How I create the MKT1 content calendar
A behind the scenes look at my content strategy - Part 2 of 2
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I don’t have a big team, an army of freelancers, or an unlimited amount of time in my day to create MKT1 content. But I do have a system. One that lets me create a lot of content—across newsletters, podcast episodes, templates, LinkedIn, events, and sometimes even YouTube, without burning out or falling into the trap of random acts of marketing.
In this two-part newsletter series, I’m sharing my strategy and system in hopes it helps you refine your own. In part 2 (this newsletter), I focus on executing on said strategy. Because even if your startup has a strong content strategy, great execution isn’t guaranteed.
Some teams build rigid calendars that can’t flex when the world changes (likely why I see so many companies making blog roadmaps that look like they are from 2010). Others abandon their strategy entirely as the ink is drying, respond to any and every internal request, and end up saying nothing memorable. My system lives in the middle: structured enough to stay strategic, but flexible enough to respond to the moment.
The system I use isn’t complicated, but it makes a huge difference in how efficiently I can produce content that actually drives impact (and revenue).
In this newsletter series:
This is part 2 of my “behind-the-scenes” newsletter series:
Part 1: How I built the foundation of the MKT1 content strategy.
My perceptions and storylines (like “marketing is strategic, not just execution”)
My content pillars (like ecosystem marketing and org design)
My core principles I follow to make sure my content is useful and unique (like “always add value” and “no dead ends”)
Part 2: This newsletter - How I plan and execute the MKT1 content calendar
Step 1: Map out monthly-ish content themes
Step 2: Build a flexible content calendar (and know when to break from it)
Step 3: Repurpose and distribute as you go, not weeks later
Step 4: Map everything into 4 parallel content streams (this is less complex than it sounds)
Paid subscribers: There’s a new annual content calendar & strategy template in the MKT1 template library, alongside a handful of other content-specific resources you can copy and adapt.
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Step 1: Map out monthly-ish content themes
For the first couple years of MKT1, I wrote one big newsletter a month. All my content was centered on a monthly theme, except for some repurposed and one-off social content. I wrote an “anchor” newsletter related to the monthly theme, and then created an additional newsletter for paid subscribers, templates and resources, an occasional event, and my main social posts all around this theme. This is still mostly true—even though I typically publish more than one big thing a month these days.
I usually make a rough roadmap with my monthly themes 3–6 months in advance. When I’m planning out these themes, I try to get breadth across my content pillars (e.g. ecosystem marketing), but depth on my perceptions (e.g. “Marketing is a strategic function–up there with product”). More on my pillars and perceptions in the previous newsletter »
The point of laying out high-level themes is to make sure you have proper coverage of the things that matter most to your business before you jump into the content creation process. But also, if I didn’t make a high-level content calendar this way, I think I might lose my mind a little (or a little more than I already have). I need to have a high-level topic I’m thinking about for a while and not spread myself too thin mentally. I think this goes for entire marketing teams too, focus helps.
Here’s an example of how I lay out monthly themes:
On the flip side, don’t over publish
Your cadence for creating “anchor” or “big” content doesn’t need to be monthly. You need to adjust your cadence for your company. You can do a quarterly theme if it better suits you. Sometimes my own themes span across 2 months (e.g “Account-driven GTM” and “Annual planning” spanned 2 months). Semi-counter-intuitively, you should default to less, not more.
Don’t make new stuff all the time if your quality bar and distribution are taking a hit. If you are making too much stuff and not even having time or bandwidth to distribute it, your fuel & engine are out of whack. And my number 1 rule of marketing is to keep your fuel and engine aligned and in balance with each other and with your audience.
For me at MKT1 this is relatively easy to keep balanced. My content is on a platform that helps me grow subscribers. And now with my large subscriber base I have built-in distribution. I also have a decent audience on LinkedIn for distribution. For startups without an audience yet, keeping this in balance can be a lot harder.
Warning: Many startups make too much fuel, and lack a strong engine
Most companies focus too much on creating net-new content, treating their editorial calendar like a perpetual hunger that must be constantly fed (was I actually hungry when writing this? probably). It definitely doesn’t help marketing slow down when leaders demand “x pieces of content a month.” This mindset leads to shallow content that doesn’t drive real impact. After all, content isn’t really a volume game, it’s a quality game.
Try to avoid getting stuck in this hamster wheel of constantly looking for “new” ideas to add to your calendars!
Thought experiment: Make nothing new for 6 months
So here’s a thought experiment I often run with growth- and late-stage companies I work with: If you published nothing new next quarter, what would your social calendar look like?
When I ask this, people usually say, “Oh we have enough content created that we could share it for another 6 months and do nothing new, but I’m not allowed to do that!”
I then ask, “Why not?” If you have quality content that hasn’t been properly distributed and/or repurposed, why not use it?
Yes, making nothing new can be a tough sell internally (especially to your CEO or sales team), and you probably will want to make one or two new big things at least—since business needs, audience wants, and market forces do change.
But it’s often riskier to focus only on generating new ideas than to double down on the good stuff you already have. New content takes time, budget, and coordination, and most of it never performs as well as your best work that’s already published. Repurposing lets you get more value from proven content, reinforce key messages, and reach more people across more channels, without the constant pressure to reinvent the wheel. So if you’re considering a big new content project, your default should be “no” unless there’s a compelling reason it’s truly additive and uniquely valuable.
Repetition is a good thing, for your content team and your audience.
It bears repeating (pun intended) that repetition and consistency are essential in marketing. Your audience is likely not watching every single thing you do, so saying something more than once, and in different ways, is not only a good way to get mileage out of your content, it’s a smart strategy. In other words, it’s okay to sound a bit like a broken record:
Step 2: Work off your pre-built calendar—that’s subject to change
Once a quarter or so, I take a look at my monthly themes, and do more detailed planning for each big new piece of content that fits each month’s theme. I then plot out any secondary content—this could include a podcast episode, an event, a new set of templates, etc.
Then I start to plot out my social calendar, especially those related to the big new content pieces.
I find it helpful to map these big moments out visually so you can see how they’re spread across weeks and adjust against anything that’s already blocked out on your calendar. This is a great time to reserve space for pre-posts too—more on what that means in a second.
I do this in Asana. This is dummy data, but exactly the setup I use:
You’ll see that I put the monthly theme on day 1, here it’s “annual planning”.
I color-code LinkedIn posts related to the monthly theme (teal in this case) and use a different color for LinkedIn posts not related to this month’s anchor content (light green).
I make my primary content orange, and my secondary content pink (I use MKT1 brand colors for the main content b/c I’m just that into being on brand).
I’ll show what I put in these individual tasks later on in this newsletter
I also made a quick Loom walkthrough on how I do this in Asana (available to paid subscribers) »
Like many things in marketing, I make plans and then break them
My content strategy (pillars and perceptions!) shapes my roadmap. And then I leave room for both external factors (what my audience is talking and thinking about) and internal factors (mainly content creators’ energy levels and strategy shifts) to cause me to reorg or rethink the roadmap.
It’s easier to let changes happen as a team of one or two. But, even in large teams, I believe you need to make room for both of these things: external changes and your team’s ability to create something truly valuable at that moment.
Externally
You gotta read the room when making content. Things change fast out there, and you want your content to resonate. I stay on top of things by reading LinkedIn non-stop, not because I love LinkedIn, but because that’s where the marketers are.
Internally
You have to follow where your energy takes you, and you can’t force the creative process. When I first started managing content creators and designers over a decade ago, I didn’t fully understand this. I’d get frustrated that content couldn’t be manifested as quickly as a growth experiment. Now I completely get it, sorry if I didn’t understand your process previous direct reports, I’ve since evolved!
That’s why I often find myself writing on weekends (like right now), when my mind is clearer and I’ve had some distance from the chaos. That doesn’t mean write on the weekends or encourage your team to do so, it means flow time is needed and you gotta find it where you can! I still think teams need deadlines. But being flexible when possible and being willing to switch the roadmap around could help your content team get in a better zone and produce better content.
Example of this happening in the MKT1 calendar:
A few weeks ago I read Andrew Chen’s Substack “Every Marketing Channel Sucks Right Now”
I left a LinkedIn comment and my friend Mallory Contois responded
I dropped everything else on my content calendar temporarily and made a newsletter and videos with Mallory
This newsletter became an opportunity to restate some of my thoughts on marketing strategy and the state of marketing right now–including ecosystem marketing and account-driven GTM (a perception!)
This then impacted my “Sales & marketing alignment” podcast and companion newsletter a few weeks later, where I felt inspired to make a GTM timeline of the last 15 years of high-level trends.
This timeline then became a LinkedIn carousel post that got lots of engagement too.
This is now my best-performing newsletter of 2025—and one of my top LinkedIn posts
Step 3: Plan for repurposing and distribution as you go
Proper distribution rarely happens if you have to go back weeks later and figure out how to promote something you already made. It’s hard to get back in the zone. So, it helps to think about distribution while you’re creating. Even if you have a larger team and aren’t the one responsible for repurposing and distributing, you’ll help everyone out if you do this! Ask yourself: what parts of this content are best suited for social? What can be clipped, quoted, or turned into a visual? Can I actually include that visual in my main content AND use it for distribution? Thinking this way upfront makes distribution way easier when it’s time for the post weeks or even months later.
I treat my “big” or “anchor” content as a spike. Something that peaks during a specific month or two, and then gets stretched out and repurposed over time. You can see that pattern here in how I theme my months and build in a natural fade-out:
Repurposing ≠ distribution
Before we get into distribution, let’s clear up the semantics.
Everyone’s talking about “repurposing” these days. I used to call it getting more mileage out of your content—same idea, just easier now thanks to AI. You take a strong content idea, create an anchor piece, then build offshoots tailored to specific ICPs, channels, etc.
But here’s the mistake: repurposing doesn’t just mean posting about a new piece of content on social. That’s the bare minimum.
Relatedly, repurposing and distribution aren’t the same, though they often get conflated. You can distribute content without repurposing it, and repurposed content still needs a distribution plan.
Repurposing = the fuel: Transforming a single asset into multiple formats, mediums, and angles to reach and engage your audience in different ways. This is about rethinking, not just re-using.
Distribution = the engine: Getting content in front of the right people, through the right channels.
Real repurposing happens when you:
Create frameworks and concepts that you then reuse, even months later
Take a diagram from long-form content, modify that diagram into a carousel for a LinkedIn post
Extract elements from larger pieces to stand alone. I might take an idea from just one newsletter section and make it a question on the podcast.
Aggregate concepts, frameworks, or data across multiple pieces into a report; or start with a big asset and break it into standalone parts
Ineffective repurposing happens when you:
Copy and paste the same messaging across every channel without adapting it
Post once about a piece of content and call it “repurposed”
Share the same idea with the same image multiple times in a week, hoping for different results.
Write a bunch of social posts but either publish them all at once (tanking engagement) or never publish them at all.
Rely on AI tools to auto-generate clips from videos, it’s almost always better to curate these clips yourself. There are great tools for video editing, but IMO the auto-generated clips don’t give you the quality you need (yet).
Bottom line: True repurposing extends the life and reach of your best ideas. Distribution ensures those ideas actually get seen. When you treat them as distinct but connected disciplines, you build a content system that scales impact without scaling chaos.
I shared this in my last newsletter too, but it’s worth repeating—because I use this approach to repurpose not just my newsletters, but also my Krameworks™:
Keeping all this in mind, here’s how to build out the social part of my content calendar:
“Drafting” social posts while creating content
While I’m working on a newsletter or podcast, I’m already doing some pre-work for distributing it on social:
When I’m creating newsletters, I make tons of diagrams. Ultimately, the goal is that 75% of these become LI posts of their own, but not all at once. I use some of them in my first posts about a newsletter, and save a few for resurfacing the conversation down the line.
e.g. For this newsletter, I’ve already planned a post about making a flexible content calendar, with the calendar gif.When I listen to and review podcasts, I do double duty. I’m marking clips and sections I like on the transcript as I listen. These then get turned into Asana tasks with sections of the transcript called out. Sometimes we clip these all in a batch, sometimes we do them one-off, but I never have to go back and look at what highlights I can use from a previous podcast.
As I mentioned, the key here is front-loading some of the thinking around distribution, so you’re not circling back and trying to remember what’s worth sharing after the fact. This also works well when you are asking others to cross-promote your content (like your CEO, partners, sales team, etc.). I give each podcast co-host a clip they can use on LinkedIn with some ideas for how to frame it, making it easy for them to amplify the episode. Because this is done upfront, it doesn’t seem like an afterthought, a week after I publish the episode.
My distribution calendar makes itself
Thanks to all this pre-work, my content calendar is filled out months in advance with planned posts across different channels. As those dates approach, I shift things around to finalize the actual publishing schedule.
I keep my list of podcast clips, newsletter diagrams, etc. ready to go in Asana.
I concentrate my posts right after the original publish date and then spread the rest out over the coming months.
I put due dates on almost all post ideas related to my “big content”, knowing they’ll change. This works better than no due date at all, it forces me to move it to another date not couch it forever.
I also mark every post as movable or not movable, so I can make quick adjustments as I go and not have to think too hard about what’s set in stone.
On a weekly basis, I shift things around to lock in my distribution calendar across LinkedIn, Substack notes, and YouTube shorts.
Some of the ideas on my calendar never see the light of day. But I’d rather come up with a bigger list while in the moment than going back and trying to resurrect an idea.
This process gives me a calendar full of social ideas, months in advance!
Here’s how I do this using custom fields in Asana tasks:
I add these tasks to the calendar when making or just after publishing something, usually 5–7 ideas per newsletter or podcast. Then, if I need to I just move them! I make custom fields for the content type, which determines the color the task shows up as in my calendar (you saw this above). I also add a custom field for if the date is movable or not, this is largely dictated by whether sponsors are involved or not.
So with a few custom fields and some due-dates, I’ve populated my social calendar through Thanksgiving and it’s only May.
The pre-post “hack”
Not only am I making my social calendar as I create content, but I actually start getting mileage out of a topic before I even make the thing.
I call this the “pre-post.” It’s my not-so-secret LinkedIn secret—you can and should steal it. A pre-post teases an upcoming topic or asks a question related to content you’re planning. I use it often for 3 main reasons:
To gather comments, data, and ideas I can use in the content itself. Sometimes that means running a poll to reference stats; other times, I’m looking for free-form responses to quote (with credit, of course).
To test whether the topic resonates. If I’m already working on the idea, this helps shape the angle. If I’m still deciding whether to cover it, I use the post to gauge interest—I guess that makes it a pre-pre-post.
To re-engage the same audience when the content goes live. I’ll often drop the finished link in the comments of the original post, especially if there was strong engagement.
For example, last week I posted on LinkedIn asking if people regularly publish to their company blogs, or still read any company blogs regularly. Again…this is by design. The next day, I recorded a podcast with my dear friends Jenny and Devon on this very topic. So I’m getting the conversation started now, and also using it to inform what we talk about.
As I said this is a not-so-secret secret, here I am talking about it on a Riverside webinar.
Step 4: Track all of this in 4 “streams” (aka content roadmaps)
Another way I think about this system is that I have 4 “streams” of content:
New “big” content, like a newsletter or podcast episode
Secondary new content, like templates or follow-ups for that month’s big newsletter—typically repurposed or extensions of my new “big” content
On-theme social posts, based on the big and secondary content that month (the 2 streams I mentioned above)
Social posts based on “old” content or random ideas (That may lead to new content in the future)
I actually turn this into 4 separate “roadmaps” for prioritizing. So in Asana, I have these all in their own project calendars, and then consolidate them into an aggregated roadmap—which is very easy, I just put the same task in multiple projects.
While this is best in a tool like Asana, it works in other tools too. Even laying out your repurposing and distribution plan in a spreadsheet or Google doc will help you stay organized and have a list to come back to when you’re planning your weekly or monthly calendar.
The reason I like having 4 streams: It forces me to not neglect the “other” or “repurposing stream” altogether—it’s just as important. And it also forces me to think hard about how I’ll get many posts out of my anchor content for that month.
Example: Annual planning theme
Last fall, I ran a newsletter series on annual planning. Turns out it’s a great example of how I extend and repurpose around a monthly theme. It started as just 3 main newsletter parts, and the engagement with the series gave me an idea for an unofficial part 4 of the newsletter, months after the first post.
September:
Newsletter part 1: MKT1 Guide to Annual Marketing Planning
A new template pack for paid subscribers, including the annual planning & goal setting template
Several LI posts:
October:
Newsletter part 2: Marketing strategy exercises to kick off your annual planning process
Video: Walkthrough: How to prioritize marketing work during annual planning
Newsletter part 3: How to prioritize marketing activities & avoid random acts of marketing
LI posts:
And beyond:
Newsletter part 4: How to calculate your marketing budget—and make sure it’s efficient
And even more LinkedIn posts…
This single theme generated upwards of 40 distinct pieces of content across 4+ months, reinforcing my key perceptions while providing ongoing value to my audience.
The important thing to notice: Everything I created reused, referenced, or built upon the foundational concepts and frameworks I laid out in the first newsletter.
Summary: It’s not about new content all the time, it’s about a better “system”
This behind-the-scenes system—monthly themes, flexible planning, thoughtful repurposing, and real distribution—is what keeps MKT1 running. And it’s the same model I recommend to startups and content teams.
If you build a system of perceptions, pillars, frameworks, and your own content “IP”, then turn that into engaging content and distribute it properly, you’ll not only get more out of your work, you’ll say smarter things, more often, to the right people.
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