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Sometimes it’s tempting for founders to pick one way to publish and stop there. They are a writer, or a video person, or they do the podcast, and everything they make lives inside that single lane.

It feels focused even though it actually caps your reach at the size of one audience, the slice of people who happen to consume the way you happen to produce.

The problem is that people are not built the same way.

Some read and never watch.

Some listen on a commute and never open an article.

Some will watch you talk for ten minutes but would never make it through the same idea in text.

When you publish in only one medium, you are invisible to everyone who prefers the others, no matter how good the work is.

One fix is a two-medium stack. One written channel and one spoken channel, running side by side, each feeding the other.

Here is how to build it without doubling your workload:

Choose a written home and a spoken home. A newsletter and a podcast. Posts and short video. Articles and audio notes. The pairing matters more than the specific platforms. One medium catches the readers, the other catches the listeners and watchers, and together they cover most of how people actually take in ideas.

You are not creating two separate bodies of work. You are saying the same core ideas twice, in two forms. Write the piece, then talk through the same idea on camera or into a mic. Or record the conversation first, then pull the written version out of it. The thinking happens once. The second medium is a translation, not a new invention, which is what keeps this sustainable.

The stack compounds when the two channels feed each other. Your listeners learn there is a written version worth subscribing to. Your readers learn there is a show worth following. People who found you through one medium discover they can get you in the other, and the ones who like both become your most committed audience.

You can’t be everywhere. But you do need to be in two places that cover how people actually consume, saying the same true things in both.

Most of your best ideas only ever exist in one form. You wrote the post, it did its work, and then it sat there, reaching only the people who read. The people who prefer to listen never knew it existed.

This week, take our two-medium stack concept and apply it with one idea you already published in writing by recording a spoken version. Sixty seconds, straight into your phone, with no script beyond the point you already made.

Use the same idea, the same argument, just said out loud instead of typed. Post it as a short video or audio clip and leave the original text post alone as your baseline.

Track replies and new follows on the spoken version against what the written original earned.

The hypothesis is that the same idea reaches new people in a different medium. The point did not change. The packaging did, and packaging is what determines who actually receives it. If the audio echo pulls in people the text never touched, you just found free reach hiding inside work you already did.

Putting the same idea into a second form gives you a direct read on how many people you were missing by publishing it only once.

At times, I’ve held back the good stuff. I would teach up to a point in my content, then stop right where it got valuable, because some part of me believed that if I gave away the real answer, nobody would have a reason to pay me. I was protecting my best material like it was a finite resource.

That was the wrong instinct, and it cost me. The half-answers I published were forgettable, because a half-answer helps no one. People could tell I was holding out, and holding out is not a good look on someone claiming to be an expert. Worse, the people who might have hired me never got enough proof that I knew my stuff, because I kept hiding the exact thing that would have shown them.

What changed was giving the whole answer away. The complete framework, the real steps, the thing I used to save for paying clients, published in the open for anyone.

And the fear turned out to be backwards. Giving away the answer built the trust that brought me business, because someone who reads your complete answer and sees that it works does not think, “Now I don’t need you.”

They think, “If the free version is this good, I want this person in my corner.”

Now, I believe your expertise is not a finite pile that shrinks every time you share it. It is proof, and proof is the most persuasive thing you own. The people who take your free answer and run were never going to pay you anyway.

The people who take it, get a result, and come back ready to work are the whole business, and they only show up because you gave them the whole answer first.

Stop rationing your best thinking, and give it away completely.

Generosity is some of the best marketing.

On September 14, Google confirmed it is running an "AI contribution pilot" through Search Console, paying selected publishers when their content significantly shapes AI-generated answers across Gemini, AI Overviews, and AI Mode. Invited publishers see an earnings widget tied to AI contributions, kept separate from ordinary search traffic. The payment is for content that materially shapes an answer as it is generated, not content merely cited or used to double-check a fact afterward.

The program is invite-only for now, spanning dozens of publishers across news and non-news categories, and participants can opt out anytime. There is a real limitation: publishers see a monthly earnings figure but cannot yet see which pages earned it or how the value was calculated.

The takeaway for founders is a signal about where content value is heading. The most valuable work is shifting from the most trafficked to the most foundational: the deep explainers, original research, and genuinely useful answers that AI systems build on.

Even before you get access to anything like this, the move is to make the kind of substantive, non-commodity content an AI would choose to ground its answer on, because that is what the whole system is starting to pay for.

Read more here

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