01
The brief
One page, written before anybody writes anything
The question, the audience, the number the piece has to find, and what you measure afterwards. Everything downstream gets easier or harder here.
Lesson 01Free
Nothing was decided before the writing started.
Somebody puts a title in a spreadsheet. A writer fills it. It goes out, gets four clicks, and nobody ever looks at it again. The problem is not the writing.
The question, the audience, the number the piece has to find, and what you measure afterwards. Everything downstream gets easier or harder here.
A primary document, a number you calculated yourself, one published study with its year, one person quoted by name. Anything unattributed gets cut.
Most sites carry more pages than they can support. Cutting is usually worth more than the next five posts, and nobody wants to do it.
A piece shared once on the day it went out is a piece nobody saw. The plan is written into the brief, not improvised afterwards.
Set at publication, not when traffic falls. A page without a review date decays quietly for two years and then gets blamed on the algorithm.
Agreed before writing. A piece with no target cannot fail, which means it cannot teach you anything either.
Each one is free to fix. Each one is skipped because it happens before the fun part.
A title in a spreadsheet is not a brief. Without the question, the audience and the number, the writer is guessing and the reviewer is guessing about the guess.
Fix: one page, written first. The generator below builds it.Twelve pieces summarising the same public article are twelve reasons to read the original. One number you calculated yourself beats all of them.
Fix: every brief names one figure you produce, not borrow.Published, shared once, forgotten. No distribution plan, no review date, no merge of the three pieces that now compete with each other.
Fix: a date in the calendar at publication, not later.Nothing technical. Answer five things about how content gets made where you work, and we tell you which of the three problems above is yours and what to do first.
About a minute. We ask for your email at the end because an editor writes the answer by hand, and they need somewhere to send it.
Type the topic, who it is for and what it has to do. You get a real editorial brief: the questions to answer, the sources to find, and what to measure. Section one is open to everyone.
Section 1 of 6 open
Structure, the source list, the angle for your goal, what to measure and the ask at the end. It opens on this page straight away and an editor sends a copy with a note on what to write first. No call.
Read them in an hour. Each one ends with something you can do to your own content this week.
A title in a spreadsheet is not a brief. What goes in one, why the number matters more than the outline, and how to write one in fifteen minutes.
You have three pages competing for one search and none of them win. How to find them, what to merge, and what to delete without losing anything.
A piece shared once on the day it went out is a piece nobody saw. Where it goes afterwards, on what dates, and how to know whether any of it worked.
Straight answers, including the ones that mean writing less rather than more.
Six people have to agree before anybody buys, and they read different things. What actually changes a B2B decision.
Most calendars are a list of dates nobody meets. What belongs in one, and the two columns that make it work.
A four thousand word page nobody links to is not a pillar. What the structure is for and when it is a waste of a quarter.
Nobody believes a case study with no numbers in it. The structure, and what to do when the client will not let you publish the figures.
Cutting one post into ten posts gives you ten weak posts. What is worth repurposing and what is just spreading it thinner.
Six so far, more each week.
A published page, a draft, or just the topic you are stuck on. An editor reads it and writes back with what to cut, what is missing and what number it needs. No cost, no call, no pitch. If it is good we say that too, and it happens.
Each one shows where its numbers came from, including the ones we calculated ourselves.
The first pieces are being written. The lessons, the guides and the brief generator already work.