Distribution Beyond Posting

This is the half of the job most people skip. Publishing is not distribution, and the algorithm is not a guaranteed channel, especially early when your following is small. Creators dramatically over-invest in the creation half and under-invest in getting it seen, then conclude the content didn’t work when the actual failure was that almost nobody saw it. You’d never write a strong proposal and then just email it and wait by the phone, you’d call, you’d follow up, you’d loop in the right person to walk it through. Content deserves the exact same discipline. Distribution is where the actual reach comes from, especially before you have scale working for you.

Take the finished piece and brainstorm every place your Lesson 1 audience actually spends time beyond your own feed: relevant communities or group chats, industry newsletters that take guest mentions or links, specific individuals who’d genuinely find it useful (not a spam list, real relevance), colleagues or partners who could share or tag it credibly, and comment sections on larger accounts in your space where a substantive comment could put your name in front of the right people.

For each one, write the specific action, not “share in communities” but “post in [named community] with one line explaining why it’s relevant there, not just a link drop.” Vague categories don’t execute, specific actions do.

Assign timing. Some actions happen day-of: a direct message to five specific people who’d find the piece genuinely useful. Others happen days later: a follow-up comment on your own post adding a new angle to revive it in the feed, or a mention in a newsletter issue two weeks out. Spreading the actions across days gets you more total exposure than dumping everything on publish day and hoping.

Set a standing rule: any piece that took real production time, call it two hours or more, gets a named distribution plan before it publishes, not scrambled together after the fact when the first day’s numbers disappoint you.