How To Get 10x More From Your Content
Before Ross Simmonds had a job in marketing, he was living in his parents’ basement in Nova Scotia, drinking instant coffee, with basically no money. He believed that if he gave value to the internet, it would give value back, so he kept writing. One post landed him several job interviews. Another, about marketing to Gen Z (back when they were still hip and cool), got Bacardi to fly him to Miami to present to their C-suite.
Today Ross runs Foundation Marketing and Distribution AI, helping enterprise brands spread their stories. My co-host Dasha sat down with Ross at Drive in Vermont to learn how Ross’ whole content philosophy fits on a bumper sticker: create ridiculously good content once, distribute forever. Here’s how he does it.
Create great content that hits all 4 Es
Distribution only works if the content you’re distributing is good. Ross won’t spread trash no matter how many channels it could go out on, and his test for good is what he calls the 4 Es.
The best content:
- Educates: gives people information they never had before.
- Engages: gets people talking, like with a contrarian take.
- Entertains: makes people feel some kind of emotion.
- Empowers: makes people feel like they can go do something special.
Hitting all four is hard, but crack it and you have a banger. Ross’s own career is proof. Before he worked in advertising, he wrote a post called “14 books to read to get a job in advertising,” and it landed him interviews at several agencies.
Essentially, distribution multiplies whatever you create, so create something worth multiplying. Once you have something that clears the bar, most teams post it once and move on. That’s just where Ross gets started.
How to take your content far past launch day
One post isn’t a distribution plan. The people online the day you hit publish won’t be the same people scrolling next week, and your market keeps changing too. New buyers come into market all the time, and others head out. A proper run catches your total addressable market over time.
A brand came to Ross with a white paper that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in design, stats, and surveys. They had promoted it once on LinkedIn and got only a few leads. Ross, however, has seen brands grow traffic to their sites 10x once they started distributing properly. Here’s how he would’ve distributed that white paper to get the most out of it.
The 9-step distribution run:
- Post it on every social channel: LinkedIn, X, Threads, Bluesky, you name it.
- Reshare it the next day and week: reach people who missed it last time.
- Send it to your email newsletter: so it lands in the inbox, not just the feed.
- Hand it to sales: to send to their contacts and any pipeline that’s gone quiet.
- Make a long-form video: chop it into shorts for Reels, TikTok, & stories.
- Submit it to Reddit: in the subreddits relevant to your niche and audience (be upfront about who you work for).
- Turn it into a carousel: for Instagram or LinkedIn’s slides format.
- Record a story if you’re feeling ambitious: with the content green-screened behind you and a swipe-up link.
- Repost it two weeks later: then schedule a few more for the weeks after.
Somewhere in the middle of all this, grab a cup of coffee and ask yourself: What else can I do? That question is the whole plan.
If there’s always someone new to reach, when do you finally stop?
Keep promoting until the wheels fall off
If you create something ridiculously good, there’s no natural point where you stop promoting it. The only time to stop is when you can say with high confidence you’ve reached 100% of your target market, and simple math says that’s likely impossible. If content starts to feel dated, that’s a reason to update it, not shelve it.
These days, the payoff for playing the long game by keeping content fresh shows up somewhere new: AI answers.
The long game: keep it fresh for the LLMs
Every channel you distribute to now feeds the answers LLMs give to your prospective buyers. Update your best asset once a year so it keeps giving past readers something new while it reaches the ones who haven’t seen it yet.
Back in 2023, Ross’s team created an asset for a client and never stopped updating, distributing, and promoting it. Today it’s consistently cited in AI answers for some of the top prompts in that category, and still generates leads.
A note about Reddit: it’s one of the most powerful sources of training data for tools like Gemini, so what people say about your category there shapes the answers your buyers get from AI.
Get a real return on your content investment.
In a world full of AI slop, content that hits the 4 Es is your advantage, but only if it doesn’t sit collecting dust. Make this 9-step framework your own, promote past the point where you’d normally stop, and keep your best stuff fresh for the LLMs.
