A few weeks ago I sat down to plan my July content. Iced coffee in hand, calendar open, feeling annoyingly organized. Twenty minutes later I put the pen down, because I’d caught myself about to teach the same idea in three different places: a podcast episode, a YouTube video, and a community post.
None of the three were going to be any good. The podcast version kept turning into a tutorial you can’t follow with your ears. The YouTube version was just me talking at a camera for eighteen minutes, which is basically a podcast with me in a cute dress. And the community post was a watered down summary of both.
That one moment turned into the biggest restructure I’ve made to my content, maybe ever, and it came down to a content channel strategy I hadn’t actually been using: giving every channel an actual job instead of asking all of them to do the same one. Here’s what changed on my end, and the exercise that’ll show you where your own channels are quietly repeating each other.
What Does a Content Channel Strategy Actually Look Like?
It means deciding what one channel exists to do, on purpose, the way you’d write a job description before you ever hired someone for the role.
I got here by accident, through a conversation with a founder friend a while back who was doing everything right by every standard piece of advice out there. A weekly podcast, weekly YouTube videos, three emails a week, daily social posts, a community she posted into faithfully. And every single channel had plateaued. Not shrinking, not growing. Flat for months.
She asked me what she should add. I asked her a different question: if each of her channels was an employee, and I asked her what that employee’s job was, what would she say. Long pause. Then: “I guess they’re all kind of doing the same job.”
Right. Which is no job, because that’s what happens when we hire channels into a business the way we’d never hire an actual person. No role, no responsibilities, no definition of success. Just: welcome aboard, go do marketing.
Why Does a Channel With No Job Turn Into a Blurrier Copy of Your Whole Business?
A channel with no defined job doesn’t stay empty. It fills itself with a smaller, blurrier version of everything else you already do, teaching and selling and announcing and nurturing all at once, everywhere, until you can’t tell which channel is actually underperforming because none of them were ever given something to perform.
I want to tell you the moment that conversation came back around and bit me a little, because months later, there I was with my iced coffee and my calendar, doing exactly what I’d just described to her. I heard my own question in my head: Rachel, what’s each channel’s job? And I didn’t have an answer either. Humbling.
How Do You Find Out What a Channel Is Actually For?
Look at what’s actually working on each channel, not what you meant it to do, and let the platform tell you the job it’s already good at.
So I sat with my YouTube analytics. Really sat with them, not the anxious Tuesday afternoon glance most of us do. And the story was clear. My tutorials performed: strong search traffic, strong watch time, real subscriber growth. My talking-head strategy videos got crickets. The old me would’ve gone looking for better thumbnails. But there was nothing to fix, because that channel wasn’t failing. It was miscast.
YouTube is a search platform. People go there to watch someone solve a problem on a screen, not to hear me think out loud. That’s what a podcast is for. Podcast listeners choose audio on purpose: they’re doing dishes, walking the dog, driving to pick up their kids. They want a voice in their ear, not a screen share they can’t see. I’d been asking each platform to be the other one, then wondering why both felt like such a drudge.
What Job Should Each of Your Channels Actually Have?
One sentence each: what this podcast exists to do, what this channel exists to do, and what this list exists to do, written the way you’d write it for a new hire.
The Podcast Is Where the Strategy Lives
For me, that meant going audio only. No more filming myself sitting in a chair doing what audio already does better. When I recorded my first episode without the camera, it was looser, more me. Some part of my brain had apparently been managing my posture and my hair for years, and I only noticed the weight once I put it down.
The Channel Built for Watching Someone Do the Thing
YouTube is becoming pure tutorials for me: screens, not just my face. Circle walkthroughs, AI workflows, the setups. When I say on the podcast that something’s possible, that’s where you go watch me actually do it.
The Space for What Had No Home Yet
Once each channel had its own job, I could suddenly see all the content that belonged to nowhere: the behind-the-scenes moments, the real-time stuff, the voice notes I’ve always sent my team when something flopped or something gave me goosebumps. That content had been evaporating for years because it had no home. Giving it one turned into a free daily podcast, short voice-note entries with no intro music and no polish, and it’s the thing I’m most excited about publishing right now.
What’s the Homework for Auditing Your Own Channels?
Sit down for an hour, pull the last ten posts from each channel, and write one sentence for what each one should actually be doing.
Look at What Each Channel Is Actually Doing
- Pull up the last ten things you posted on each channel and just look
- If it’s a mishmash of teaching, selling, and announcing, that’s your answer
- If the honest reason is “I post here because I feel like I’m supposed to,” write that down too
If what surfaces is less a job-description problem and more that you’re producing on autopilot with no system underneath it, the batch work strategies that changed how I run my own week are worth sorting out first.
Decide What Each Channel Should Be Doing
- One job, one sentence, per channel, like the job description you skipped on hiring day
- If two channels end up with the same sentence, you don’t have two channels, you have one channel with double the workload
- If there’s a channel you can’t write a sentence for at all, it’s allowed to go on pause. That’s housekeeping, not quitting
Once the jobs are set, a calendar built around what each channel is actually for is a much easier thing to keep running than one built around filling every slot.
Name What You Keep Almost Creating
- Ask what you keep almost creating that has no home: the idea that evaporates because it doesn’t fit any format you’ve built
- Think about the client conversations, the mid-project realizations, the things you say out loud to an empty office
- You won’t know what it is until you name it. For me it turned out to be a whole daily podcast hiding in plain sight
Try This Prompt
Once you’ve pulled the last ten posts from each channel, this turns the audit into an actual plan instead of something you circle back to eventually.
“I run a [type of community] and publish on [list your channels: podcast, YouTube, newsletter, community, social, etc.]. Here’s what each one has actually been posting for the last month: [describe]. Based on the content channel strategy in this post, give each channel a one-sentence job description, flag any two channels that seem to be doing the same job, and tell me which of my content ideas don’t fit any of my current channels. Give me the output as a simple table: channel, job, and what to stop posting there.”
It drafts the audit. You still decide what each channel is actually for.
One Job, Not Everyone’s Job
Giving a channel a job isn’t about doing less. It’s about letting each piece of your content be genuinely good at the one thing it’s for, instead of a decent version of everything at once.
I didn’t wake up one day and decide to blow up my content system. It started with a question I asked someone else, months before it came back around and caught me doing the exact same thing. That’s usually how it goes. The advice you give first is the one you needed too.
Some of you are going to merge two channels this week. Some of you will finally retire one, guilt free. And some of you will find your own version of the voice notes hiding in there, the thing you’ve been almost creating for years that just never had anywhere to go.
Go give your channels jobs.
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More From Your Community Strategist
Not every episode has a video version, but the channel is where the walkthroughs live: Circle builds, settings, and setups on screen instead of described out loud. New videos every Thursday.
More Like This
Listen: Batch Work Strategies for Community Builders. The system for producing content without losing your week to task switching.
Listen: How to Build a Content Calendar for Your Community. Where the what-to-post-and-when gets solved once each channel already has a job.
Listen: Your Community Isn’t a Content Machine (Stop Treating It Like One). The companion argument: more content isn’t the fix for a channel with no clear job.
Keep Going
coCreator Society is where community builders and membership founders work through this together, with the templates, the walkthroughs, and people who are one step ahead of you. Join coCreator Society
If you would rather not do this part alone, Rachel and the team build, migrate, and run communities for founders who need it done properly the first time. Talk to the team
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