Turn down the volume and talk like a person
At some point, almost every business owner, CEO or marketing director I’ve worked with has said some version of the same thing: We just need to publish more.
More blog posts. More social. More newsletters. More video.
The assumption would be that the pipeline is the problem — if we can just get the volume up, traffic will follow, leads will show up, we’ll move the needle.
It doesn’t work — I am confident in saying that it never actually works. The reason is worth understanding clearly because it will save you a significant amount of time and money.
You know content is key, and you know it takes time and talent. But everything about your marketing expertise tells you that sales tools require volume to move that needle. And that’s where you’re wrong. Let’s talk it out.
The Volume Trap
Here’s what usually happens when a business decides to publish more:
They hire a freelancer, or a junior in-house writer, or they start using AI to fill the gaps in the calendar. The content goes out. The numbers don’t move. Six months later, they’ve published forty posts, spent some real money, and organic looks exactly the same as it did in January.
They either give up on content — “content doesn’t work in our industry” — or they double down on volume, convinced that if forty wasn’t enough maybe eighty will be the tipping point.
Neither conclusion is correct, because the problem was never volume.
The problem is that publishing without strategy is just more noise.
What Content Strategy Actually Means
Content strategy is not an editorial calendar, not keywords on a spreadsheet. It’s not a branding and voice guide in a Google Doc nobody reads.
Real content strategy is the connective tissue between what you publish and what your business is actually trying to do.
It answers three questions that most businesses I’ve seen never seriously addressed in the first place:
1. Who exactly are you talking to?
Not a demo, not a persona with a cartoon face and an alliterative name. A real human being with a specific problem they’re trying to solve, a specific level of trust in you, and a specific next action you want them to take.
Most content fails because it’s written for an imaginary audience instead of a real one.
2. What do they need to hear — and when?
A first-time visitor to your site and a prospect who’s been on your list for six months need completely different things from you, and that absolutely and crucially includes content.
Content that doesn’t account for their relationship with your brand will always underperform. We think in terms of the funnel and the search intent but we rarely think: how would I want this to work if I were the one with the problem?
3. How does this piece connect to something that matters?
Every piece of content should do a job: build authority, generate a specific search query, move someone toward a decision, deepen trust. “Publish ‘something’ today” or “this week” is not doing the job. “Write 1000 words weaving in these ten keywords naturally, including best portapotties near me” is not cutting it.
But if you can answer all three of these questions before you write a single word, what you produce will be exponentially more effective. Not because you’re gaming an algorithm or listening to a hacky growth guru or chasing the trend — it’ll be because you’re actually communicating with an actual human who needed to hear exactly what your content said to them at the moment they saw it.
You need to get chosen, not just found.
The SEOs and marketers are there to get your client, or your business, found by leads. But it’s content — and content alone, besides maybe a firm handshake — that reaches across the table and grabs them in partnership. Content is what makes their choice for them.
Content is powerful because writing is powerful, and writing is powerful for the simple reason that you’re saying something at a given time and place that can then be read and comprehended by anyone, in any time or place. Nothing else works like that except maybe music, or fine art. You are saying, “I know what you’re feeling, probably because I’ve felt it too.”
The Cost of Skipping This
I spent twenty years as a staff writer and critic. That’s the kind of journalism-adjacent work where every sentence has to justify its existence — where editors would pull a whole piece because the premise was too soft. That’s training that gave me an intolerance for content that doesn’t know what it’s for.
Right now I am writing this blog post as pillar content to serve my website’s SEO by proving that I know what I am talking about. I am writing it to get business for my own concern.
But really, I am doing it because I work all day with otherwise brilliant people who cannot put themselves in their customer’s shoes for even a moment — and thus can’t do content.
and even more than that, I’m writing it because I know what it’s like to be frustrated when something isn’t working, to know there’s a reason and not know what the reason is.
The businesses I’ve seen waste the most on content are the ones who treated strategy as a luxury — something for later, once they’d built sales momentum. What they built instead was more like a publishing habit, with no architecture beneath it.
Lots of posts. No authority. No funnel. No compounding return.
get off the flywheel
We write in a specific way we were trained to write as marketers. Then the robots came and learned to write in that specific way, and now LinkedIn lunatics are lecturing each other about whether or not using em dashes should get you shot.
The truth is that it’s all just noise. Whether it’s a robot or a person — or a person who thinks like a robot — creating the stuff, it’s just factory goo. The internet is 99.9% keyword optimized.
You need an intent and you need it to be clear to everyone involved, including your reader. This is why I always say that no matter who you are, you have to think like a content strategist — because that’s exactly what you need to be if you want to survive.
The cost of fuzzy intentions isn’t just the money you spent on content that didn’t work, it’s the opportunity cost of the audience you didn’t build, the search rankings you didn’t earn, and the trust you didn’t establish with the people who were literally looking for you.
When they showed up, you were yelling the same thing as everybody else. So they kept looking.
And when you can see it that way, you can see the value here is not in continuing to yell, much less yelling twice as much, or twice as loudly, or getting a robot to yell for you. It’s about talking to people like they’re people, which is not a habit this particular world trains us for. But it should.
What the Fix Looks Like
The businesses that get content right — the ones that build genuine organic traffic and real, engaged, deliverable subscriber lists, the ones with actual inbound leads — share a few things:
They started with an audit.
Before you create anything, you have got to take stock of what you already have. What’s working and why, what attracted the bad leads or the wrong audience or just didn’t fill a need. What wastes crawl budget or fails at the point of conversion. Content audits are boring but they’re not unrewarding. You are sitting on gold — something someone needs to hear, who needs to hear it from you — and you’re too busy shouting along with everybody else to notice.
They built a system before they built their calendar.
A system means you know your topics, your formats, your internal linking logic, your CTAs, and your distribution pipelines before the first post goes out. The calendar isn’t the ground truth, it’s the execution layer on top of that strong foundation. You can see how this one builds on the first, too — it conserves energy, time and money to work with what you’ve already got.
They treated content as the long-term asset that it is.
A well-optimized post can generate traffic for years, no matter how long or short its tail or how evergreen. A post with intention behind it that matches intent will buy back those hours and days. But a post published without strategy that generates a spike on day one is still going to sink like a stone after that. It’s a question of lifetime value, not short-term wins.
Content is forever. You have to learn to treat it like the resource that it is.
If Any of This Sounds Familiar
The businesses I work with best are the ones who’ve already tried the volume approach, watched it fail, and are tired enough to try and do it right. They’re not looking for another freelancer to fill the blog queue, they’re looking for someone to look at the whole board.
Which is what I do. If you’re ready to stop guessing and start building something that actually works,let’s talk.
Jacob Clifton is the principal of Clifton Creative, an editorial strategy consultancy based in Austin, Texas. He spent fourteen years as a flagship staff writer at Television Without Pity and has written for Tor.com, Vulture, BuzzFeed News, and the Austin Chronicle.