How to Leverage AI in Your Content Flywheel (and How I'm Doing This)

I’ve talk a lot about the way AI makes it easier for humans to express themselves creatively, but I haven’t explained how you actually integrate AI into your content workflows.

This article is about the content flywheel and the strategy I use with AI to enhance it.

Let me first explain the content flywheel before getting into some examples.

What is a Content Flywheel?

If you aren’t familiar with the term “Content Flywheel”, here’s a good way to think about it:

Having a flywheel is important because it gives us a framework to remain consistent in our content creation even when we aren’t feeling as motivated.

James Clear says “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”.

He said this in the context of building habits, but this applies to content specifically as well—without systems in place, you cannot be effective in the marketplace for attention. So, we use these flywheels as systems to stand on to ensure that we are consistent with our content.

Now, lets look at some examples of content flywheels before I talk about my content flywheel strategy (and cover a few ways I use AI within my flywheel).

Examples of Content Flywheels

AutoPilot’s Meme Account Strategy

The founder of AutoPilot—Chris Josephs—was able to harness the power of memes and viral content to launch his brand into the spotlight.

He created twitter tracking accounts for well-known political figures who were trading the stock market—encouraging followers oft he account to copy trade people like Nancy Pelosi.

This innovative strategy not only garnered widespread attention but also fostered an engaged community, demonstrating the impactful blend of humor, relatability, and strategic social media use in modern marketing

This example shows how you can:

1. Create meme pages to raise awareness for brands or products

2. Foster community around humor and culturally relevant content

Imagine the power of a meme account army powered by AI, fully automating this flywheel.

GymShark

Gymshark's content flywheel strategy showcases a dynamic approach to marketing, beginning with leveraging fitness influencers to promote their brand.

This method not only cultivates a dedicated community but also encourages the creation of user-generated content, amplifying their reach. Diversifying their efforts, Gymshark effectively utilizes various social media platforms, notably launching successful TikTok challenges to boost engagement and brand visibility.

Their strategy extends beyond online presence, incorporating immersive pop-up events that solidify their status as a community-centric brand, demonstrating the power of a well-orchestrated content flywheel in action.

My Content Flywheel Strategy

My content strategy currently can be broken down as the following:

1. Write a weekly long-form newsletter and publish it every Saturday.

2. Spend 4 hours max over the course of the week in blocks of 30 - 60 minutes repurposing the long-form newsletter into posts for Twitter and LinkedIn.

3. Make a YouTube video the following week—either a talking head video where I discuss the concepts I wrote about in last week’s newsletters or about something I’m currently working on.

4. Collect notes and findings throughout the week and start to synthesize a new topic for my next newsletter.

Each part of this process has at least one or two places where integrating AI into the process will save me time (e.g., repurposing long-form articles to tweets with ChatGPT or tool to get first drafts to work off of).

Let’s dive into these so I can describe my process for each in more detail.

1. Newsletter Cornerstone

The newsletter is the most important aspect of my content creation for four reasons:

1. Writing long-form helps clarify my thoughts and communicate better.

2. The articles inspire ideas for my YouTube videos.

3. Short-from text posts and threads can be made by repurposing content in the newsletter.

4. It gives me sanity throughout the week—something to anchor my content to.

I like to think of writing the newsletter as loading up my content cannon with ammo for the week. I’m a general preparing to go into battle in the war for attention. And, if I'm going into battle, I want every edge I can get.

AI has become my super-soldier for getting that edge. Let me explain.

Where does AI fit into this workflow?

Written long-form is a great use case for AI. Here are some ways I leverage it for long-form writing (steal these for yourself):

Ideation

The “blank-page” problem is as old as writing itself. If you struggle to start, just ask ChatGPT to give you some ideas. This isn’t cheating. This is leveling the playing field.

Many people are creative. But not everyone is great at every part of the creative process (and that’s okay) such as ideation. AI will help you train your ideation muscle over time but as you are getting started, use it as your training wheels.

And even after you are great at coming up with ideas, AI can still be helpful here. I’ve found it super helpful to have a second opinion on my ideas and have a back-and-forth with things like ChatGPT—talking about your ideas helps you clarify your thinking.

If you don’t know where to start, have AI help!

Drafting

Drafting doesn’t mean letting the AI write for you.

It means letting it write with you. 

Through carefully crafting prompts, you can leverage AI to write up full-blown drafts of articles that you can use for inspiration—it can be helpful to see a certain concept written about before you start writing it yourself.

I’ve also found it helpful to paste your drafts into tools like ChatGPT and have it rewrite the draft in someone else’s writing style. I like to see what my ideas look like written in different styles so that I can see how I might write my ideas in that style.

Critiquing

Large Language Models (LLMs) are really good with large quantities of text, so you can paste your entire newsletter into ChatGPT (or some other chat interface like Claude), and you can ask it to critique on things like:

• Coherence

• Strength of Arugment

• Spelling & Grammar

• Key points & Themes

This will allow you to iterate on drafts faster and see where you can improve your writing.

Now that we know what the first phase looks like, let’s move on to repurposing.

2. Repurposing

Repurposing my newsletters is next phase in the process and I am constantly iterating on how I can improve it.

What I’ve landed on currently is to:

• Write ideas off the dome that come to me.

• Write tweets about points that stood out to me in my newsletter.

• Take ChatGPT through a series of prompts or run my article through one of my tools I’ve built for myself (check out my skool for learning some of the prompt flows I use).

The main point is that after we have all of our thoughts written out in long-form from the first step, we have a great base of raw information to work off of—to mold and shape to our liking.

Instead of writing tweets constantly, you get to have an extra piece of content (newsletter) and it helps you efficiently write short-form posts with quality substance.

3. YouTube as a Base

YouTube videos are a great way to connect with the audience in a more engaging way (video!).

I like to make 1-2 videos per week—I have started using my newsletter topics as inspiration for my videos more regularly. It’s helped me make videos in a shorter amount of time because I already have the topic I will make the video about and know how to talk about it (because I have already spent a week writing on the topic).

Aside from the ease of transition from newsletter to video, YouTube videos can also be a great source of content to repurpose for X (Twitter) and LinkedIn. Using YouTube as base inspiration for LinkedIn and Twitter posts is a great way to get more content for the same amount of effort.

Video is a great medium to build connections with your audience—I would recommend putting your face in the vides because it helps you connect with the audience more vs a faceless YouTube channel.

The two key touch-points of this content workflow where AI can be leveraged are pre-production and post-production.

Pre-Production Stage

Before you start making your video, you can leverage tools like VidIQ’s Custom GPT here.

This GPT is able to connect to your YouTube channel, analyze the content and provide suggestions on what videos to make that would resonate with your audience. It can also assist in creating scripts, thumbnails and titles for your videos.

I will either come up with a video idea separate from the concept I talked about in the newsletter or use the newsletter topic as inspiration for my next video.

Post-Production Stage

There is also an opportunity to streamline the YouTube video uploading process after the video is done.

For example, I created a custom tool that allows you to upload a video and generate:

1. Tweets and LinkedIn posts about the video

2. A YouTube SEO optimized description of the video

3. Thumbnails based on the topic of the video

As you can see, the opportunities for integrating AI into this content lifecycle span from the start of the video creation process to the end.

These are just two examples that show how AI helps us be more efficient with the content we produce by aiding in reducing the friction.

4. Research & Synthesis

This part of the process is both the end and the beginning of the flywheel.

I usually take a day to just think and explore. But then I get serious and narrow my focus on another topic for the week.

Here’s where AI (yet again) is helpful.

The process at a high level is:

• Find interesting things and collect notes, references, etc.

• Use AI to help draw connections across the information I found—synthesize my findings.

This synthesis is crucial—it transforms isolated pieces of information into a cohesive theme or argument for my next piece of content.

Essentially, AI acts as a research assistant, piecing together disparate data points into a storyline or thesis that informs the subject of my upcoming newsletter.

This cyclical process ensures a steady stream of inspired and interconnected content, keeping the flywheel spinning.

Closing Thoughts

I hope breaking down my process helped show you the importance of having a system—it helps us identify points in the process where AI can be leveraged.

Since integrating AI into this process, I’d say I’ve saved 10-20 hours/week. Even if you don’t like writing, you should try this process out and let me know what you think!

DM on twitter here.

That’s it for now. ‘Til next time, much love and peace y’all. 🤠