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Weekly deep dives into the Art & Business of Digital Writing, Ghostwriting, & Self-Publishing
In 2026, there are five text based formats that you need to know how to write. If you wanna build an audience, you wanna become known for a niche you own, you wanna get leverage out of your library, you wanna pull short form out of long form and expand long form out of short form. And most of all, you want to make money online from your content directly, or you wanna use your content to drive customers to your business. Because if you can write online using these five types of formats, you can write anything. You can write in self published books.
C:You can build a category defining free or paid newsletter. You can turn proven short form content into viral long form content. You can expand long form content into digital products or cohort based curriculums, even coaching and consulting frameworks. These five formats are the foundational pieces of everything that you could ever want to write and create. But before we talk about the five formats, we need to back up one step.
C:Where should you be writing in 2026? So quick history lesson. Back in 2010, the answer was to start a blog. Then in 2014, the answer was to write on Facebook and Quora. Then in 2016, the answer was Quora and Medium.
C:Then in 2018, the answer was Medium and LinkedIn. Then in 2020, the answer was Twitter, now known as x. Then in 2023, the answer was x and LinkedIn. My point is every two or three years where you should be writing online changes. This is because new social platforms emerge and old social platforms degrade or even die, and algorithms continue to change and prioritize new content formats and sometimes suddenly punish other content formats.
C:So the name of the game isn't really learning how to write and growth hack one individual platform and then never have to adapt ever again. The name of the game is to understand that the game is always changing and build the skills that allow you to change with it. This is why my entire point of view for writing online is based on this idea that your library is more valuable than virality. The performance of any individual piece on any one platform is not what matters. Going viral is cool for, like, two days.
C:It's a dopamine rush. But then forty eight hours later, your reach reverts back to your previous baseline. You go right back to doing exactly what you were doing before, which is just consistently playing the lottery game that is writing online. I call it a lottery game because you don't have control over when you win the lottery. In fact, more often than not, the pieces that you work really hard on and think are gonna go viral and get a ton of positive feedback are the ones that end up flopping.
C:And the pieces that you write really quickly and debate even publishing it all because you don't think they're any good are the ones that end up going viral. I literally just had this happen. I spent twenty hours writing this long form piece on 20 lessons learned selling over $20,000,000 of online writing courses. These are very expensive lessons that I've had to learn building our portfolio of writing businesses, and it took a lot of time for me to write and crystallize all of these lessons into a 10,000 plus word essay and newsletter. I was sure that it was gonna go niche viral in our little corner of the Internet.
C:And then I posted it, and it completely flopped. In fact, it's one of my lowest performing pieces ever. So this is not something that you only experience as a beginner. I've been writing online for more than fifteen years, and I still experience this on a daily basis. Writing online is a lottery game.
C:You don't know what's going to work, which means the only thing that you have control over is three things, where you write, what you write, and how many days, weeks, months, and years you write for. So let's start at the beginning. The three best platforms for text based content in 2026 are X, LinkedIn, and Substack. And here's why. First, X.
C:X has over 500,000,000 users. It also is the platform with the highest capacity to go viral. Meaning, as far as text based content goes, it's where you are most likely to hit a home run and reach millions of readers. It also has the most flexibility in terms of the types of content that you can publish. You can write stand alone short form tweets.
C:You can connect tweets into threads. You can post medium length essays and expanded posts. You can write full blown articles and embed images. You can do a lot on x today that you couldn't do back when it was Twitter five or ten years ago, which is why we recommend every single writer start on x first. Second, LinkedIn.
C:LinkedIn has over a billion users. Just think about that. It is a gigantic platform, but LinkedIn also has all kinds of benefits for writers specifically. First of all, it is a primarily text based platform. So, yes, people post images and videos, but text is by far the most common content type.
C:Second, LinkedIn as a platform has the largest number of affluent users. So especially if you're writing and creating content in an industry where your goal is to attract qualified readers and prospects for your business, LinkedIn is probably your best bet. Third, LinkedIn has a severe mismatch between creators and consumers. Most writers think LinkedIn is just a job searching platform. But remember, it has over a billion users.
C:So just by writing and creating content on LinkedIn instantly puts you in the top one percent of writers and creators on the platform. Third, Substack. Little fun fact. Substack has raised over a $100,000,000 in venture funding and is growing very fast. Substack has a lot of potential, and for the past few years, we've been making a big bet publishing all of our content on Substack.
C:Because as a general rule of thumb, just follow the money. Substack has raised over a $100,000,000 from some of the most well known venture capital firms in Silicon Valley and have been very effective at convincing legacy journalists to leave major publications like The New York Times and start their own newsletters on Substack instead. Substack also has two very different components to their platform. They have the newsletter publishing side, and then they have Substack notes, which is the social content side. When you publish newsletters on Substack, you get to tap into Substack's social feed and distribution.
C:This is a huge benefit. I can't emphasize enough how rare it is for a SaaS platform to have some sort of social distribution. A great example is just look at our Substack paid newsletter right with AI. Yes. We drive external traffic to our newsletter here, but more than 55% of all of our email list subscribers have come from inside Substack's own recommendation engine.
C:That is a lot of free growth. So you see, choosing where to write online is half the game. You always wanna be writing in the digital environments most likely to give you distribution, and the best platforms today are not gonna be the best platforms tomorrow, which is why what matters more than anything else, I repeat this over and over again, is that you are building a valuable library of content in a niche over a prolonged period of time. That way, whenever a new platform emerges or an old platform dies, your library retains its value, and all you have to do is copy paste your entire niche library over to the next new platform and capitalize on the next new arbitrage opportunity. So now that you know where to write, let's talk about what to write.
C:The five best writing formats in 2026. Since the social platforms that provide the best distribution of text based content are always changing, that means the formats that perform best on each platform are also always changing. For example, back in 2021, the best writing format and the one that provided the most free distribution was actually Twitter threads. If you're not familiar, these were strings of stand alone tweets connected into what was called a thread, with the first tweet being some sort of hook that got the readers to click into it and scroll through the entire thread. Back in 2021, if you were even halfway competent at writing threads, you were able to get exponentially more reach and engagement on your writing than if you were to post the same exact content on any other social platform.
C:This is what I mean when I say every few years, the best platforms change, and so do the best formats on each of those platforms. So if you can learn how to spot these trends, you can capitalize on them. For example, writing Twitter threads is how we built our writing program, Ship 30 for 30, to millions of dollars in revenue in its first year. All me and my business partner, Dicky Bush, did was write threads on writing related topics. And at the end of the thread, we would link to our start writing online free five day email course.
C:And then we would pitch all those subscribers on our email list on the next cohort of ship 30 for 30. Those were the only three things we did. Write Twitter threads, send them to an educational email course, remind them, hey. The next ship 30 for 30 cohort starts in a month or a week. So what are the best formats right now on X and LinkedIn and Substack?
C:Well, let's walk through each one.
C:Format number one, tweets. Tweets are short form text based posts, basically bite sized thoughts compressed into 280 characters or less. I find writers and creators struggle with this format more than any other format on the Internet, and that's because, as the seventeenth century French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal put it so eloquently, if I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter. Writing something short that is clear and memorable is very hard.
C:It's a skill, but these short form text posts or tweets as they were known back in my day, are really the foundation of all great writing. A single sentence tweet is the same thing as a great first sentence in a longer piece. A two sentence tweet is the same thing as a hook, either in a text post or in a TikTok. A succinct paragraph tweet is the same thing as a paragraph in a longer form essay. On top of that, and I noticed this is something a lot of people don't talk about, short form written content is really a game of rhetoric.
C:The best book I have ever read on this topic of rhetoric and how this can apply to short form content on the Internet is this book called The Elements of Eloquence by Mark Forsyth. I keep this book on my desk. I reference it all the time. In this book, he lists out timeless writing mechanisms for making single phrases striking and memorable just by altering their wording slightly. For example, there is a reason why people remember this iconic phrase from John F.
C:Kennedy's inaugural address in 1961. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. That's a great line, but it's memorable because it uses an age old rhetoric mechanism called an antimetabole, repeating the same words in reverse grammatical order. Another more modern example would be entrepreneur Alex Ramosy, who's known for his short form content on x.
C:If you look closely, the vast majority of his tweets are packaged using these timeless rhetoric principles. For example, this one where he says, the goal of youth is optionality. The goal of adulthood is commitment. Now there are two different rhetoric mechanisms working here. The primary one is what's called an antithesis.
C:This is an obvious observation. The goal of youth is optionality, followed by a non obvious observation. The goal of adulthood is commitment. The opposite. And the secondary mechanism is what's called parallelism, which is where two sentences use identical grammatical structures.
C:They mirror each other. And there are dozens and dozens and dozens of these different types of rhetoric mechanisms that you can use. And what they do is they make your short form content sharp and clear and much more memorable.
C:Format number two, atomic essays.
C:Atomic essays are 300 word visual essays to master the fundamentals of writing online.
C:The atomic essay format is actually a format we invented for our beginner writing program, ship 30 for 30. And the reason we encourage writers to practice with it, especially if they're brand new to writing online, is because an atomic essay is small enough that you can write it in thirty minutes or less, but long enough that you can begin to practice the five fundamental skills of writing anything in the digital age. Headlines, so what are you promising to give the reader if they click and give you their attention? Hooks, how do you hook the reader's attention in the very first sentence? Formatting, how do you organize your main points into clear sections using headers?
C:Writing rhythms, how do you alternate sentence and paragraph links to make your writing more dynamic and easy to read? And five, bulleted lists, How do you make each section as skimmable as possible? As soon as you have these five foundational skills, you will notice yourself using them everywhere from text messages and Slack messages to emails and even presentation decks. And the atomic essay format is the easiest, smallest container to practice all of these skills simultaneously.
C:Format number three, LinkedIn Carousels.
C:LinkedIn Carousels are multimedia slideshows that grab readers' attention and have the highest likelihood of going viral on LinkedIn. Carousels have been the best performing format on LinkedIn since, like, 2024. And no matter how many other formats we test, we find ourselves always coming back to carousels. However, writing and building a viral worthy carousel in your niche is very different from simply writing a text based post, and that's because carousels combine multiple forms of media. So first of all, carousels are visual first.
C:That means you have to navigate different word count constraints relative to other social platforms and other content formats because each slide can only hold so many words, which means each idea needs to be compressed into its smallest, most actionable form. This goes back to writing really effective tweets. If you know how to write a really effective tweet, that's gonna make it easier to write each individual slide on a carousel. Second, carousels lend themselves better to certain topics because carousels are multimedia slideshows, so you're prompting readers to click through each slide. And the vast majority of carousels that perform well and go viral do not cover these big nuanced topics or require a lot of explanation or tell long winded stories.
C:The best carousels are almost always listicles. They're sharing 10 tips or nine mistakes or eight reasons or seven prompts. So choosing the right ideas to turn into LinkedIn carousels is like half the battle. Third, LinkedIn carousels involve more skills than just writing. So AI has certainly made this easier, but you're still the one responsible for the most important variable, which is your taste.
C:You have to be the one to use AI to design a brand kit that you like. You have to choose the images. You have to assemble the content in a way that is visually pleasing to you and to the reader. And if this sounds like a lot of work, just remember, the skills are the moat. Okay?
C:The reason carousels perform so well on LinkedIn is because the vast majority of people don't know how to create carousels, and they aren't willing to spend a few hours learning how. But their loss is your gain. If you can learn how to create this content format, you will immediately elevate the perceived value of your content on LinkedIn. And don't worry about it. You can build this skill in stages.
C:If you want a really beginner friendly option to get started, you can create lightweight text based carousels using TypeShare. It's just text inside the carousel format. If you want something slightly more advanced, you can create more branded looking carousels using an AI platform like Gamma. And if you want something pro grade, you can design your own brand kit and design studio inside Claude Design or even Chatch BT. And lastly, what you can do to squeeze even more juice out of your carousel library is republish them on other platforms.
C:So LinkedIn carousels can very easily be turned into Instagram carousels and graphics. LinkedIn carousels can also be republished on other visual platforms like Pinterest. There are dozens of different ways that you can reuse this content. So don't think of carousels as LinkedIn specific. Instead, think of carousels as a content format, and you can reuse and republish that format across any other social platforms that allow you to publish that same type of format, something visual, which is essentially all of them.
C:Format number four, x articles.
C:X articles are 800 ish word thought leadership style blog posts. Once you've learned the fundamentals of writing online, your library of articles is where you will begin to build the most leverage. This is because articles are a writing format that can be reused, republished, expanded, or compressed in infinite ways. K.
C:So articles can be spliced apart, creating dozens of short form posts. Articles can also be copy pasted and republished across multiple platforms. Articles can be sent to your email list as newsletters. Articles can be expanded into book chapters. Articles can be read aloud as YouTube videos, and pieces of articles can be read as Instagram reels or TikToks or YouTube shorts.
C:The list goes on and on. Unfortunately, a lot of writers and creators don't know you can do this. Either they never realized that you could take the same content and just copy paste it to a second or third or fourth platform, or they thought if they did, they would get in trouble or they would hurt themselves or they would ruin their SEO, which they're not even trying to rank for anything anyway. None of those things are true. This is why my entire thesis for writing on the Internet is about building your library.
C:Building your library. Building your library. Building your library. That's the only thing that matters because it's yours. You own it, which means you can republish it wherever you want.
C:You can cut it apart. You can smash it together. You can take a paragraph from one article and a different paragraph from another article, and you can create something new. You can turn the free content into paid content. You can splice apart the paid content into free content.
C:This is what writing online is all about. So the bigger your library of articles grows, the more content you will have to play with, making it easier and easier to write new things using ideas and stories and frameworks you've already written down before. This is leverage. And
C:format number five, AI prompts.
C:AI prompts are prompts you write for yourself, but can also be used as assets all along your content supply chain system.
C:You can use them in your marketing. You can even use them as digital products inside your business. We're still very early in the age of AI, but already it's clear that most people only think about how to use AI themselves. They fail to realize that every single thing you use AI to do effectively for yourself simultaneously creates an asset or a product that you could give away or even sell to your readers and target customers. So every time you use AI, you have to remember that you're tapping into three different forms of leverage.
C:First is personal leverage. So as I like to say often inside our AI writing school, you can't automate what you can't articulate. So first, you have to learn how to do something. Right? You have to acquire a skill.
C:But then as soon as you have that skill, now in the age of AI, the very next thing you should do is get some leverage on that skill. You should train AI on some component of that task or set of tasks. Now AI doesn't have to do all of it 100% end to end. I think this is something a lot of people misunderstand. But if AI can help you do a singular piece of that task except 10 times faster, that in and of itself is leverage.
C:And the more areas of your life and business where you can make those upgrades and build those systems and get leverage, the better. But writing a prompt or using AI to get leverage on a task for yourself is only the beginning. The second form of leverage is marketing leverage. The single most valuable type of marketing ever is where you give your target customers something for free that does two things, saves them time or helps them make money, which means every time you write a prompt for yourself, you aren't just automating yourself or your own work. What you're also doing is creating an incredibly compelling and valuable marketing asset.
C:This is an incentive for your target customers to take some kind of action. For example, you can say, built this prompt for myself. It now saves me five hours per week. I want you to have it for free. All you have to do is give me your email.
C:There is no better marketing than that, and I believe the masses still haven't realized this opportunity exists inside every single niche on planet Earth. Everyone is asking themselves how they can use AI in their life and in their business right now, which means no matter what your niche is, you have the opportunity to help give people the same prompts and systems that you're building for yourself, which leads to the third form of leverage, which is business leverage. So the same way that your library of content can be compressed or expanded, free content can become paid content, and paid content can be spliced apart into free content. The same thing is true with AI prompts and Claude skills and other technology assets. Every time you create a prompt or build a system for yourself, what you're really doing is creating an asset, and an asset is a product.
C:And you can do all sorts of things with these products. You could give them away for free as incentives in your marketing, or you could sell them as digital products, or you could combine them into a more expensive, say, prompt pack, or you could combine them into a prompt pack and give it away for free as a bonus inside one of your other products or other platforms or other services, or you can make them monthly unlocks as part of your paid community as a retention bonus, or you can make them down sells for when someone doesn't purchase your more expensive product or service. You see, the list goes on and on. You can reuse these assets in a zillion different ways. But my point is, anytime you build something for yourself, you have to recognize that you can sell your sawdust.
C:And in the age of AI, prompts are products.