You can make the fastest, most readable website with the perfect design, elegant search features, and your own custom GPT and it still won’t be more convenient than a generic AI chatbot — because your readers’ workflow has fundamentally changed. Here’s the old workflow. Search, click, scroll, skim, avoid ads, extract the answer from a … Read more
Most people seem to have this vague idea that science advances when a new theory comes along that explains the facts better. The new theory is so compelling, or so we imagine, that people abandon the old orthodoxy and adopt the new one. Following the facts, and all that sciency stuff. According to Thomas Kuhn’s … Read more
One overlooked aspect of audience engagement is “trust anchors” — the foundations people rely on to interpret information, such as science, authority, community, or lived experience. To get better engagement with your audience, identify and align your trust anchors with the ones used by your audience. Charlie Kirk is either a hero or a villain, … Read more
[This is the main article from the August issue of The Krehbiel Letter.] I keep hearing that AI will steal jobs, but also that AI-generated content is substandard, and humans are still better at …. something. That’s the theme of this month’s issue. Where do humans fit in as AI takes over? Hope for humans … Read more
Summary: The partisan divide in the country, in which we all live in our own epistemic bubbles, isn’t a cultural or political shift — it’s a consequence of the technologies that make it easy for anyone to become a content creator. Attention is limited, but content is almost unlimited. In that situation, content that provokes … Read more
Summary: Our obsessions shape how we see the world. Instead of resisting them, we can harness them—finding what’s interesting to build an audience and what’s actionable to create value. Are you ready for the flood of posts, videos, and tweets about “Marketing Lessons from the Big Game,” or “Why the Halftime Show is a Branding … Read more
Summary: Listening to Beowulf exposes you to “kennings,” which are vivid, unexpected expressions — usually a pair of words — that put a different spin on a name or concept. Unlike AI’s predictable phrasing, creative language like kennings breaks linguistic patterns, making content more engaging, memorable, and uniquely human. While I was heating the pan … Read more
Summary: For now, excellent content requires a human writer, but creative teams are being downsized in hopes that AI can fill the gap. When Moses told Pharoah to let his people go, Pharoah said, “I guess these guys have too much time on their hands. From now on they have to make the same quota … Read more
Summary: You can create reusable tools with ChatGPT to help streamline idea generation and content creation. You’re staring at a blank page, and it’s staring back at you. How do you move forward? Today I’m going to explain a great tool you can use with ChatGPT to help you with content creation. My son does … Read more
Summary: There are rules and patterns that define and describe compelling content. Here’s an overview. The Babylon Bee had a great bit where a husband is complaining that his wife wants to have a deep conversation but she won’t even listen to his podcast. That’s essentially the message of “Nobody Wants to Read Your Sh*t” … Read more
Summary: A 16-point, step-by-step guide to using AI to write a book. Today I’m going to give you a simple technique to help you write a book quickly. There’s one prerequisite. You have to have already produced a lot of content on the subject. That content could be blog posts, articles, podcasts – even documentation, … Read more
Summary: There are many ways to restrict access to content, and there are a lot of issues to consider when developing such a strategy. Here’s a start. When advertising revenue declines, as it has been, publishers start to think about paywalls, as they have been. I was talking with a client about this the other … Read more
Summary: To establish trust with your audience, your content strategy should focus on these five pillars: transparency, credibility, habitual product, relevant language, and specificity. At Omeda’s OX7 meeting in Chicago, Adam Ryan from Workweek gave a talk on 5 pillars of trust. They are … Transparency Credibility Habitual product Relevant language Specificity My notes from … Read more
Summary: To make your content stand out in a crowded field, consider these nine concepts: voice, focus, frameworks, recurring segments, vocabulary, message, favorites, characters, and skits. Publishers spend a lot of time and money developing their own brand image, which can include typography, colors, logos, and stylized art. Think of the dot-matrix images in The … Read more
Summary: To create a solid content-based business, don’t focus on the “flyby” traffic. Use high-quality, relevant content to attract an engaged audience, then create a robust database around that audience. At MACMA Industry Day last week, Amanda Landsaw said “flyby visitors don’t create robust databases.” There’s a lot to unpack in that statement. Let’s start … Read more