Category: Strategic Marketing

In masterclasses or training I give, at some point someone inevitably brings this up.
The rules and ratios of a content strategy.

We’ve talked strategy, positioning, content, building trust, and then a hand goes up: “But what’s the ratio? How many posts per week? Is there a formula?”

I understand where this is coming from because a formula feels safe.
If positioning and posting is math, you can’t fail at it; you can only miscount.

And the influencers and creators aiming solely at reach know we all love these kinds of over-simplified concepts.
Which is why the internet is full of rules with numbers in them: the 5-3-2 rule, the 4-1-1 rule, the 3-3-3 rule, the 80/20 rule, the rule of 7, the 95-5 rule.

People search for these, hoping one of them is the answer.
When I ran an SEO research round on this, the numbered rules were the single strongest pattern in what people ask. One of them even showed up in six of my fourteen searches.

I’ve spent 16 years testing this stuff in practice, so let me save you the detour.
Most of these rules are BS, wearing a lab coat.
But, and this is the interesting part, almost every one of them is wrapped around a concept that’s correct. The numbers are made up, but the ideas underneath mostly aren’t.

So let me help you with which ones make sense and which ones you can skip.

The rule of 7

The claim: a buyer needs seven touches with your message before they act.

The origin is older than LinkedIn, older than your CRM, older than television: 1930s movie studios worked out that people needed repeated exposure to a film before they’d buy a ticket. Marketers adopted it, and the seven stuck because seven sounds precise.

Nobody has ever shown that the number is seven. It might be three for a familiar name and thirty for a stranger selling something expensive, and in a feed where your buyer scrolls past four hundred posts a day, “touch” itself is a stretchy unit.

But the direction is correct, and it’s the direction most of us ignore.
One post, one email or one meeting does nothing.
Familiarity is built by repetition over time, and the market rewards the name it has seen before.
In every group I trained, the person who posts once, gets silence, and concludes “LinkedIn doesn’t work for me” is the same person who’d never expect one call to close a deal.

The rule survives if you read it as “far more touches than feels reasonable.”
It doesn’t the moment you build a spreadsheet to track your results with a column that says 7.

The 5-3-2 rule and the 4-1-1 rule.

Both are content-mix recipes.

– The 5-3-2 rule says that out of every ten posts, five should be curated from others, three your own content, two personal.
– The 4-1-1 rule, born on Twitter in the content marketing world, says for every one post about yourself, share one relevant repost and four pieces from others.

The idea underneath is good, and it’s the idea that separates accounts people follow from accounts people mute.
Talk about yourself rarely, be useful often.
Nobody follows a walking brochure, and the account that’s 80% “we’re proud to announce” is the reason the mute button exists.

But the recipes themselves date from the curation era, when resharing other people’s articles counted as a content strategy.
That era is over.
Feeds are drowning in reshared BS, and reposting industry news with “interesting read!” builds nobody’s reputation, because the reader learns nothing about you from it.

What people need from you now is your take, your experience, your point of view, the one thing that can’t be curated from elsewhere.

In my programs, I hand my clients a ratio.
✅ 70% insights your audience finds useful
✅ 20% company perspective
✅ 10% promotional.

The 80/20 rule

Pareto’s principle gets applied often to a content strategy.
80% value and 20% promotion. It’s the same as the 70/20/10 rule as above, still fine as a starting guardrail.

✅ A handful of your posts will produce most of your reactions.
✅ Of your five main topics, one will drive most of your engagement.
✅ A small slice of your network will generate almost all your opportunities.

My experience is that many people get obsessed by this 80/20 principle.
we search for winners when the research input is rarely enough to make those kinds of predictions.

The trick is to publish consistently enough that the winners have room to happen, then double down when you find them. The rule survives as a mindset. It fails as a plan, because you only learn which 20% mattered afterwards.

The 3-3-3 rule

This one is my favourite, for the wrong reasons.
The 3-3-3 rule was the single most-searched rule in my research round.

Ask five marketers what it says, and you get five answers.
Three posts a week, or three hashtags, or three content pillars in three formats, or thirty minutes split three ways.
I’ve seen every one of these presented, confidently, as The 3-3-3 Rule.

A rule that is popular with that little agreement on its content tells me something.

The demand was never for the rule.
It’s for certainty.

People aren’t searching “3-3-3 rule” because they saw it work.
They’re searching because someone mentioned it, and the idea that a secret formula exists, one everyone else already knows, is unbearable.

There is no formula. There was never a formula.
The people you admire, the companies that succeed are not counting to three.

“Best time to post”

Not a numbered rule, but it lives in the same drawer, and it’s the question I get asked a lot!
I spent my early years posting at the “optimal” times, and I can report the result made little difference.

My problem was never the clock.
My problem was that I sounded like everyone else who’d read the same free guide.

Timing has a small effect, but engagement does!
Post when your audience is awake and online, and be around in the first few hours to answer comments, because conversation helps a post travel.

The 95-5 rule

The claim is that at any moment, about 95% of your potential buyers are not in the market for what you sell.
Only around 5% are buying now.

It comes from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, working with LinkedIn and the underlying point holds up.
The overwhelming majority of people seeing your content today have no budget, no project and no intention of buying this quarter.

Most sales reps and business development professionals or entrepreneurs read that as bad news and post less.
It’s the best news on this list. And if you’re not into selling something, it’s also the case for attracting new talent.
It means the game was never converting this week’s audience, but rather being remembered by the 95% until they’re ready.

The consultant they’ve followed over the last year gets the call the moment an issue arrives.
The one who only showed up to sell to the 5% gets compared on price with four strangers.

It also explains why so many people quit LinkedIn “because it doesn’t generate leads.”
They measured a twelve-month game with a two-week ruler.
If 95% of your audience can’t or won’t buy right now, silence after a good post isn’t rejection.
It’s building a reputation of being someone that can be trusted.

The 95-5 rule survives because it never pretended to be a posting recipe.
It’s a description of how markets work, and everything I teach about trust and reputation stands on the same ground. You build the relationship before you need it, because when someone finally moves, they move toward the ones they already trust.

What the numbered rules are selling

Every one of these rules has a reasonable idea in it.
Repeat yourself more than feels natural, be useful more often than you sell, expect smaller results on the short term, accept that most of your audience isn’t converting today.

Every one of them dresses the idea up as a number, because “be patient and generous” doesn’t sound like good advice, but “the 4-1-1 rule” sounds like something a professional would know.

The number is the packaging, not the product.
The danger isn’t following the rules; it’s what following them does to your attention.

Marketing and sales teams will debate their content ratio for an hour, while nobody could name the three questions their buyers keep asking.

They were doing the accounting instead of the work, and the accounting felt like progress.
That’s the cost of formula-hunting.
It hands you something to optimise that isn’t the thing.

What to use instead of a formula

Three questions, and they do everything the rules promise.

What should this bring me?
Name the result. Inbound conversations, speaking gigs, candidates, being top of mind with twenty specific buyers.
A goal you can name beats a ratio you can count, because now you can tell whether any of this is working.

What do my buyers keep asking?
Their recurring questions are your content plan. Answer them in public, in your own words, with your own examples. Do that and your “content mix” sorts itself out, because useful is the default and selling becomes the natural result of it.

What rhythm can I hold for six months?
Not the rhythm of your most motivated week, the rhythm of your busiest one.
One post a week you can keep, beats five you can’t, because the 95% out there aren’t judging your frequency.
They’re noticing whether you’re still around when their moment comes.

Show up consistently, say something you believe in your own words, be useful to the 95% who aren’t buying yet, and sell rarely enough that people don’t flinch when you do.

Anyway.

If someone tells you they’ve cracked LinkedIn with a formula, ask them why they’re selling the formula instead of using it.

The rules, answered plainly

A while ago a client told me, halfway through a call, that her daughter was about to leave for university and she was dreading the empty house. Nothing to do with the work, but just a human thing she mentioned.

Three weeks later we spoke again and I forgot to ask her how she was doing. Not because I didn’t care, but because I’d captured it where I captured everything then, which was nowhere 🫣.

I help people build a reputation through relationships. “Reputation built on people, not platforms” is sort of my message.

And meanwhile, I was letting the context of my own relationships live in tools that aren’t made for this kind of relationship management.

Your email inbox, LinkedIn messages and WhatsApp aren’t there to help you build relationships; they are there to make the companies behind them some money.

So I started building something to fix that. It’s early, and the personal knowledge experts might say it’s just beyond the phase where it holds together with tape in places.

But I don’t want to wait to walk you through what it is and why this might be my biggest breakthrough in the last 15 years.

Where your relationships live

Here is the typical “Relationship Management System” of people like you and me.

1. A name in your phone.
2. An email thread in Gmail.
3. A calendar entry that says “coffee w/ Jeroen”.
4. A transcript in a notetaker.
5. A connection on LinkedIn.

Five tools, none of them talking to each other, all of them owned by companies whose job is their own growth, not your life.

And every CRM I ever tried made it worse, because a CRM isn’t built to remember a person. It’s built to push a lead down a funnel or ensure you keep track of when clients are ready to buy “again”. It wants a deal size and a close date.

The main issue with it, is that it treats your neighbour, partner and best friend the same as a lead you have met and an event last week. So at some point the thing basically asks you what sales stage your partner is in 😵‍💫

As you read in the intro, my biological memory could benefit from an upgrade, but since that’s not on the table, I need an external one.

The problem was that my external memory was spread across half a dozen apps, none of them talking to each other, and for none of them mine I own the data.

Everyone’s pointing AI at the wrong thing

At the same time, everyone I see has started pointing AI at exactly one thing, which is the output.

Write an email, write a post, create a presentation, etc. Have a look at one of the newsfeeds on LinkedIn and Substack and it’s full of people explaining how to use skills to fix that. But the more I used it, the more I noticed the thing it was missing.

I don’t need an AI system that writes like me. I need an AI system that knows me, helps me remember, think and connect the dots. Who I’ve met, what we talked about, what matters to them, and when we last spoke.

And this is the part that almost everyone overlooks.

AI is only ever as good as what it knows about your (professional) life, and I mean the full spectrum of it. Right now, that information is spread across 12 apps and 4 cloud drives that don’t know or talk to each other.

You can have the smartest assistant on earth and it’s working blind, because the memory it needs is locked inside someone else’s database.

So I asked myself a different question. Instead of “how do I use AI to make more stuff” I asked “How do I build myself a memory good enough that it serves me for life?”

The Life Lens System

That’s when I landed on something Martijn Aslander has been building for a while. A personal, local, tool- and LLM-agnostic system that remembers everything you want it to.

The name is his: the “Life Lens System”. I took the idea and started building my own version. The core is really simple. Your life is a set of plain notes you own, forever, that link to each other. No app in the middle. No account you can get locked out of. Just Markdown files.

I build mine in Obsidian, which, under the hood, is a folder of plain text files sitting on my computers.

The good thing about Obsidian is that it has bi-directional linking. So linking a “thing” to another “thing” shows up in both places. This is how you can create a “single source of truth” and that will save you a shit load of time!

One note per person. One note per company. One note per meeting. And the relationships between them are links, the same way your head connects a face to a place to a conversation. Link a person to the meeting, the meeting to the company, and a little map of how everyone connects starts building itself.

I tried this before, but it was always a fuckload of work. I’m not going to sit and type contacts into a form like it’s 2009.

But with AI the system feeds itself from what already exists. My calendar knows who I met. My meeting tool has the transcripts of what we said. A small importer pulls those in and turns them into notes on its own. Local, in a format any computer can read.

And since I can’t code, Claude built the whole thing while I described what I wanted in plain words.

A few things it does that a normal contact list can’t:

• It knows how warm a relationship is, and works it out live. Talked this week, it’s on fire; a month back, cooling; longer than that, cold. I never set that by hand, the system does it automatically.
• It dims people instead of deleting them. The hundreds you’ve met once don’t clutter the place up, and they don’t get deleted either. They sit in the background and step forward the moment you talk again.
• It stores the signal, not the message. I don’t want a copy of all emails, but I do want to remember that we talked, when, and roughly about what.

People are only the first lens

The relationship management example is just the first step. The reason it’s a Life Lens System and not a CRM is that the same approach, plain notes you own, linked together, works for everything else too. What you’ve read, what you’re learning, the ideas you’re chasing, the projects you’re in. It’s meant to be a memory for a whole life. I started with people because they are my entire business, so that’s the lens I ground myself in first.

And there’s another reason I am so enthusiastic about this, one that is becoming more important each day as AI infiltrates our lives and work.

Everyone (especially companies) is handing their thinking, their writing, their relationships to tools they don’t own, on the assumption that those tools will always be there.

They won’t.

Companies get bought, prices suddenly double overnight, Orange Uncle Donald decides you can’t use it anymore, and the feature disappears.

Plain text on your own disk outlives every one of them. Own the memory and you can point whatever AI comes next straight at it. Rent it, and you get whatever big tech decides to hand you that month.

Where to start?

I’m not handing you a finished system because I don’t have one. But if you recognise any of this, here’s where I’d start, and roughly where I did:

1. Pick one slice. Don’t try to build an operating system for your whole life on day one. I started with people, because that’s where both my money and my meaning come from. Yours might be what you read, or what you’re learning.
2. Own the files. Plain text, on your own machine, and a layer to connect them like Obsidian. If a note only opens inside one company’s app, it isn’t yours.
3. Let AI feed it what you already have. Don’t type it all in. Point it at your notes, calendar, your meeting notes, the stuff you already have, and let it fill itself.
4. Keep who, when, and what mattered. Skip the rest. You don’t need the whole transcript of a meeting, but you do need to understand the nuances.

I’m early on this, but Martijn Aslander is light years ahead. Have a look at https://martijnaslander.github.io/life-lens-system/ for what’s possible in your future.

The point isn’t a better database

That client I told you about in the intro? Yesterday we called. Before I picked up, I opened her note. The situation with her daughter and the empty-house thing was right there. So I asked how she’d settled in. The pause on the other end told me she wasn’t expecting it, because almost nobody remembers anymore.

That’s why I love this stuff. It’s a bit nerdy, but it’s not about a smarter database.

It’s a way to keep being the person who remembers, in a world that’s quietly agreeing to forget.

Everyone’s using AI and it makes us all fucking lazy. Open LinkedIn and you can smell it. Tidy paragraphs that have no soul, a neat three-point takeaway, and underneath it all, nothing anyone actually thinks. A whole feed of people who typed “write me a post about leadership” and posted what came back, then wondered why it landed like a wet napkin.

The tool isn’t the problem. Your laziness to build context is. You’re handing the best writing tool you’ve ever had one vague sentence and expecting it to read your mind. It can’t, or at least not yet, so it gives you the average of everything ever written on the topic.

The fix is not that hard, and it’s not some €47 magic prompt you buy off a guy in your DMs. It’s five things you tell the AI before you ask it for anything.

The five things a good brief has

Think of it like briefing a freelancer on day one. You wouldn’t say “write something good” and walk off. You’d tell them who to be and what you actually need. Same here, and basically it comes down to five things.

Persona. Who it should be. Tell the AI what role to play. “You’re a copywriter with 20 years in B2B.” “You’re a skeptical CFO.” The role shapes everything that follows, and “helpful assistant” is not a role.

Task. What it should do. One clear job. “Summarize the newest trends in digital marketing.” Not “help me with marketing.” The vaguer the ask, the more generic the answer.

Tone. How it should sound. “Professional but informal with a 7/10 humour twist.” Leave it out and you get the default AI voice, the one everyone’s learned to scroll past.

Context. What it’s working with. The one people skip, and the one that matters most. Give it the real material: the post you’re replying to, the client’s situation, an example of how you actually write. this is the most essential part. The more context you build the better it is

Format. What it should look like. “Give it to me as a table, sorted by topic.” “Three short paragraphs, no bullet points.” Tell it the shape or it’ll guess, and it guesses wrong!

Stack those five and the output reads like something you’d put your own name on, instead of something a robot skimmed off a marketing blog.

The trick most people miss

You don’t have to write the perfect brief yourself. Make the AI do it. Paste your rough prompt in and tell it:

You’re an expert at writing prompts. Improve the one below. Sharpen the focus so the question is specific, structure it so the answer is richer and more detailed, and if I gave you an example, swap in a better one. Here’s my prompt: [paste].

It’ll hand you back a version three times better than what you started with. You’re using the tool to write its own brief.

What the prompt bros leave out

You can master all five and still produce forgettable garbage. Because a brilliant brief with nothing behind it just gets you to generic faster.

The thing AI genuinely cannot do is have your point of view. It’ll copy any style you want and nail any format. What it can’t do is have an opinion. It’s never sat across from the client who walked out, and it doesn’t have your years of experience. That part’s yours, and the best “prompt” is really just you feeding the machine your own take and letting it do the typing.

So implement the five, it will save you hours. But a perfect brief with nothing behind it just gets you to generic faster, and the AI will happily help you sound like everyone else at record speed.

The brief is the easy part. What goes into it is the whole game.

Recognize this scenario?

You know you saved it. You can even picture it, a link, a PDF, a note you made after a call with the exact number you now need. And you’ve just burned ten minutes hunting through Notes, Drive, your email, Slack, and two apps you forgot you were paying for. So you give up and google it again, and land on a worse version of something you already had. You just can’t find it, and no new app fixes that, because the app was never where the mess was.

The app graveyard

I love a new app. Especially the ones that promise me I’ll finally be productive and effective and for the love of God finally have some calm. To-do apps, note apps, micro-note apps, bookmarks, three cloud drives. I collect them like other people collect gym memberships in January, and with the same results.

The trap is always the same and I’m stupid enough to keep falling for it. Every app promises to be the one place everything lives. But you do different kinds of work in different phases, and no single app handles all of it well. So you spread your stuff across ten of them, and six months later you have no idea what you were using each one for. The mess just moved into nicer software.

What actually fixes it is a system that sits on top of all your apps, the same shape everywhere, so it stops mattering which one you open.

That system is PARA.

PARA, in plain terms

Tiago Forte built PARA as the backbone of his “second brain” idea. Four buckets, and the whole thing works because there are only four:

• Projects — things with a deadline and an end. Launch the website. Write the talk. Paint the shed. A project finishes, so its folder changes constantly.
• Areas — things you’re responsible for with no end date. Your health. Your finances. Your team. You don’t “finish” your health. You just keep the standard up.
• Resources — stuff you’re keeping because it’s useful across projects: articles, book notes, PDFs, references. Not tied to one deadline.
• Archive — anything from the first three that’s gone quiet. Project done, area no longer relevant, interest faded. Out of sight, still there if you need it.

The one distinction people get wrong is Projects versus Areas, and it’s worth getting right because everything else hangs off it. A deadline makes it a project. “Run a marathon in October” is a project. “Stay fit enough to grow old” is an area. It’s the same topic in two different buckets, and if you file them together the whole system turns to mush.

The point is you use it everywhere

PARA works because you run the same four buckets in every place you keep information. Your note app, your cloud drive, your email, all the same structure. So your brain only ever learns one filing system, and finding something stops being a treasure hunt.

You don’t have to do it all at once. Start in one app. I ran PARA in my notes first, saw it hold up, then rebuilt it in Dropbox, then moved to Obsidian and now have a powerful Exo-Brain.

How to actually start

I’ve gone a long way since I got in touch with the personal knowledge management sphere in 2019. But if I were to start all over again, this is what I would do.

1. Brain dump. Everything you’re carrying: things to do, things to learn, responsibilities, half-ideas. Get it out of your head and onto a page. You can’t organize what you can’t see.

2. Name the projects. Go through the dump and pull out anything with a deadline and an end. “Lose 5 kilos by summer” is a project. “Eat like an adult” is an area. Be honest about which is which.

3. Build the Projects folder first. One folder, a subfolder per project, and drop in the files you already have for each. Mirror the exact same list in your to-do app (Things, Asana, whatever you use) with the subtasks and deadlines.

4. Go do the work, then test it. The whole promise of PARA is that you find what you need for a project faster and without friction. So use it on a real project and see if that’s true. If it is, roll it into the next app. If it isn’t, your buckets are probably mislabeled, go back to step two.

PRO-TIP! If you can ensure your information won’t be locked in by a vendor (for example, if you are going to use Microsoft tools for this), it will be very hard to pivot to Google. Last year, I switched to Obsidian and now have all my information in the markdown format. Markdown is readable by every computer no matter the operating system you use and is very easy to read and write for any AI

Why this matters more now than it used to

A tidy second brain used to just save you time. But if your boss pays you eight hours a day, you don’t give a crap about that. But since the adoption of AI in almost every company, it is more essential than ever. AI is only as good as the context you hand it, and most people hand it nothing, so they get the same generic answer everyone else gets. The person who’s kept their own notes and client context in a system they can actually pull from feeds the machine something nobody else has. Your organised knowledge becomes the thing that makes your AI output yours instead of everybody’s.

Start with one app. Brain dump first, structure second. And the next time you know you saved something, you’ll find it.