You’re Burning Your Best Content (And Don’t Even Know It)

Most content creators think they have a content creation problem and they don’t. They have what I call a flaring problem. And if you don't know what that means, like stick with me here for just a second because it's probably the reason that your content isn't working as hard as it should for you, right? So I'm going to give you a metaphor that I created a while back for my team internally, my content team, and I shared it with my copywriter a few months ago, I just recently shared it with my video editor, and I shared it because I wanted to highlight where the bottleneck in the entire system really was. And I felt like there was a complete misunderstanding on what the challenge that we were facing was. And it started with the idea, the mistaken idea that I had, that we had a content creation problem. I would sit down and I'd create a lot of content and, you know, I could never for the life of me figure out why does it seem like we don't have a content machine just cranking out content on every channel? Right? Like I feel like I write a newsletter every week, I record a YouTube video every week, I'm now doing interviews with a podcast that are hour, two hours long. Like we've got all of this content sitting around, why is this not basically a media machine that we see stuff everywhere where we've got shorts going out over here, we've got reels, and we've got tweets, and we've got LinkedIn posts, and we've got you know, everything being created from the original creation.

And it comes down to this metaphor that I'll share with you and it's basically content creation is a lot like drilling for oil. Because if you think about it, oil has three stages: it's got extraction, refinement, distribution. Extraction is that process of finding the oil, pulling that out of the ground, like the raw crude oil, getting that out of the ground and to do that, you do a lot of like experimenting and testing, surveying, drilling, all sorts of stuff until you hit something really good. Okay? Refinement is the process of converting that raw crude oil that you've found in the ground into something that's actually usable. Right? So because raw crude oil on its own isn't as valuable as it is when you convert it or refine it into something like gasoline or diesel or jet fuel or plastic or whatever. And then distribution is basically getting that stuff to a market where it generates revenue. Content basically works the same way. Extraction is that creative act, right? It's the process of sitting down and writing that newsletter or doing that podcast interview that I do or you know, recording that YouTube video that I record. I sit down, I spend you know, a fair amount of time creating that originally, that long form piece of content and that's the underlying idea. That's the raw message that I want to deliver. That's the crude oil. Okay? Refinement then is taking that, that long form piece of content or whatever it is and turning it into something useful for a specific channel. So I record a 20-minute YouTube video. Well you know that could be probably 10 different tweets, it could probably have a few shorts in it, could maybe a reel, maybe you know, you get a couple quote pics for Instagram, you get a couple LinkedIn posts or Facebook posts like all that shit. So refinement is the process of taking that thing and then converting it into a bunch of other stuff. And then distribution is obviously publishing it, right? Like you get that shit scheduled into something and then and then you hit publish.

And that's where it goes. This is where it gets interesting. Most creators don't have an extraction problem, or at least speaking for myself, most people are capable of creating more than enough content to keep a good content engine rolling like pretty consistently. And you know so they can sit down, you know and I can hammer out that idea, I can put it into a newsletter and I can do that frequently, I can do that consistently and I look at that and I go, "Yeah but I'm not hitting all these channels and I don't have this you know huge media machine that's really cranking things out. So what I think I should do is create more. I need to go extract more content. I need to like dig into my brain and extract more stuff, more ideas and more concepts and more frameworks and all of that." But that's not really the problem because the problem is refinement. And like in oil, when you have more capacity to drill oil, when you have more crude oil in the ground than you have capacity to refine it and convert it into something useful, then it's called flaring. Right? And flaring is you're burning off the excess oil because you have too much of it. You've tapped it, you've got the well in there, boom! And it's now like you're cranking out oil, you've got to create the capacity to then convert it into something useful. If you don't have that capacity, you're going to burn that oil, literally burn it, which means you are sitting on gold and you are fucking burning it. And you think about that and you go, "Wow, that's not where you want to be."

Think about that. If content is just like drilling for oil and you break it down into this metaphor, you go, "Do you have a content creation problem, an extraction problem, when you don't feel like sufficient content is getting to market to be seen and turning into and converting into new customers and actually marketing that generates some leads or some awareness or some brand or some thing like that? When that's not happening as much as you want and you're creating a sufficient amount of content or you've been creating a lot of content for any reasonable period of time, you probably don't have a content creation problem. You don't have an extraction problem. What you have is a refinement problem." If you look at the people who are doing this really well, you take you know, an Alex Hormozi or a Dan Martell or any of these people who can sit down, hammer out a YouTube video and their LinkedIn is filled with content, their X Twitter is filled with content, their TikTok filled with content, their Instagram filled with content, all these things are getting filled with content. Do you think they're sitting there like creating all of that content? Like no. What they've done is they've created a refinement process that matches or exceeds the extraction process. They have created a system that is better at turning one piece of content into 50 pieces of content than you have or than I have. When you don't understand that, when you don't grasp that, what happens is thinking that you have an extraction problem, you go create more content. You start hammering out more LinkedIn posts, you start hammering out more YouTube videos, you start trying to get more people on the podcast, you start pushing more and more volume not realizing that you are flaring.

You are burning all of the excess fucking content and the frustrating part is when you drive by an oil well and you see the oil burning at the top and it's flaring, you think, "Wow they are just burning money." Well the only thing worse than burning money is burning time, right? Because you can go get more money, you can't get more time. So when you spend hours and hours and hours on the creation side of things, on the extraction side of things thinking that that's your problem, what you are effectively doing is creating more inventory for a refinement process that isn't sufficient to keep up with what you're doing. And the reason you're working so damn hard on the content creation side is because the system isn't capable of maximizing the ROI and everything that you should get out of that. This is why I've shared this with my content team internally. I can create a ton of content. Like extraction is not our problem. Like send me out for a walk, I'll come back with 40 fucking LinkedIn posts and I'll you know, three ideas for YouTube and I'll you know, I'll have scripts half written this and that. Like I can create content until the cows come home. Like that is not my problem, it's never been my problem. In fact, the only time it's been my problem is when I started to burn out, kind of a pun intended but not fully intended. But I started to burn out because I just kept creating and creating and creating and I'm like, "Damn, every morning I'm sitting here like writing new posts and I'm creating more content. I'm extracting."

But I'm investing no time into the refinement strategy. I'm investing no time into ensuring, "Hey, I've got three years worth of LinkedIn posts. Do we potentially think that there's an opportunity to turn this into something more useful?" Right? And speaking for myself, at one point I'm you know, I'm recording two 10-to-20 minute YouTube videos per week. I'm creating fresh content for LinkedIn every day. I'm creating a weekly newsletter that is we've got you know, 41 or 42 percent open rates on our email newsletter so I focus a lot on it to make sure it's good quality. By the way, if you want to sign up for it, it's raysemail.com. You can sign up for free. I'm creating all this content and I'm like, "Damn, why does it feel like I'm just busting my ass and I can't create, I can't get as much content published as other people around me?" And it comes down to the refinement system. And then by the way, once you once you build a refinement system that keeps up with the extraction, now you got to make sure that the distribution works. Which I know sounds easy, just put it into the thing and and schedule it. But if you're creating content for different channels, then you know you've got to some of these things have to go in native and some of them have to go into a scheduler and some of them have to do this and some of them want this format and some of them want this format, blah blah blah. So you've the but the whole system has to work in order to maximize your time.

And if you find yourself on a content treadmill and you can't quite figure out why it's not getting the reach or generating the results that you really want and you feel like you're working really damn hard, what you may do is zoom out and say, "Do I actually have an extraction problem here? Do I need to create more content? Or instead of creating more content, should I just allocate all of that time into building a good system or finding somebody to build me a good system that can refine what's already been created and get that to market and get that distributed?" So it's a conversation that's happening internally. It's a metaphor that's worked for me and and makes a lot of sense when I when I think about it this way and I hope it helps you. Adios.