Content strategy doesn’t need to be complicated. Revisit the essentials of building a content ecosystem that works for your personal brand.
Before you create more content. reset your content strategy. Not every piece of content needs to sell or prove your expertise. But it should contribute to the bigger picture you’re painting for your personal brand.
1. Create Content Pillars
Advice on creating content has gotten so complex that we can often lose sight of setting the right foundations. Your content pillars establish what you want to be known for. When you ask yourself, “What do I want people to associate with my personal brand?”, what comes to mind?
Define the areas you want to be recognised for into 3-4 core pillars. If you were to consistently create content in these areas, what pillars do you want to reinforce?
I recently watched interviews with TikTok sensation Nara Smith - a personal brand powerhouse at just 25 years old. Nara’s pillars appear to be something like:
Food
Fashion
Beauty
Home
With 12M+ followers on TikTok alone, she dominates these ideas for millions around the world.
Consistency in a subject matter creates recognition, while variety creates interest.
2. Content Formats
Your content pillars can be expressed through different forms. Key pillars don’t need to feel repetitive.
Nara’s personal brand pops on her TikTok profile. Her consistency appears flawless. However, the genius of the personal brand ecosystem she has created is in the detail. Her pillars express themselves in different ways. Maximising her creative and commercial opportunities.
Your content formats are how you communicate your pillars.
For example, Nara’s format strategy might look something like this:
Food - From-scratch cooking, cookbook recipes, takeaway unboxings, snack taste tests
Fashion - Fashion week, fashion events/shoots, GRWM
Beauty - Hair, makeup, skincare, routines, salon visits
Home - Family, husband, children, homewares, garden
In interviews, it’s the phrase ‘from scratch’ Nara often repeats and what she appears to most build her commercial ventures around, for example, releasing her cookbook Homemade and hinting at consumer products to come. For more on owning an idea in an audience’s mind, see my earlier blog, Mental Real Estate: How to Become Known for an Idea in the Market.
Boldly blurring the boundaries of homecooking and food, Nara doesn’t restrict herself to the food niche either. She also describes her focus on worldbuilding - a strategy I discussed in my earlier blog, Stop Boxing Your Personal Brand Into Your Niche. Start Building Your World. She builds a world that captures her multiple interests and expertise.
With her dramatic fashion statements and cooking things most wouldn’t dream of doing (homemade bubble gum or Skittles, anyone?), there isn’t anyone quite like Nara. However, she’s a distinct masterclass in personal branding for any profession. What do you want to be known for, and how will you show up consistently?
For a professional building their personal brand, the same principle applies.
Let’s say you’re a marketing executive; your content pillars and formats might look like this:
Brand Strategy — Brand case studies, campaign critiques, industry trends
Leadership — Team building, industry engagement
Creativity — Behind-the-scenes of your process, what you’re loving lately
Personal Perspective — Your career journey, POV, lessons learned
Remember, your pillars reinforce; your formats keep things interesting.
Your pillars and formats don’t need to be self-contained strategies within each platform either. Each platform will likely serve a different purpose for you. For example, for me personally, I keep most of my YouTube, podcast and blog/LinkedIn articles about my reflections on personal branding and personal development. I share my behind-the-scenes life on my Instagram, particularly my Instagram stories.
Your pillars can span platforms while your formats and publishing priorities adapt to each platform's purpose. Form your pillars around your platforms if that best suits your personal brand strategy.
Create systems or formats that work together. Leverage and optimise your creative efforts. For example, I have recently been curating my favourite Instagram stories into a post photo carousel. It is hardly any extra effort as it uses what I’ve already created. My YouTube and podcast content is also based on my articles and blog. Creating can be hard work, so make your creations work harder for you.
3. A Stock & Flow Strategy
Creating content is like building what Warren Buffett would describe as a “moat” around your personal brand. You're reinforcing your competitive advantage. You're creating a portfolio online. You're investing in an asset. There is a saying that marketing tells the world you are a rock star; content marketing shows them.
As I shared in my article, Create a portfolio of proof for your personal brand online, I love the idea of ‘stock and flow’. Austin Kleon, in his book Show Your Work, describes the importance of the strategy.
Stock and flow is the economic concept adopted by Robin Sloan as a media metaphor. When it comes to your media, Kleon describes it as:
“Flow is the feed. It’s the posts and tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that remind people you exist. Stock is the durable stuff.”
“‘Stock’ is what lasts months, even years, into the future. It’s the long-form, evergreen content. The key is to grow your stock in the background while you maintain your ‘flow’.”
Consider how these two ideas interplay in your content strategy:
Evergreen content: Ideas that age well in your personal brand portfolio
Trend-based content: Time-sensitive content that capitalises on what people want at a particular time
For Nara, her stock and flow might look like
Stock (evergreen content) - From-scratch cooking, cookbook recipes
Flow (trend) - Fashion weeks, family updates
But stock and flow aren’t mutually exclusive to evergreen and trend-based content. Flow refers to the ongoing stream of content; stock refers to durable work that accumulates value. A trend can become stock if it remains useful, and evergreen content can be published as part of your flow.
The stock and flow strategy for your personal brand isn’t about overnight wins. It’s about building leverage in the long game.
4. You are the Content
As I shared in my earlier blog, How are you growing your ‘specific knowledge’ for your personal brand? (3 Tips), one of my favourite pieces of advice for content comes from social media master Gary Vee’s mantra:
“Document, not create.”
It takes all the pressure off creating. Let’s return to Nara. It’s easy to assume that her videos, just minutes or less long, still involve a huge BTS team and production crew. When in reality, at the time of writing this anyway, just her, her iPhone and her tripod. It’s usually an average 7-hour session of her actually cooking and evenings spent editing. While most of us don’t have the time to dedicate to content that mega creators do (according to the Forbes Top Creators 2026 list, she made $7.5M dollars), we can still take away from Nara’s story.
Nara’s videos look like performance art. But they are more real than they appear. She is a mum of four young children and was married at just 18 years old. Much of what she cooks is actually what her family craves. Meanwhile, her focus on health and homegrown ingredients evolved naturally from her own journey combating health issues, including eczema and autoimmune disease.
Despite her young age, Nara isn’t new to the working world. She began modelling in Europe at 14 years old, establishing an authentic origin story for her bold, fashion-forward brand. During COVID, while most succumbed to sweats, she wore beautiful clothes in her kitchen because she couldn’t go anywhere else, and her daughters loved it. Many of the clothes she wears have also been gifted to her by brands. Spending so much time at home, she uses cooking to give her a place to embrace and celebrate her archive.
Even the ASMR Nara’s personal brand has become known for began organically, as she found herself whispering while she was recording her voiceovers next to her sleeping babies.
While most of us aren’t international models, married at 18, Nara proves that creating a personal brand that’s distinguished and recognisable can also be authentically you.
So, ask yourself:
What does my life actually look like?
Where do I spend most of my time?
What am I genuinely interested in?
What do I love researching?
What would light me up creating about?
What do other people recognise me for?
Your personal brand online doesn’t need to be manufactured; it can just be sharing more of who you already are.
5. Commit to a Cadence
Key content pillars give your personal brand a strategy to rotate around. Between your pillars and content types, you should have no trouble filling up a solid content calendar.
When you establish your strategy, consider what publishing schedule you can realistically sustain. The cadence of your content creates expectations. It lets people know when they can expect you. It quietly invites them to show up along with you.
For more on creating consistently, see my recent blog, 8 Pieces of Creative Advice I Keep Coming Back To.
Create with Intention
A great content strategy isn’t about creating more. It’s about creating with intention. Build your foundations, find your rhythm and remember that the most distinctive personal brands don’t just create content. They give people something to remember.
