Types of channels
Bedrock (also known as evergreen/foundation/backbone): These are channels that operate like building blocks. They tend to take the longest to grow, but each investment adds to your foundation and can have outsize returns over the long run. The good news is that the sooner you begin, the sooner you’ll see success. The prime bedrock channels are SEO and your newsletter, but can also include things like Quora answers.
Viral: Unlike bedrock channels, viral platforms tend to be targeted by new writers, because they can give you a quick dopamine hit and accelerate your growth. However, they’re often not dependable and you can’t build upon them over time. For example, a feature on Hacker News is great, but it can’t necessarily be replicated and it’s unlikely that you’ll get to the front page twice in a month. That means that maximum traffic from even a site like Hacker News would be ~30k pageviews per month. Meanwhile, blogs that take advantage of SEO, for example, can build up to 30k+ pageviews in a day — consistently.
Social: Popular social channels, like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook tend to feel pretty familiar, but each channel has its own quirks. If you hone in on them, you can take advantage of each one. Social channels feel like bedrock in that you’re building a following, but your content lives on the platform — and you’re at the whim of an algorithm that you don’t own.
Syndicate: For these purposes, syndication just means that you repost your content, whether in full or adjusted, on another platform. These channels range from Medium, where you republish your entire article, to Pinterest or YouTube, where you would need to repurpose the content in a new form.
Targeted: Targeted platforms are essentially niche communities (not necessarily small, just specific). These communities are unlikely to drive significant growth, but can be a great way to develop super fans. These include Slack, Telegram, and Facebook communities, independent forums, or partnerships with other creators.
Paid: This channel is pretty self-explanatory — channels that you spend money on to distribute your content. The scale of these is based on your budget and ability to grow the lifetime value of your customers (allowing you to acquire more).Â
The CODES framework
CODES helps you consider how each channel functions, and whether a channel fits your goals.
Here are the 5 pillars of CODES:
Cost: A measure of typically how much monetary investment is required to drive benefit from a platform.
Ownership: A measure of the extent to which you control a channel. Do you own the content? Can you easily control who sees your content, or are you at the whims of an algorithm? If there is an algorithm, is it surfacing content mostly on the site (ex: Facebook, Twitter), or is the algorithm’s purpose to direct to content off the site? Consider how a “follower” on a channel that you own is different from a “follower” on a channel that you don’t own (Andrew Chen says a newsletter subscriber is worth 100x a LinkedIn follower).
Dependability: A measure of the consistency that you can expect from a channel. If you wake up today and bring in X pageviews, can you expect the next day to also be X? What about in 2 months… will it be X/2, X*2, or X^2?
Effort: A measure of both the work that it takes to get a channel up and running, and the ongoing effort required to keep it driving value.
Scalability: A measure of the potential reach of a channel over a period of time. If your goal is to reach 1m people with your channel, can this channel get you there? Is the ceiling on a particular channel the size of the channel itself or the time that you can put into the channel?