7 Lessons for Building Profitable Content Systems

Over the past 15 years, I've worked with solo founders all the way up to Fortune 500 companies to help them install content-enabled systems in their business to help them streamline and scale their content creation. And throughout those 15 years, I've picked up a lot of lessons along the way in what it takes to effectively create a quality content system in your business. So today, I'm going to walk you through those seven lessons learned so that you can avoid those issues and effectively create your own content system for your business. Before we jump into that though, a little bit of housekeeping. I'm Dave Polykoff, the creator of the personal brand accelerator and co-founder of Zenpost, which is a content agency helping personal brands and solo founders create content consistently so that they can attract, convince, and convert their ideal client online. I've been a part of many content-enabled startups over the last 15 years, including a company Brand.com that helped publish content for top influencers and service-based businesses to help suppress negative things that might be said about them online or just amplify their current success. And that involved a lot of content creation and needed to have a content system enabled in the business in order to manage all of that content creation, which I was spearheading the entire time. And then went on to another startup called News Innovations. And this was essentially a marketplace for Fortune 500 companies to purchase sponsored content onto some of the largest news publications in the world, Associated Press, New York Times, Business Insider, and I was spearheading the content system that brokered that transaction between the Fortune 500 company and the publication. I then went on to create my own content agency called Presto Media, where we were working with publications to create content at scale for them to continue to fuel their business model, their digital business model of turning content into cash through eyeballs and advertisements and such. And that required high volume of quality content being created and seamlessly published onto their website. And then finally, I launched Zenpost back in 2019, which was a system and department that can be installed into solo founders and small agencies' businesses to become their video and social media content creation arm to their business, so that these founders can focus more on building their business and not get bogged down by creating and editing videos all day. And what enabled the growth of Zenpost is the content systems and technology that we'll talk about today. So let's dive into the seven lessons learned throughout my 15 years in content creation and content systems. **Lesson one: the importance of having a style guide in your business.** A style guide is the Rosetta Stone to your personal brand or brand in general. It is the thing that outlines your brand voice, your tone, language used, requirements for formats within your content. And this tells the content creator, whether it's 2025, whether that be a human or AI, exactly how to sound like you, and also how to make sure that you're fitting the format of the piece for the purpose of what you're trying to accomplish with that content. I first discovered the importance of having a style guide back when I launched Presto Media, because we were working with these publications that required a lot of detail and specifics and requirements within how their content needed to be published in order to fit the requirements of their website. Also, the editorial requirements as to what words they can use and can't use, and sometimes there was some legal elements to that. So there was a lot of editorial nitpicks that went into each assignment that eventually we said, you know what, we need to craft all of this into a style guide that the writer can always reference and learn and absorb and just completely know, so that when they go to create an assignment or create a piece of content for this website, they know the exact boundaries and requirements that will make the website happy. It is key that you have one in your business too, so that you always have that kind of brand Rosetta Stone to reference back whenever you're creating any form of content, whether it be YouTube videos or LinkedIn posts or newsletters. And the key thing with style guides, and this is very important, is you don't want to overload your style guide with a million different directions. What we found was publishers continued to kind of nitpick the content we were creating for them, and then every time they found a nitpick, they would just go into the style guide and add that as another rule for the writer. And by a few months in, it would be this long list of rules and certain circumstances that you needed to do this in this circumstance, and but if it's like this, then you don't have to do that, and it just got very confusing. So really with your style guide, less is more. Find the key things that will tell a writer or the AI the most important things that they should know to ensure that your content is staying consistent and on brand, and make sure that those are the things that are being highlighted in your style guide and just stick to that. Any other kind of nitpick things or things you can kind of train an individual on over time, but it shouldn't work its way into the style guide. Otherwise, your style guide is just going to end up being bloated. **Lesson two: there needs to be editorial oversight in your editorial process.** There needs to be a content manager, an editor-in-chief, someone who is ensuring that every piece of content created is on brand, that it reflects your true opinions, that it's factually correct, and that it is publish-worthy. This may be you early on, especially as a solo founder, when you're working with another content writer or you're working with AI, where there needs to be this training period where a writer or AI needs to understand what style and tone of voice you want out of your content. What are the requirements and top priorities of your content that it needs to learn along the way, so that you eventually don't need to tell it that anymore. It just intuitively already knows. And this takes sometimes a month or two of constant feedback before you'll get to that point. But it's a requirement, at least early on, that you or someone on your team is reviewing all of the content that's being submitted and you are giving your signature on it of approval before it moves on to the next stage in the content workflow. What we see is if you were just taking your hand completely off the wheel of the content editorial process, then things are going to get created and published and you're going to see the repercussions of not being a part of it when it's too late. So you're going to publish content that either is off-brand, off-topic, doesn't reflect what you believe in, uses words that you wouldn't say, and so now your audience is kind of getting mixed brand voices from you, and you don't have that brand consistency early on. It's just a requirement to really stay involved in the content workflow to ensure that you can reach that kind of cruising altitude of content creation editorial sign-off. **Lesson three: incorporate automation in your content workflow wherever you can.** It's 2025 and automation is the word of the year. Being able to streamline steps that otherwise would require a human to be involved is so easy with so many automation tools and no-code tools to be able to build these things yourself. And there are steps in the content workflow that don't require much creativity and would otherwise require a human to perform this step that can be automated with these tools. So when I say automation, I'm talking about being able to change the status of a piece of content in your content management system or project management system, and it automatically tasking the next person to do their step in the process. So maybe you've recorded a video and you've uploaded it and you submit it to a certain status. That should then automatically send that task over to your video editor, and then when you get a certain status of complete, it should automatically schedule it in your scheduler. So these are steps that you would otherwise need to wait to have a human perform for you. And humans, while we have a lot of strengths, organization and timeliness and ability to do the same job the same way 100% of the time is something that we are constantly always battling ourselves. But luckily code and tools and systems and automation allow those things to be able to be streamlined and be able to work the same way every single time. So installing automation into your business not only allows you to be able to streamline and do things quicker, but it also allows you to be more consistent with those actions. There's rarely, if ever, a breakdown in a workflow when an automation is just running in the background the entire time. **Lesson four: the power and importance of notifications.** Similar to automations, where steps are being done on your behalf in the background without you needing to be involved, notifications allow you to keep track of what's going on even though you are not necessarily involved with every step. Additionally, notifications allow you to know when you do need to be involved with the content workflow. This was a critical thing when we were building out our content systems at Brand.com and at News Innovations and Presto Media. Content needed to be created and then it needed to be edited by an editor, and then it needed to be reviewed by the brand or client. And each of those steps needed to have its own notification so the next person knew when it was their time to perform their task. So notifications are things like email alerts to say, "Hey, the content has been written or recorded. It's now your turn to go in and edit it and create a first draft." Or it could also be for task management organization. So if your assignment or your part of the workflow is due in a certain time frame, those notifications are also keeping you in line, so that if you have a task due the next day and you needed to get that content created, you're getting a notification to say, "Hey, reminder, this needs to get done." And so that helps the content workflow continue to move on without any bottlenecks. So notifications are huge because with automation, you're letting things run in the background and trying to be as hands-off as possible, but you still want something letting you know when you need to be involved, or letting you know when maybe something within the content workflow has broken down and you need to be alerted to it. It's great to be hands-off with your content system, but having that notification there to just kind of be that little bird in your ear letting you know when things are happening and when you need to be involved is very, very important to make sure that your content system continues to run well. **Lesson five: the importance of organization with your content.** When you're creating consistent content at scale, you're going to have a lot of puzzle pieces that are floating around. It's important to have some sort of database or content management system where all of the assignments or pieces of content that you're either thinking about working on, or are in the process of working on, or even have published in the past, can be organized and managed. And when we talk about organization of these assignments and pieces of content, it's important to have things like titles of the assignments, statuses, tags, assignees. That also goes in as part of the organization as well, because the more context you can give each piece of content, the easier it is to then search and look up and filter this database of content in the future. Because not only are you trying to organize your content for the sake of knowing what you need to work on, but also you want to see at a snapshot view where is all of my content in its current statuses. Where are the bottlenecks in my content workflow. Is there a pile-up at a certain person within the content workflow. When are certain due dates and when should I be publishing certain things. So the organization of your content helps keep everyone in line. It helps give a clear kind of dashboard snapshot as to where your content is. And when it is your time to get involved with the content workflow, you can quickly pop in and know exactly where that assignment is. **Lesson six: the quality of your outputs is directly determined by the quality of your inputs.** So what does that mean? Basically, you need to feed your content system good information in order for the end piece of content to come out the way that you want. And this kind of takes into consideration a lot of the things we just talked about, in terms of making sure that you have a clear style guide that has all the information that is necessary for content to get created. Make sure that the information you're feeding into each post, in terms of the research and what you want to discuss, is 100% accurate and reflects your beliefs and all of that. If you give bad information or you put the settings in your content workflow incorrectly, it's going to cause a storm of bad drafts, of late assignments, of a content piece coming back to you that was way off base of what you actually wanted to have created. This was definitely learned when we were building out Presto Media, where a publisher would request a piece of content and submit the assignment with details that they thought were clear but were a little bit too ambiguous and left a little bit too much creativity up to the writer. So the writer would try to intuit what the publisher or client needed as best as they could, and they would submit a topic or a draft back to the publisher, and the publisher would be like, "Whoa, whoa, no. I wanted you to write about this completely other topic." And we would go back into the assignment to review the details that they submitted and realize that it was just so ambiguous as to what the publisher actually wanted the writer to write that it just left too much of a gap for this type of problem to happen. So what we did is we created a requirement where you needed to provide examples as to the direction that you wanted the article to go in. So this way there was no gap between what the client wanted as the end result and what the writer understood needed to be created. What's interesting is I know there's a lot of talk about the battle going on between human writers and AI-generated content. And I find that there's a lot of similarities in the experiences and lessons I've learned about what writers need in order to create a really well-written piece of content and what AI needs to write a really great piece of content. And it goes back to the idea of having a quality style guide for it to reference, clear directions on what needs to be created, and examples as to what the final product should look and sound like. And those three things were a large part of why we were successful in getting our writers to create content that our publishers loved. And if you install those things into your AI process as well, then AI will start to sound like you and create content that fits the intention of what you're trying to create. So it was kind of interesting to see, as we continue to work with writers but start to incorporate more of AI-generated content, how they're both kind of require the same things in order to create quality content. **Lesson seven: your content system needs to be intuitive to you.** When you log into your content management system, you need to be able to understand where you need to go to perform the task you need to perform. You need to understand at a snapshot what content is where in your content workflow, and you need to be able to understand how to perform actions within content in order to move along the piece to its next phase. This was a lesson I learned back when I was creating the content system at Brand.com, the first startup that I was ever at. And I was put into a role where I needed to create a SaaS product. And I had never created a SaaS product before. And I didn't really know a lot about things like UI design and user experience design and all that. I was good at it, but I wasn't great at it. And I was building a system for hundreds of people to use. And I would build what I thought was intuitive. And then I would beta test it with the internal staff and then the clients that were needed to also use it to review the content. And I would get feedback of "I don't know how to do this," or "what does this button do," "I'm trying to do blah blah blah and I don't know where to go to do that." And to me it was so intuitive, but to the people who are actually going to use it, they just didn't know how to take the steps they needed in order to achieve what they needed to achieve for that task. That causes bottlenecks in your content workflow when things just aren't intuitive. It needs to be not only intuitive to you, but intuitive to anyone else who is involved in the content creation process. So they either need to know what they're doing already or be trained on how to use your content system, because you want to keep that content moving throughout the content workflow. And one person who needs to spend 10x more time on a process because they just don't understand the system that you've built will drastically bottleneck your system and slow down your content creation process. So don't overcomplicate your content systems, and make sure that is something that you feel comfortable with. Those are my seven lessons learned throughout my 15 years in creating and installing content systems into businesses. Now, I'm hoping that you can take these away, and when you go to build your own content system, that they help you avoid these issues. But if you need to learn a little bit more, make sure to subscribe, where I will be putting out consistent content and helping you create your solo business and build your personal brand and create content consistently through things like content systems and automation.