Consistent Content — Issue 011: Your Tools Are Your Influence

Most advice about making money from content starts in the wrong place.

It starts with the audience — grow it big enough and brands will come. It starts with the pitch — build a media kit, send cold emails, negotiate rates. It starts with the platform — optimize your profile, hit the algorithm, maximize reach.

None of that is wrong exactly. But it misses the thing that actually makes a brand want to work with you, pay you fairly, and come back for more.

That thing is influence. Not the follower-count version of influence. The real version — a documented, specific, lived relationship with a product that an audience has watched develop over time.

This issue is about how to build that, why tools are the most underused content pillar for professionals, and what happens when a brand finds your content before you ever find them.

In this issue:

Here's what a brand is actually purchasing when they pay a creator to feature their product.

They're not buying your follower count. Follower counts are easy to inflate and hard to verify. They're not buying your reach. Reach without trust doesn't convert. What they're buying is documented, specific, lived experience with a product — the discovery story, the use case, the result — delivered to an audience that has watched that relationship develop authentically over time.

That's influence in its most valuable form, and it's the one kind that can't be manufactured after the fact.

Most professionals have this kind of relationship with the tools they use every day and never think to document it publicly. They pay for software monthly, they develop workflows around it, they figure out use cases through trial and error, they see results they could articulate clearly if someone asked. That's the raw material for genuine influence, and it's sitting unused because nobody told them it was worth sharing.

Tools are the most underused content pillar for professionals for three reasons:

First, everyone uses them. Your audience isn't abstract — they're professionals with the same problems you have, looking for the same solutions. When you share how a specific tool changed how you work, you're not doing a product review. You're solving a problem in public, and that's what makes people save the post, share it, and remember your name.

Second, the stories are already there. How you discovered it, why you started paying for it, what changed when you did, the specific use case that made it indispensable — those are all stories you lived, which means they carry the specificity and honesty that generic content advice can't touch. AI can write a product description. It cannot write your discovery story.

Third, it compounds in both directions. Every tool post you publish adds to a public record of your professional life — what you use, how you think, what you care about getting right. That record builds credibility with your audience and visibility with brands simultaneously. The same post that helps a follower discover a useful tool signals to that tool's marketing team that you have genuine advocates in your audience.

The strategy isn't complicated. Make the tools you already pay for a consistent content pillar. Post about them specifically and honestly — discovery story, use case, result. Do it regularly enough that your relationship with each product is documented publicly over time. By the time a brand reaches out, you already have the evidence they need to justify the partnership.

I'd been using Granola for about two and a half months before I posted about it.

The discovery wasn't linear. I saw someone on LinkedIn mention it, got curious, went to Perplexity to research it, read through the website, and then randomly saw an ad for it on TikTok. That combination was enough to make me download it. Not a sponsored post, not a cold email, not a sales call — just enough organic touchpoints that the decision felt like mine.

What grabbed me immediately was something that sounds small but changes the entire dynamic of a meeting: I don't have to add a transcription bot to my Zoom calls. I'd always found that awkward — the moment you add a bot to a call, everyone in the room knows they're being recorded by a third party, and it shifts something. Granola runs in the background without an invite link, captures everything with AI built in, and lets me stay present in the conversation instead of splitting my attention between listening and note-taking.

After two and a half months of using it daily, I posted a how-to — how I use it, what problem it solved, what the workflow actually looks like. Not a review, not a sponsored mention. Just an honest account of a tool I'd been living with long enough to have a real opinion about.

A few weeks later I got this DM:

That message came from Granola's team. The post wasn't designed to attract them. It was designed to be useful to the people in my audience who sit in back-to-back meetings and lose half of what was said by the end of the day. Granola found it because I'd documented a genuine relationship with their product over enough time that the post had real credibility behind it.

That's the whole strategy. Post about the tools you actually use, specifically and honestly, after you've used them long enough to say something worth reading. The partnerships follow from that — not from pitching, not from outreach, but from a public record that does the qualification work before you ever enter the conversation.

Start with the tools you already pay for.

Pick three products that are genuinely part of how you work — tools you'd recommend to a colleague without hesitation, that you've developed real opinions about through actual use. Those are your anchors.

For each one, identify the story: how did you discover it, why did you start paying for it, what's the specific use case that made it worth keeping, what result have you seen. That's a post. Not a review, not a sponsored mention — a specific, honest account of your professional relationship with a product.

Post about each one in your regular content cadence. Not in a campaign, not in a sequence — just as part of how you document your professional life publicly. Over time, that documentation becomes the credibility that makes brands come to you rather than the other way around.

The income from content doesn't come from pitching. It comes from building a public record of genuine expertise that makes pitching unnecessary.

Influence isn't audience size. It's a documented, specific, lived relationship with a product that an audience has watched develop over time — and that's something you build post by post, not follower by follower.

Recent issues: Issue 010: The Only Career Move That Pays You Three Ways
Tool library: Notionly
Full archive: Consistent Content

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