The ultimate guide to distribution in 2026

When people start trying to build an audience, they usually think the problem is volume. If they posted more, or on more platforms, or at better times, people would notice. Sometimes that’s true. But in my experience the people who reach millions differ from the people who reach hundreds less in how much they post than in two other things: they have something worth following, and they’ve learned to present it so people notice it.

Neither of those is very complicated. That’s what’s surprising about distribution. It looks like a dark art from outside, and people spend years stumbling toward principles that could have been explained to them in an afternoon. So I want to try explaining them in an afternoon.

Start with the end

The most important thing to understand about building an audience is that you’re not making a series of posts. You’re telling a story, and each post is a chapter in it.

This sounds like the kind of thing a branding consultant would say, so let me explain why it’s actually true. People don’t follow content. They follow a trajectory. When you follow someone, what you’re really doing is placing a small bet that whatever they do next will be interesting. And the thing that makes what someone does next interesting is knowing where they’re trying to go.

The clearest example I know is Amazon. When Jeff Bezos started it in 1994, it sold books. But books were never the point. He picked them because there were millions of titles, far more than any physical store could stock, which made them the obvious first thing to sell online. What he actually wanted to build was a store that sold everything. Books were chapter one.

What’s interesting is how openly the company behaved like this. It kept reinvesting instead of taking profits, it kept adding categories, and anyone paying attention could see where it was going. People who followed Amazon in those years weren’t following a bookstore. They were watching to see whether this strange company could really become the place you bought everything. Every new category was another chapter.

Figma does a version of the same thing with beliefs instead of products. Their ending is a world where design isn’t something one person does alone in a desktop app, but something the whole company does together in a browser. To get you there, they need you to believe a few things first. Design files shouldn’t be trapped on one person’s laptop. Design is a team activity. Engineers, product managers, and writers belong in the file too. Each of those is a belief that has to be in place before the ending makes sense, and each one is something they can make content about.

This is also why founder-led content works so well right now. A founder building a company is a story in progress by definition. The product roadmap is the story roadmap. Every feature, launch, and milestone is another step toward an ending the audience already knows about.

If you’re building a personal brand rather than a company, the same principle applies, but the story is you. Either you’re trying to get somewhere and sharing what you learn along the way, or you’ve already gotten there and you’re showing others the route. Usually it’s some mix of both.

So before you write anything, it’s worth asking yourself some fairly basic questions. What do you do? Where did you start? What do you believe that other people don’t? Who is this for, and what are they struggling with? Why should they listen to you instead of someone else? Where are you trying to go? And what, at the end, do you want them to buy, join, or believe?

Most people skip this step because it feels like homework. But the answers are what make everything after it easy. Once you know the ending, you know what the chapters are. Once you know who it’s for, you know where to find them. And you’ll also find, a year in, that you aren’t burned out and your audience isn’t bored, because you’re not inventing each post from nothing. You’re just writing the next chapter.

Your story will change. Mine has. That’s fine. A story you revise is still much better than no story at all.

What makes a chapter worth reading

Within that larger story, individual pieces work when they do at least one of three things. They make people feel something. They teach people something. Or they make people want to know what happens next.

There are other ingredients, but if you look at nearly anything that spread widely, it’s doing at least one of those, and usually two. A post that does none of them is just noise, no matter how well it’s formatted.

How you say it

Your story is what you say. Your voice is how you say it.

Liquid Death sells canned water. It’s hard to imagine a more boring product. Instead of selling it the way water is usually sold, with mountains and purity and calm, they packaged it in tallboy cans and branded it like a heavy metal band. The water is ordinary. The voice made it one of the most talked-about drinks around.

For a company, voice is a decision. You choose what you want to be perceived as, whether clever or warm or chaotic, and you hold to it. It helps to decide not just what you’d say but what you’d never say.

For a person, my advice is the opposite: don’t decide anything. Write the way you talk. The temptation when you start is to imitate whatever style seems to be working, and the result is almost always worse than what you’d have produced if you’d just sounded like yourself. Readers can tell. This is also why I’d avoid using AI to write for you. It produces a kind of average voice, and the average voice is exactly what you’re trying to stand out from.

Why good things go unseen

Here’s something that took me a while to accept. You can have a good story, a real voice, and the right platform, and still get 200 views.

The reason is usually packaging. Most people spend about 95% of their time on the content and 5% on how it’s presented. I think it should be closer to half and half.

That ratio makes people uncomfortable. It feels like it ought to be enough to make something good, and that worrying about titles and thumbnails is somehow beneath serious work. But consider what’s actually happening when someone scrolls past your post. They’re not rejecting your ideas. They never got to your ideas. They decided in a fraction of a second, based on a handful of words or a single image, that it wasn’t worth stopping for. Packaging isn’t a substitute for substance. It’s the door substance has to walk through.

The most important part of packaging is the hook. A good hook usually does at least one of a few things: makes a bold claim, calls out a specific reader, opens a gap in their knowledge they want closed, promises a clear outcome, or says something contrarian. You don’t need all of these. You need one that’s true.

Titles should be clear above all. A big promise, a clear outcome, and no confusion. If a reader has to think about what your title means, you’ve already lost them. People often try to be clever in titles, and cleverness that requires decoding is just friction.

Thumbnails and visuals have one job, which is to get the click. They work better with less in them, not more.

For video, the hook isn’t only the words. It’s everything in the first three seconds: whether the background is clean, how the speaker carries themselves, whether there’s text on screen reinforcing what’s being said. The viewer is judging all of it at once.

Then there’s formatting, which is a quieter version of the same problem. Every platform has its own language, and content that ignores it reads like a foreigner’s. On X that might mean long-form articles. On LinkedIn it might mean longer posts that draw on personal experience. The way to learn a platform’s language is the way you’d learn any language: spend a lot of time consuming what works there, and notice what it has in common.

And in general, make things easy to read. Short sentences. Scannable structure. Write so that a ten-year-old could follow it. This isn’t dumbing things down. Difficult ideas expressed simply are more impressive than simple ideas expressed in a difficult way, and they spread further too.

Choosing where to tell it

Once you have something to say and you know how to present it, you need somewhere to say it. I think of channels as falling into three groups.

Rented channels are platforms you don’t control: X, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube. They’re the best for reach, because the platform will show your work to strangers. Owned channels are audiences you can reach directly, like a newsletter, a community, or your website. They’re best for trust and for turning readers into customers. Earned channels are other people’s audiences: podcasts you appear on, collaborations. They’re best for spreading your name into networks you wouldn’t otherwise touch.

Eventually you want all three. Rented channels get you discovered, owned channels let you keep the people who discover you, and earned channels expand the pool. But the mistake almost everyone makes at the start is trying to be everywhere at once. Pick one or two.

To pick, ask three questions. Where does your audience already spend time? Are you better at writing, talking, or being on camera? And how much time can you honestly commit? The last question matters more than people expect. A channel you can sustain beats a better channel you’ll abandon in a month.

Here’s roughly how I think about the main options.

X is the best place to build a network and test ideas quickly. It suits writers, founders, and operators, and it doesn’t take enormous effort. Because feedback is so fast, it’s also a good laboratory: ideas that work there can often be expanded into other formats.

Short-form video, meaning TikTok, Reels, and Shorts, is the fastest way to get raw reach. It suits anyone comfortable on camera, or anyone good at editing. It’s mostly top of funnel; people find you there, but they rarely get to know you there.

YouTube is slow to start and a lot of work, but it compounds like nothing else. Videos keep getting found through search for years. If I had to pick the single strongest channel, this would be it. It suits educators and storytellers.

LinkedIn is underrated. There’s less competition than on X, and the audience has money to spend. If you sell to businesses, it should be on your list.

A newsletter is one of the best places to be fully yourself, and it behaves differently from everything else. Most content grows slowly after you post it, as algorithms pick it up. A newsletter gets most of its engagement immediately, because it’s going straight to people who asked for it. Everyone should probably have one eventually.

Podcasts let you build deep trust and add nuance you can’t fit into a post. Running your own is a lot of work. Appearing on other people’s is not, and it’s one of the easiest ways to borrow an audience.

Communities, whether on Discord, Telegram, Skool, or wherever, are where you get to be personal with the people who care most. They take effort, and they only make sense once you have a core of people who are already engaged.

Different channels can also carry different parts of the story. Your X account might be about the product, your Instagram about your life, and your community about the things you’d only tell people who’ve been with you for a while. That’s not inconsistency. It’s the same story told at different distances.

I like writing, so I mostly focus on X. That’s not a recommendation. It’s just an example of picking the channel that fits the person.

Some things I’ve noticed

A few other things that don’t fit neatly anywhere but have made a big difference.

Engage, don’t just post. Especially on written platforms, the people who grow fastest are the ones who spend time in other people’s replies. An audience is a network, and you can’t be part of a network you only broadcast to.

Steal formats, not content. Some of the best ideas come from adjacent niches. A structure that works for fitness creators might work beautifully for B2B software, and nobody in B2B software will have seen it yet.

When something works, do it again. This is surprisingly hard for people. When a post takes off, the instinct is to feel you’ve already done that, and move on. That’s backward. An outlier is information. It’s your audience telling you exactly what they want. Make five more versions.

Point every channel at another. X to the newsletter, YouTube to X, and so on. Each one should feed the others rather than standing alone.

And turn one idea into many. A single article can become a thread, a video, a newsletter issue, and a dozen short posts. Most people abandon ideas long before they’ve extracted most of the value from them.

The whole thing

So, to put it all together: decide where your story ends, and work backward to the chapters. Find your voice, or for a person, just use the one you have. Pick one or two channels that suit you and your audience. Then learn to package and format for those channels, because good work that nobody sees might as well not exist.

None of this is secret, and none of it is hard to understand. What’s hard is doing it consistently. But that’s good news, because it means most people won’t, and if you do, you’ll already be ahead of almost everyone. I’ve used this same approach to get over a million impressions on X in ten days, starting from a new account. I don’t think there was anything special about me. I just had a plan, and most people don’t.