← The Art & Business of Writing Podcast with Nicolas Cole
The Art & Business of Writing Podcast with Nicolas Cole
The X Algorithm Has Changed! (Your New 2026 Content)
00:55:57
Loading summary
Transcript25 lines
- [00:00]
Cole Schafer
Big news.
- [00:01]
Dickie Bush
The X algorithm has changed and it is a disaster. So for context, from 2020 to 2023, X as a platform, back then it was Twitter was our number one traffic
- [00:12]
Cole Schafer
source for our business.
- [00:14]
Dickie Bush
Then from 2023 to 2025 it actually fell behind LinkedIn, which by the way LinkedIn now drives like 70% of our
- [00:22]
Cole Schafer
leads for our business. It's crazy.
- [00:23]
Dickie Bush
And then all of a sudden at the beginning of 2026, the X fell to the bottom of our traffic list. It's now behind LinkedIn, YouTube and Instagram. And I have over 200,000 followers on X and my business partner Dickie bush has over 400,000 followers. So what happened? Well, every week inside our digital writing school, I host a Monday masterclass where I dig into either a writing or monetization framework or I talk about what's happening on the cutting edge of the digital writing world. And last week all we did was talk about the new X algorithm. Why reach is down, but somehow net new followers are up. What new formats are going viral and which formats that used to go viral don't anymore and where I think the X algorithm is trending next and what your 2026 content strategy should be to capitalize on it. And if you'd like to join me live for any of these Monday masterclasses, just click the link in the description below. You can sign up for our digital
- [01:21]
Cole Schafer
writing school or all we do is
- [01:23]
Dickie Bush
talk cutting edge tactics. Otherwise I just wanted to share this
- [01:26]
Cole Schafer
session with you here for free because
- [01:28]
Dickie Bush
this is something that affects all of us. This has had a huge implication on our business and a lot of our students found it really valuable and I
- [01:35]
Cole Schafer
think you will too. Today we have a very special topic we are going to talk about the X algorithm. Drop in the chat. Has anyone, especially if you spend a lot of time on that, on that platform, has anyone noticed a difference in the X algorithm in the past three months? Let me skip to the answer. It is completely different. All right. Me and Dickie have been writing on X since, I mean back when it was called Twitter. And we both really started ramping things up in 2020. Now, quick little crash course for everyone. Twitter back then. Now X was the number one traffic driver for our business. We built ship 30 to millions of dollars in revenue off of the back of the traffic that we drove from Twitter. We got very good at it. And there was a time in 2020 and 2021 where threads were just. You could write a thread and sneeze and you would get 10 million views you know, I mean, it was just. There was something about that format. The reason that I'm sharing this and just I want to give a brief history of how we got here is I've been writing on the Internet for 15 years now and over and over again. I notice that approximately every, we'll say two to five years, something changes. Sometimes that means the platform changes. So a great example is in 2016 when I, or actually earlier 2014 when I started writing on Quora. Quora was incredible for distribution. Quora between 2014 and 2017 was like the best platform on the Internet. It was the best kept secret. You could rack up tens of millions of views. Their publication team had a really cool partnership program where basically they put Quora columns on every single major publication. So Forbes had a Quora column, Fast Company had a Quora column, CNBC had a Quora column. And Quora's team would take the highest performing or like reader favorite Quora answers and they would republish them on Quora's column in various publications. Little fun fact, I set the record in, I think it was 2015 for the user who had the most Quora answers republished in major publications. I had north of 100 different Quora answers. Huffington Post, CNBC, Fast Company, Slate, Inc. Magazine, you name it. Real quick.
- [04:27]
Dickie Bush
If you want to write online but aren't sure where to start, click the
- [04:30]
Cole Schafer
link in the description of this video
- [04:31]
Dickie Bush
and check out startwritingonline.com and this is a free masterclass I put together sharing all of our most helpful frameworks for beginners, like proven hooks to capture your target reader's attention, where to write online to get the most distribution on your work and little growth hacking tips to build your social, audience and email list faster. Over 100,000 writers have gone through this free masterclass and many even send us emails afterwards thanking us for sharing such valuable information for free. So click the link below this video to check it out and make this year the year you start seeing success from your writing online.
- [05:04]
Cole Schafer
And in 2016, Inc magazine republished so many of my pieces that they just came to me directly and said, do you just want a column in our publication? And then I ended up writing for Inc. Magazine from 2016 to 2018. I think give or take in there. Why am I sharing this? Because every couple years the platforms change. Quora is now a dumpster fire. As much as I love that platform, I love that team. I'm grateful for the impact that it had. I would not recommend anyone write on Quora because it has changed so dramatically after Quora, from 2016 to 2020, Medium was incredible. Not only could you get really amazing distribution on Medium, but they also were starting to ramp up their paywall program. Their paywall program was when you would write a piece on Medium, you could choose, do I want this to be available to the public or do I want to put this behind the paywall and basically get paid a royalty based on viewership and engagement. So the same way that a music artist might get paid per stream on Spotify or Apple, that's what Medium was trying to build. And they raised a bunch of money to do it and they ramped up the program. And the thing that I figured out is that they didn't even care and they didn't have the infrastructure to check whether or not the same pieces were getting published behind the paywall. Meaning I took my entire library, my entire library from Quora and everything that I had written on Medium up to that point, and I took all the highest performing pieces and I just copy pasted them behind Medium's paywall. I got 10 times more viewership because I had an insane library to just keep leveraging. And because I was playing the hits and I was just posting bangers, I got paid on all of those. So from 2016 to 2020, I think I was probably making 100 grand a year just copy pasting all of my old articles to the point where Medium ended up emailing me saying, if you keep doing this, we will have to ban your account. We will have to take you off of the platform. Because I had figured out how to basically game their system again. Why am I sharing this? Because as time goes on in the world of digital writing, the platforms change, the rules of the game change, algorithms change, incentives change, formats change. And so my entire thesis from writing on the Internet for the past 15 years is that the whole goal is to build a library that you can reuse over and over and over and over and over again. It is inevitable a new platform will pop up tomorrow, a new platform will pop up next year, A new platform will pop up five years from now, ten years from now. It is inevitable that whatever platform you are currently using will change. You know, there was a point when Quora was my entire life. I haven't written on Quora in three years. And the same is true at some point for X, the same will be true for LinkedIn, the same will be true at some point for Instagram, etc. So the game is not really putting all your focus on how do I game the Algorithm. The game is on building a library so that when platforms change and when algorithms change, you can take advantage of it. Okay, so I'm giving that preface to share that right now we are going through another one of those periods. And this is always a really exciting thing for me to talk about because I've gotten very good at recognizing when these periods begin. And as soon as I notice that something has changed, I deploy resources in a very different way because I want to capitalize on that opportunity. And so my goal here is to share with all of you how I'm interpreting this, what I think is changing, and what you should do about it, especially into 2026. Like what, what are your opportunities for arbitrage? Because that's all organic content really is, is just arbitrage. It's like this platform is prioritizing this thing. Let me go capitalize on that and I get to arbitrage the opportunity. Okay, does that make sense? Fun topic, something everyone's interested in. If you have questions as we go along, drop them in the chat. But I do want to walk through sort of in detail, what I, what I see happening. Okay. So the first thing you need to understand I. This was like a big, a big insight for me. I don't have the book on my, on my desk here, but in my book, the Art and Business of Online Writing, something that I talk a lot about is that you have to pay and pay attention to the context of these different platforms. You have to, you have to realize that each of these, like, even though these are huge platforms, right, platforms with hundreds of millions or billions of users, you have to remember that they are still owned and operated by human beings. Okay, so these, these aren't like these amorphous, you know, containers. They are things that are built by other humans. And you also have to pay attention to where is the money. Like another easy example back in 2021, 2022, maybe a little earlier. 2021, I think substack raised a monster round. And when I saw them raise tens of millions of dollars from some of the most well known VC firms in the world, immediately I went, okay, they just raised enough. They just raised a war chest that could last the next decade. So what am I going to do? I'm going to follow the money. You just raised, all this capital, I think now is a good time to start posting on this platform. I am going to build a newsletter, a paid newsletter on Substack as soon as they launch substack notes in 2023 and they sent out their you know, news, their company newsletter and they were like, we are now prioritizing notes to make this a reader destination. Immediately I was like, follow the money. Okay, great. Let's start reposting all of our X content over on Substack. A very easy way of capitalizing on opportunities in the world of digital writing is just follow the money, follow the incentives. Okay, so if you go look at a platform like X, this is why I like staying on top of these things. I like continuing to educate myself. And if you don't want to, then that's great that you're here because I can just give you the, the summary notes. What was it six months ago? Four months ago, X hired this guy to basically take over as head of product. His name is Nikita. Bear drop in the chat. Anyone familiar with Nikita or has anyone been following his work on X? Okay, the thing that you need to know like this is like if you just pay attention, like the answer stares at you in the face, you know. So the thing that you need to know about Nikita, he's a serial entrepreneur and he basically has built an entire career around capitalizing on interesting trends, specifically like consumer short form types of content and platforms. And he has built a reputation for generating a lot of virality around the things that he does. So I don't know him, so I'm not saying this with judgment, but just from my observations, I don't think that he's someone that sits there and thinks that much about like how do I prioritize the highest quality content on X. Yes, they want quality because they want users engaged and they want users having a good time. But again, follow the incentives. Like if you're hired as head of product, what are your incentives? Your incentives are I want to make daily active users go up, I want to make screen time go up, I want to make engaging with other posts go up. And if you know anything about human nature, most people tend to default back into like what is the thing that requires the least amount of cognitive load? What's the thing that I don't have to think about? On top of that, Nikita has shared on X that he is aiming in a direction of how do you make X like TikTok for text and if you spent any time on TikTok, TikTok is very, it's very like short viral memey type of content focused. And then depending on what pocket you get into, you get served the occasional like long form video, like a two or three minute video about something that's really specific to your to Your interest. But for the most part, TikToks are like pretty short and it's like haha, it's like, oh, that's clever. Or like whoa, that's shocking. Right? Over the past couple months, as Nikita has taken over X, you can see that this is what's been changing in the X algorithm. I'm sure everyone here, if you spend any time on this platform, you probably have seen a lot more like very viral one liner, short form posts from like random people, random accounts, you know about the most random things. It's like, it's like one person like says a funny one liner about walking into KFC one afternoon or another person writes like a paragraph short story about like an overheard conversation in an elevator. Like really like obscure and sort of random and yet engaging things. As a result, your for your page is showing you a lot more of things that appeal to the masses. This is really important to understand because whenever you see algorithms doing things like this, you have to inherently ask yourself, like, our business is a great example. What is the sweet spot? How do you stay true to your industry and stay true to your niche while also taking advantage of new content formats and like playing the game, right? Like if the algorithm is clearly telling you these are the rules of the new game and you choose not to do any of them, then you shouldn't be surprised that the algorithm is rewarding other people other than you because the rules have changed. But you also don't want to completely over rotate where all you're doing is trying to write things that appeal to everyone and you abandon your niche, right? So that becomes the crux of the decision is how do you find the sweet spot? How do you stay true to the niche that you're writing about, especially when that niche is connected to a business like ours? Or you over rotate and you just try and write things that go viral but like, they have no purpose to you, right? Like I could write something that gets 10 million views, but if it's not aimed in the direction of writers, then like what's the point? Because our business is not dependent on traffic. Our business is dependent on a very specific type of traffic. Right? We want people who want to write to join our ecosystem. Okay, so yes. So how do we solve this? Like what do we actually do? Okay, so there's a couple of things that I want to, I want to point out because whenever I see stuff like this, I think the answer, or at least this is where what I've come to as the answer for myself, I think the answer is keep writing about the topics that you are, but change the format, change the packaging. So it's not abandon your niche, abandon the topic, abandon the industry. It's keep writing about the industry that you're writing about, but adapt it to new formats. As I talk about some of these new formats I want to, there's a big asterisk next to what I'm about to say, which is this is clearly a slightly more advanced topic. Okay, if you're still in a place of. You haven't really started writing consistently on the Internet yet, sure, all of this is interesting, you can do with it whatever you'd like. But the primary thing to solve for for you is not picking the perfect format. It is literally just hitting publish. So I want to, I want to be very clear, like what thing are you actually solving for? If you are consistently writing and hitting publish right now, then the next thing is you iterate on that consistency and you can do it better or differently. If you are not currently writing, then yeah, sure, like implement some of these things, but like realize that that's the second step. The first step is just consistently writing. And, and I'm going to show you why this is so important. Because again, the goal is not virality for the sake of virality. The goal is not even like views or impressions or any of those metrics. The goal is building a library. So when a platform changes, all you have to do is just copy, paste, copy, paste. Okay, so let's walk through a couple of these, test my new screen share here. Can everyone see that? Coming through. Okay. X recently rolled out a new feature called Articles. I believe it's a premium feature just so that everyone knows. And when you click on an article, it presents like this. It literally looks like a long form article. Okay? You can include like subheadings, you can include visuals, all sorts of stuff. I want to emphasize this might not seem like it's that big of a deal, but you have no idea how many years X was like. Like the only reason that threads became a thing were because people wanted to start writing long form content on X, but there was literally no way to do that. So users created a new format called Threads, where you would just reply to each tweet and you would just create a thread and that, that basically created like long form on X. Being able to post long form on a platform like this with as many users and as much distribution as it has is a huge deal. Okay, like X is 10 times bigger than Quora and Medium. And I was getting crazy distribution on those platforms back in the day. So, like, this is a big, big deal. All right? The fact that you can also do formatting things like have subheads, or you can, you know, they have a little quote feature there, or you can add images, right, like this. You can see where this is going to start to go. It's very similar. It is very similar to the way that TikTok functions, which is you have a lot of short form content, and then occasionally when you're really interested in something, you get served a longer form video, something that's like two or three minutes. I don't know if TikTok has a time limit. Actually, I want to say it's three minutes, but maybe I'm wrong. I'm not as familiar with that platform. And when you're really interested in something that serves you more of a long form, it has a longer time limit. That's. That's what I thought. Okay. I want everyone to pay attention to. I've gotten some feedback that the screen share isn't as sharp. So I don't know if you can see this. This article has 162 million views, and it was posted less than a week ago. 162 million views. That is insane. That is insane. I don't think I have. In all of my years of writing on the Internet, I don't think I have ever seen a single piece of content get that many impressions. Now, there's a couple things that I want to point out here about this one. Yes, this is Dan. Dan Ko is a very popular writer and has a huge audience. His audience is not the reason why this has 162 million impressions. And I can prove it with a very simple thing. Dan does not have 162 million followers. Okay? So it's important to internalize that. These social platforms are what I like to call a lottery game. They actually have very little to do with the size of your audience. If you go to your feed, your feed is 90% people that you do not follow. So it has almost nothing to do with how many followers you have. It has to do with the individual performance of any piece of content. Okay? So he does not have 162 million followers, which means that at some point, this piece took on a life of its own and the algorithm ran with it. Okay? This is not an outcome that he or anyone has any control over. This is he posted something and he woke up one day and he won the Powerball. Okay? So you have to remember that the only way to win in games like this is to keep playing. You don't have control over the outcome. You have no idea whether something is going to get a thousand views or 162 million views. The only thing you have control over is continuing to play the game. The second thing I want to point out, which is something I've been reflecting on a lot the past couple days, about Dan, specifically, Dan has been writing an article essentially every week or every couple days. And that article is his newsletter. And that newsletter is basically the script of the YouTube video that he records. So he's been doing that little workflow. You know, article republished, article that goes on his website also becomes the newsletter that he sends to his list also becomes the script of his YouTube video. He has been doing that little workflow every single week for five years now. I mean, he came up on Twitter the same time me and Dickie did back in 2020.
- [24:19]
Dickie Bush
Hey, by the way, if you're brand
- [24:21]
Cole Schafer
new to the world of ghostwriting, maybe
- [24:22]
Dickie Bush
you've heard the term, but aren't really sure what it is or how it's different from copywri or content writing, check out premium ghostwritingblueprint.com it's in the description below. Okay, this is a free masterclass that I've put together for writers who want to monetize their skills and love for writing with ghostwriting. This is what I did, and ghostwriting completely changed my life. It's how I quit my job. It's how I quadrupled the amount of money I was making. It's how I've gotten to work with so many smart, amazing people, but also have time for my own writing, like writing this book. The Art and Business of Ghostwriting. Anyways, check it out. If you're at all interested in making money from your writing, I would really
- [24:57]
Cole Schafer
encourage you to get into ghostwriting.
- [24:59]
Dickie Bush
And this free premium ghostwriting blueprint in the description below is the best place to start.
- [25:03]
Cole Schafer
I remember when Dan and I, like, talked for the first time and he had less than, I don't know, 5,000 followers or something like that. And same thing, me in 2020 on X, I had like 7,000 followers or something. So he's been doing that little workflow over and over and over and over and over again for five years. This is an absolutely insane outcome. 162 million impressions. But you have to put that in the context of. Yeah, and of course the likelihood that you win the lottery is going to go up the more that you do it, right? If Dan had decided to quit year one, this never would have happened. So I'm pointing this out just as a reminder of how important consistency is. The third thing I want to point out is that there is a very good chance that this entire article is actually pieces of other pieces strung together. So whether or not he sat down and wrote this whole thing as a new thing, or he sat down and was inspired by multiple previous things that he had written, or he sat down and wrote parts of it and then copy pasted over other things, it's all the same outcome. This is a topic that he has written about a thousand times. He's written probably a thousand different pieces on this topic. He probably has pieces within pieces that he's like, oh, next time I write about that, I want to reference this. Because, like, that's a really great point. This is the benefit of building a library is not just the familiarity that you have with a topic, but that you can also repurpose and reuse things. Now here's the last thing I want to point out again. Value of a library. Ever since articles started really popping off, look at his output. He had an article January 10, January 8, December 29. Oh, that's a link to his website. So it looks like he started ramping articles right around beginning of January because the algorithm was starting to change. I would, I would be willing to bet that all of these articles that he's republishing are actually just previous articles from his library. Because that's what you do when a new opportunity presents itself. You don't have to always create new content. You can, but the thing you should do first is just go back through your library and go, well, what are all the hits? Let me just copy paste them over, right? Does that make sense? Does everyone understand why that's so important? This is why my whole thesis is you just want to focus on building the library. Because now X said, we're going to start prioritizing articles. What do you think I'm going to go do? Drop in the chat? What am I going to go do? X goes, you can now post long form content on our platform. What is the first thing I'm going to go do? Am I going to sit there and write something new? A.I. no, come on. No, what am I gonna do? I wrote like 2000 long form articles on Quora. I wrote like a thousand articles on Medium. What is the first thing I'm gonna do? I'm gonna go take my entire library and every single day for the next three years, I am going to copy paste over an article that I have Already written. That is what I'm going to do. I have literally 3,000 newsletters. I have paid newsletters, I have free newsletters. We have newsletters for different lists. I have an infinite amount of content. So why, if a new feature comes out like this, why would I go and reinvent the wheel? I can, I can sit down and write something new, but why? I don't need to. This is the purpose of building a library. I'm harping on this because it seems, I know this seems like such a simple idea, but nobody does it. This is like the entire secret to writing on the Internet is build a library of short form and long form content. And every time a new platform comes out or a platform prioritizes a new format, you take your library, you play the hits, and you copy paste. That is the whole game. Okay, so Dan Ko, I guarantee you for the next foreseeable future, is just going to take his massive backlog of articles and copy paste them over to X. And he's going to do that for two reasons. One, because X's team has publicly said on the platform, we are starting to prioritize long form articles. Okay, that's a new format. You should probably take advantage of it. And second, because as he's been experimenting with this new format, it's clearly working. Look it, this article got 162 million views. This article got 11 million views. This article got 1.9 million views. This article got 6 million views. This article got 6.1 million views. This is not because he has a huge audience. He does. But the reason this is happening is because the algorithm is prioritizing a new format. So let me say this very directly back to everyone here. If you have the option of writing about a topic in either a thread or a long form article on X right now, which format should you use? Drop in the chat, same content. Should it be in the format of a thread or should it be in the format of an article? It should be in the format of an article. Okay, so this, this is what the game is all about. The game is about looking at when formats change and then like adjusting your content to that format. This is exactly what Everybody did in 2021, when Threads started ramping up. What did I do? I took all of my articles and I rewrote them as threads. Pretty much the same content, just a different format. Right? When LinkedIn started prioritizing carousels, what did I do? I took all my proven articles and newsletters and tweets and everything. What did I do? I just Rewrote them into a different form carousels. That is what everyone should be doing right now on X. They are prioritizing articles. Now, I want to preface with this asterisk that I don't know how long this will go on for. Articles might be the hottest thing ever for the next three years, or this might be a change in the algorithm that lasts three weeks. We don't know yet. All I know is that I see this changing and I am going to capitalize on it until I am told otherwise, until I see something else change. Okay, so. Yeah, Sebastian. Is that Sebastian? Yeah, Sebastian. So should you no longer write threads at all? Okay, so this, this is where it's. It's not that there's a perfect answer, it's that you should look at the things that are working and ask yourself how you can do them. More like, if you want to write a thread because you really enjoy writing threads, can you write a thread? Yes. Like, if you write and publish a thread right now, is your X account gonna get banned and is your laptop gonna explode? No. Nothing bad is gonna happen. Right. All I'm saying is when you see a format working, and if you want your content to perform as well as it can, then you should probably adjust your content to formats that you see working. That's all. Okay. Now, even though articles are popping off, am I still going to write short form tweets? Yes. Am I still going to write medium form expanded tweets? Yes. Am I still going to post the occasional thread? Probably. But, like, mentally I see this and I go, but the priority is I want to post an article on my profile every single day because I want to capitalize on this new format. That's. That's all I'm saying. Rookie LinkedIn. We'll talk about LinkedIn another time. Okay. And Sebastian, how do you reach founders on X under the new algorithm? Okay, so when it comes to reaching people like this is what you have to remember is that the foundational principles of the game never change. The fundamentals never change. How do you reach people? You write things that that person wants to read. It doesn't matter if it's in short form or long form or video or text, or. It doesn't matter. Fundamentally, how do you reach a certain type of person? You write things about the thing that they want help with or about the thing that they're interested in. Right? That's not what we're saying here. What we're saying is assuming those things are constant, right? You keep writing about the same industry, you Keep writing for the same person. Right? Like, I'm not going to change who I'm writing for. I'm still going to write for writers. I'm still going to write about digital writing. I'm still going to write about ghostwriting, I'm still going to write about self publishing. The only thing that I am changing is the container. It's the format. Okay, that's all. That's all. Yeah. So, M.D. how does your content strategy adapt to this? So, same thing. Your content strategy is like, the content component is probably still the same. You're still writing for the same sort of person. All that's changing is the format that you are putting the content inside of now. It's a good question, because as formats change and as algorithms change, sometimes posting cadences change as well. I'll give you a very simple example. Back in 2020, 2021, people were posting a lot more on LinkedIn. Then in like 2023, the algorithm changed. And the algorithm was. It was very clear to anyone who was writing on that platform that LinkedIn was not prioritizing volume anymore. LinkedIn wanted you to post less. And you basically got one shot a day, maybe two shots per day. And so. And you could tell because, you know, you would post something in the morning and it would get decent viewership, and then you would post again in the evening and it would just like fall off a cliff. It would get nothing. So all, every big creator that I know, all at the same time, we're like, okay, then I'm just gonna post once a day on LinkedIn and that's all I'm gonna do with X. I'll share what I'm noticing here on this platform right now. In terms of output and cadence, I would say six to 12 months ago, X tolerated a lot of volume. We were tweeting like every three hours. So we were tweeting upwards of eight times a day. I don't think that that is true anymore. I think that X actually wants a little bit less volume and they want a mix of short form and long form. So I'll just share with everyone what I'm doing. What I'm doing is I am either doing very short form types of posts, like very, very short form and. Or I am doing articles. Those are, those are the two that I'm hitting now because I like experimenting. I am also still gonna do the occasional, like, image or atomic essay, because it's just another format. Like, it's not that they get zero distribution. You know, it's just the algorithm's prioritizing other things right now, but I'm still going to experiment with it and I'm still going to experiment with the occasional video. The reason that I do video is honestly because I just want diversity on my profile. I just want someone coming to my profile being like, oh, you post like lots of different formats of things, that's all. But like, the two formats that I am absolutely prioritizing are very short form or articles. And, and the short form, I would say maybe twice a day and an article once a day. And then from there it's like anything else that you want to experiment with. You can, but that's approximately what I'm aiming for right now. Does that make sense? Yeah. So, Sebastian. Okay. Any recommendations on article size, length, things like that? Honestly, not really. And what I mean by that is when you're dealing with long form, and I'm going to say long form is anything over 500 words. When you're dealing with long form, the length of the article or the word count is really not what matters. That article from Dan Ko, this One that has 162 million views, whatever, this is a very long article. Let's, let's just scroll through it. This is probably 1000-2000-3000-4000, 5000, 6000, 7000. That's probably, I'm going to say like a 10,000 word or less article. That's like a book chapter, you know, so these can be very long. The question is not what is the ideal word count with long form? The question is, is the word count in service of the value that I'm providing? Does the thing actually need to be 10,000 words? This is super in depth. Like at a quick skim, this looks like it needed to be 10,000 words. That's great, you know, but like the extreme example that I always love sharing is imagine you click on a long form article and it's just 10,000 words of gibberish. Like, does the word count matter? Of course not, because the word count is irrelevant. It's the fact that it's literally not saying anything. It's all just gibberish. Right? So I think it's really important for writers to get out of this mindset of like, what, what is the appropriate word count? With long form, it really, it doesn't matter. If you can say it in a thousand words, say it in a thousand. If you need 5,000 words, then say it in 5,000, you know, but what matters is. Okay, but yeah, what am I actually giving the reader though? And is this valuable to them. And also, too, I hope everyone's takeaway here is like, I want to share directionally where I think this is going to be. But my true goal here is to point in a direction and then to give all of you and empower all of you to try things yourself. Like, the only reason that I'm here sharing these things with you is just because I'm trying lots of things. And then I'm coming to you and I'm saying, hey, I tried a lot of things. Here's what I learned, right? But there's no reason why you can't adopt the same process for yourself. And you go, hey, Cole pointed us in this direction. Let me go try a bunch of things and let me see what else I learn, right? And one of you, like, maybe go test, try a thousand word article and then try a 5,000 word article. Which one performed better? Form a hypothesis, try something different. That is what this whole game is about. It is about paying attention to where things are going and then trying things aimed in that direction. It's not about like, hey, here's the answer. And if you just press this one key on the keyboard, you immediately get 162 million views. That's not how this works, by the way.
- [41:58]
Dickie Bush
If you're brand new to writing online and want a really easy place to start, I recommend reading the Art and Business of Online Writing. I wrote this book after I'd been writing online for over a decade and accumulated over a billion views on my work, monetizing my writing in all sorts of unconventional ways. And I wrote this book to give other writers like you a way to skip all the lessons that I had to learn the hard way and start seeing success from your writing a whole lot faster than I did. So if writing online is something you're thinking about or something you're actively practicing, I recommend picking up a copy of the Art and Business of Online Writing.
- [42:30]
Cole Schafer
Yeah, so, okay, so a couple other formats I want to point out real quick. All right, so here, notice this is definitely one that I see people using. I'm going to call this paragraph style. So I apologize, because this is inherently going to lean advanced. But I want to talk about it. But again, if you're not here yet and you're not publishing, just publish consistently. Like, don't get caught up in the minutia. All right? But for anyone who wants to take this up a notch, there's an oscillation that happens on every platform. Video is a really good example. You go through periods where the formats that Perform the best are really low quality video, really raw. Like, I'm just picking up my phone and I'm talking in my bathroom in the morning, like with no makeup on. You know what I mean? Like, really raw video. Then you go through periods where it's the complete opposite, and high production is the high performing format. And if you pay attention to different platforms, they go through these different seasons where low production is the hit, and then it oscillates, and then high production is the hit, and then low production comes back, and then high production comes back. Okay, I'm sure we've all observed this over the years, and it's not that one is necessarily better than the other. They're just different. And at different points, there's. There's a rotation that happens. And I think part of the reason that rotation happens is because consumers get very used to one version. And then inevitably we all want the novel thing, right? And so when something starts becoming ubiquitous, we sort of eventually rotate to wanting the complete opposite. And that's why for everyone here, just observe your own tastes. You probably go through periods where you're like, oh, I only want to watch, like, really raw behind the scenes, like, vlog type of videos. And then all of a sudden you're like, oh, I'm only consuming mega high production podcasts. Right. It's just the nature of it. We're always looking for novelty. The same is true with text. So here's what I mean. Let me see if I can find a good example here. Okay, here's a really good example. This is a format that we teach in ship. 30 for 30 that we taught for years. Here you have a very simple. You have an opening hook, and then you have a nice little one, three, one. Here you have a single sentence. You have three bullets. You have one sentence. Okay, one, three, one. Does this mean overnight, like, oh, paragraph style is in. And I'm never gonna use this ever again? No, of course not. This is a very fundamental, simple way of writing and communicating on the Internet. It's very skimmable. It's fine, right? But because this is the way that so many people have learned how to write on the Internet. And I. And we have played a huge role in that because we've taught a lot of people how to write on the Internet. Inevitably there will be a rotation that happens where people are like, all right, actually, I've seen this thing so many times that if something looks like visually looks different, it grabs my attention. Notice, notice just the visual difference of these two. This is broken Apart, it's skimmable. This is a paragraph. It is not skimmable. Now, I think I've thought about this a lot. I think what's funny about this paragraph style and the reason why it's been working is because X is so bite sized that when you see something in the form of a paragraph, it almost looks like a screenshot that someone took of a paragraph inside of a book. And there's this unconscious conclusion that people come to where they see a paragraph and they go, oh, if it's just one paragraph, that must mean it's a pretty smart paragraph. So before you even read it, even if you just look at this, you're probably like, I bet this is saying something smart because of the way that it's visually presented. Hormozi does this a lot too, actually. He's been breaking them apart more recently, but he's been doing this for a long time. He also does these little like one liners a lot too. So this paragraph style is definitely like a new short form format that I see a lot of people doing. And I, I've been doing it a lot. There's more, yeah, stuff like this or even this is broken out a little bit. So really the two formats that I would encourage everyone to experiment with is this like short form paragraph style where you take one very concise idea and you try and compress it as much as possible. Or articles that should be for writing on X if you do nothing else. Like, yeah, you could post the occasional thread, you could post a video here and there, you could post an atomic essay if you want. But your content strategy and the formats that you should be thinking about in 2026 on X should be short form, paragraph style or long form articles. Those are the two that are outperforming now. It's important to remember though that the format is not the, the, the entire picture. Right? Like, just because you write something in paragraph style doesn't automatically mean that it's going to get a million views. Just because you write an article doesn't automatically mean it's going to get a million views. You still need to be writing about things that are valuable to other people. You still need to be building a niche library. You still need to be building a niche audience. Right. Like you still, it's still a game of the quality of content, but the wrapper matters. The wrapper is what gives your content a higher likelihood of getting in front of the people that you're trying to get in front of. That's the point. Sebastian, what's your take on the use of video? So, Yeah, I mean, LinkedIn's been prioritizing video more. X has been prioritizing video more. My honest opinion is I don't think either one of these platforms are intended to be video platforms. There's a difference between a platform being video and video based versus a platform that just allows the posting of video. Now a really interesting intersection here and overlap is actually Instagram. Instagram went from being a photo platform and then eventually over time really has transitioned into being a video platform. Like it is predominantly video now. Can you post other mediums there? Yeah, you could post carousels and graphics, you could post pictures, you can post all sorts of stuff. But it is predominantly a video platform. Truthfully, I don't think that that's what's going to happen with LinkedIn or X. Like they are still going to be text forward platforms. But yes, you can post video. So the reason that I post video is because A, I just like having a diversity of content on my profile. But B, it primarily has to do at this point with, with building brand. It's the fact that I like because we film and create really high quality videos. When someone comes to my profile and they see a really high quality video like this, immediately they come to an unconscious conclusion like, oh, Cole must be doing something because look, look at the high production quality that he's using. So honestly, when I post videos on X or LinkedIn, my metric for success is not like, oh, I hope this goes viral. I hope I capitalize on a new medium, new format. That's not the goal. The goal is I just want to post video to create another dimension for brand on this platform. Does that make sense? Cool. Yeah. All right, so let's make sure we're all taking notes here. Okay. What, what are the two formats that you should be experimenting with on X in 2026? Same content, same industry, same audience. Say everything that you're doing already. But there's two formats that you should be experimenting with. What are they? Short paragraphs and long form articles.
- [51:34]
Dickie Bush
Great.
- [51:36]
Cole Schafer
Mission accomplished. That is what you should be experimenting with. And if you have been writing on the Internet for a while now, I would encourage you. Sure. Write new things, but I would encourage you to leverage all the things that you've already created. If you already have a backlog of articles or newsletters or video scripts or whatever you have copy, paste them, post them as articles on X. Like use your backlog, leverage the work that you've already done and yeah, Sebastian. So I would Aim for like two short paragraphs a day, something like that. One or two a day. And then if I had the library to leverage or you have the time to do it, I would absolutely aim for an article per day. Day. Especially for the foreseeable future. Because X is. X is making it abundantly clear they are pushing articles. So if you want the highest likelihood of tapping into that arbitrage opportunity, then do as much as you possibly can. Mj optimal time to start a newsletter and then repurpose as article. I wouldn't start a newsletter until you're further along. Like, you shouldn't even entertain the idea of a newsletter until you are consistently publishing multiple times per day, every single day, consistently, for like six months in a row. Because a newsletter is like the more advanced version of that. It's the higher friction version of that. So if you're already doing that, then that's great, you know, then it's. You've, you've done the front end. Now it's time to build the bridge. Now it's time to build a newsletter. But if you're not there yet, you still got to dial in the first part, which is, are you writing about a niche consistently, multiple times a day, every day for weeks and months in a row? And yes, you can take the same article, copy paste it on X, read it aloud as a YouTube video, copy paste it on LinkedIn, you can do whatever you want with it. That's the whole idea. That is my entire thesis for writing on the Internet is take the things that you've written and copy paste them in as many places as possible. And then when a new format comes out, adjust or rewrite them for the new format. And then when a new platform comes out, adjust and copy paste all of it over to a new platform. If you do that, the compounding is insane. Awesome. I'm glad this was helpful. What do we think of these Monday masterclasses? Are we enjoying these? This good? Okay, great. Awesome. Glad to hear it. Okay, well, I'm excited to do more of them. We got a lot of topics to cover in 2026, and this is a great way for me to crystallize my own thinking and share it all with you. So I appreciate everyone showing up on Monday. All right, real quick, before we go, what's one thing you learned? What's one thing you're gonna take away? What's one thing you're gonna go do? We all understand short form paragraphs, long form articles on X, what other takeaways? What's one thing that is sticking with you. Library. Library over everything. Just because you wrote about it once doesn't mean that's the only time you can use it. Use it forever. Experiment on yourself. Yeah. Just try things. Repurpose way more. Yes, Way more. Follow the money. That's right. Just wherever the incentives are. That's what. That's what the answer is. Vary the types of content. Yeah. Alternate between short form and long form. Definitely. I'm investing a ton more into YouTube this year. I'm doing both shorts and long form videos. Yeah. Consistency is key. That's right. All right, everyone. Happy Monday. Appreciate you blocking the time and this was fun. I like this new setup. I hope you all enjoyed it as well. So excited to do this more. Okay. Enjoy the day, enjoy the week and I will catch you next Monday. See you.