of their medium.

While folks like Steven Bartlett and Amy Poehler expend the equivalent of my entire Columbia J-School tuition on their podcast sets alone, their secret sauce (and yours, should you choose to accept the podcasting challenge) is less about their production budget and more about their willingness to invite us behind the curtain each week to explore the inner workings of their brains.

As I was staring down the possibility of skipping an episode because life (and let’s face it, my ADHD-induced time blindness) had once again gotten in the way, I channeled the same advice I’d give to my clients and cohorts:

The yapping-adjacent Instagram Reel you’ll see below came straight outta this week’s podcast episode. (I did cut out the part about recording it barefoot, which I’m guessing Jessi Jean would’ve advised against bc #authenticity.)

This newsletter sprung to life from that same recording. Odds are good I’ll squeeze at least one more valuable asset out of it before the week is over.

If you’re doing it right, inside every podcast episode is an overflowing bounty of yapping (and other) material just waiting to be sliced and diced across your channels however you please.

I can hear you thinking to yourself: well of course Courtney is wearing podcast-colored glasses so she WOULD say that. Which, FAIR, but let’s look at the math:

The point is this: the effort to make a podcast episode isn’t just the effort of making a podcast episode. It's the content ecosystem effort SAVINGS you can bank because of that episode.

If you’ve set up your mental and literal systems accordingly, one 30-minute recording session quickly becomes six effective ways for you to show up where your audience of future clients shows up.

There it is again, my Return on Thinking framework, which boils down to:

Think once. Generate multiple times.

Whether you generate a yap video or not is entirely up to you…