· 7 minute read
The Tour Method
Develop one strong piece, then adapt and share it in several formats over time.
Most content strategies work like writing a new song for every show. You publish, hope it performs, move on, start again. Each piece has to earn its own attention from scratch. (I've written before about why even genuinely helpful content gets forgotten. This is the other side of that question.)
The Tour Method means developing one strong piece and sharing it in several formats over time. Front-load the effort into something with genuine insight, original research, a unique framework, a fresh perspective, then take that investment across every platform and format until people associate the topic with your name.
A piece of research becomes a blog post, a LinkedIn breakdown, a podcast episode, a conference talk, a webinar, a guest article. Different stages, same core material. The initial research supports several pieces instead of ending with the first publication.
the effort
asset
stages & formats
association
Artists have understood this for decades. Jerry Seinfeld develops a set, refines it in clubs, then tours it across hundreds of shows before retiring the material and building the next one. Beyoncé keeps building on an album after its release. Lemonade became a visual album, a world tour, a cultural conversation that lasted years. Renaissance became one of the highest-grossing concert tours in history.
They keep using and refining material they've already spent time developing.
Where this came from
I started thinking about this during a content strategy discussion at work earlier this year. We wanted fewer pieces, with more impact from each. But when someone pushed back on the return of investing more per piece, measured against revenue driven from organic search, the conversation got interesting.
My argument was that the question was too narrow. If you create something genuinely worth talking about, the value goes beyond search rankings. Other teams want to distribute it. It becomes a conference talk. It fuels partnerships. It builds the kind of association where people, and AI agents, start connecting the topic with your brand.
But you have to keep the show on the road until you're almost sick of it. Every time you distribute something, only a fraction of the market sees it. You have to tour the idea across stages and formats, again and again, until the association sticks.
Three scales
The Tour Method works at different scales. You can build your whole career around one idea, build a company around it, or tour a single asset while doing other work.
Identity-level tour
One word, one career. April Dunford spent twenty-five years in marketing at seven startups. She could have been a general startup consultant. Instead, she picked one word: positioning. Her website, podcast, newsletter, both books, every keynote, every consulting engagement, positioning. Nothing else.
Dunford built her consulting practice and public work around positioning. Lenny Rachitsky's conversation with her is one example of how that association carries into other people's work.
Your whole career becomes the tour. The most powerful version, and the most demanding.
Category-level tour
One category, one company. In 2016, Drift entered the market as a chat tool with no differentiation. So instead of competing in an existing category, they created one: conversational marketing. Then they promoted it through a Shorty Award-nominated podcast, a conference that grew to over 5,000 attendees, a book published by Wiley, a certification program. They even publicly killed every lead form on their website to demonstrate the philosophy.
Drift's content and events helped it explain the idea of conversational marketing. Its later commercial success does not tell us how much growth came from that work rather than its product, sales effort or other factors.
Asset-level tour
One study, five years of stages. In 2019, Rand Fishkin published original research on SparkToro's blog: over 50% of Google searches now end without a click. One finding, one study.
Fishkin kept returning to zero-click research in talks and articles, with later studies using 2020 data and 2024 data. The repeated subject gave him a way to revisit the question as search behavior changed.
The zero-click research isn't Fishkin's whole identity. SparkToro is an audience research tool, and he wrote a book about startup culture. But the study is the work that travels furthest.
This is the most accessible version. You don't need to rebuild your brand. You need to recognize the thing you've already created that could travel, and tour it.
The tour I almost missed
I know this because I've lived the incomplete version.
A couple of years ago, I wrote a piece about information gain. It got featured by a few people on LinkedIn. Someone did a teardown of the introduction as an example of best practice. I got tagged in threads I didn't start. Then I got an email asking if I could present on information gain at an in-person conference, my first. That led to a podcast invitation.
If I'd been deliberate, I could have kept touring that piece, guest articles, more podcasts, more conferences. Instead, I moved on to the next thing.
That's the part we get wrong. We create something worth touring and abandon it after the first few stops. It can feel repetitive to us long before everyone we want to reach has seen it.
Seinfeld tours the same set across hundreds of shows. Dunford has been saying "positioning" for a decade. Fishkin has refreshed the same study three times.
What makes something worth touring
Not everything justifies the investment. The things that travel tend to have at least one of three qualities.
Fishkin had clickstream data most people couldn't get. Survey 500 people in your industry, and you have original findings to share in several formats. Drift didn't invent chat; they reframed it as "conversational marketing."
The honest trade-off
I don't think this replaces volume. Volume has a real place, especially for discovery. Short-form creators test rapidly, find what resonates, then lean into the format that works. That's a legitimate strategy.
I find this approach harder to commit to.
It demands more judgment upfront. You're making a bigger bet on fewer things. You need to identify a topic worth investing in, develop something others want to share, and have the discipline to keep touring it long after the novelty has worn off for you.
You also need to know the investment makes sense for your context. A topic might be perfect for your personal brand but irrelevant to your company's product. Look for something you can say from experience that also matters to your audience or business.
Publishing more pieces spreads the risk. You're less dependent on any one of them working.
But when the Tour Method works, it compounds in a way that volume can't. Each stop builds on the last. The investment pays off across ten formats instead of one. And over time, the attention comes to you rather than you chasing it.
These examples developed over years. That does not prove repetition caused their success. It shows how a question or argument can support a body of work rather than end with one publication.
I've written things on this site, like The Lens Method, that I've shared with a few colleagues and they now reference themselves. Those colleagues are already passing the ideas on. Sometimes all it takes is writing and thinking in public, then recognizing what's worth touring.
This is a working document. The thinking continues to evolve, and I intend to tour it.