My Simple Writing System For Creators With Limited Time
A daily, repeatable system built around Substack, Medium, and small products
🧩 Friday Framework · Simple strategies to grow your creator business.
My Medium friends can read this article over there as well.
Over the next year, I’m committing to a deliberately simple writing system to grow my creator business at Content Champion.
Nothing clever or flashy. Just a system I can run consistently alongside real life.
This means I’ll be spending just an hour a day on this, as the rest of my time will be spent helping my wife run our family farming business, and on occasional copywriting/ghostwriting clients.
At the centre of all this is one habit:
I will write one article every weekday on Substack, using this publishing cadence so I create a magazine style vibe through the week:
🚀 Monday Motivator · Start your week with a positive mindset
🏆 Tuesday Champions · A weekly celebration of three inspiring creators
⚙️ Wednesday Workflow · One small problem. One simple workflow.
✍️ Thursday Thoughts · Personal stories with practical takeaways
🧩 Friday Framework · Simple strategies to grow your creator business
You’re in the last one btw - as it’s Friday. 😊
Article Audience & Structure
I don’t really have a strict niche per se. My articles are all aimed at my target avatar, a lovely chap called John Chen. He’s 34 and lives in Toronto, Canada (I’ve been there and it’s ace).
I’ve put together a detailed customer avatar document for him that lives in my project folders in ChatGPT and Claude.
He’s quite a dude, and all my work targets his main pain points.
John has a full time marketing manager job, and is married with two young kids, so he has limited time to grow his creator business…
He writes sporadically but has no system that reliably turns his limited weekday writing time into income.
His inconsistency keeps resetting his momentum, making every post feel like starting from scratch.
He has a small audience and no idea which topics actually attract buyers rather than casual readers.
He is paralysed by product creation, unable to move from notes and outlines to something he can sell.
He urgently needs proof that his writing can generate even £1k/month before time, energy, or family pressure shuts the door.
Each piece I write for John will follow the same broad internal logic:
A short human story
A clear lesson
A small, practical system he can actually use
The goal isn’t novelty — it’s repeatability. Writing gets easier when the decisions are already made.
I’ll break down my full article writing framework in another post.
Substack Is My Home Base
I’m using a custom domain on Substack ($50 one-off fee but hopefully it will be more than worth it), which is connected to Google Search Console and Google Analytics, alongside Substack’s own stats.
This means I can see what’s actually working — which ideas get read, saved, shared, and subscribed from — and then double down on those themes instead of guessing.
Every article is then republished on Medium. Sometimes with light tweaks or slightly different framing. But always with a canonical link pointing back to Substack, so there’s a single source of truth for SEO.
That way, people can read wherever they prefer, but everything ultimately leads back to the newsletter.
I cross post between Medium and Substack, meaning each article links back to itself on either platform (so everyone can read it depending where they’re subscribed).
I’m planning on emailing my audience just the Monday and Friday posts as a gateway to the other articles - which will behave more like blog posts, as I’m not sure John will want to hear from me everyday. I’ll experiment with this frequency though.
Promotion Stays Simple Too
Each weekday, I’ll post a couple of Substack Notes linking to the new article, alongside short, relevant observations designed to spark conversation and attract subscribers.
Selected snippets from those Notes will then be shared on X and LinkedIn, again pointing back to the original piece on Substack.
Everything flows in one direction:
→ Articles
→ Notes and social snippets
→ Substack
→ The free Content Champion email list
→ Paid products and my membership
Tiny Product Creation
On the product side, I’m keeping things equally focused.
I have two core offers currently under construction. Both will be short PDF’s or micro courses that deal with the core problem clearly and succinctly:
Writing Reps — the weekday writing system I’m using myself (which I’m outlining here).
48 Hour MVP — a simple weekend sprint system for creating and shipping a small digital product, ideally once a quarter.
Both will live on Gumroad - because it’s easy to set up and simple to use.
Over time, I’ll look at what’s selling, what’s being talked about, and what people keep asking for. If I need to rework my products based on feedback then I’ll factor this in.
If it makes sense, this may all then evolve into a membership community or paid Substack later in the year. I like the look of Skool too. But that comes after traction, not before it.
For email, I’ll likely stick with Kit for now for my buyer’s list. I’ve used it before at scale and trust it. Gumroad’s buyer emails may play a role later, but the priority is clarity, not tool-hopping.
Simplicity Wins
The important thing is this:
The strategy is flexible. The system is not.
Platforms may change. Tools may evolve. Minor details will be tweaked. But the core remains the same:
Write consistently
Publish to Substack
Republish with intention
Track what works
Promote simply
Sell small, useful products
Improve the system as you go
That’s my entire plan for the year ahead.
No hassle, hype theatre or over complexity.
Just a repeatable writing system, run one weekday at a time - with the occasional weekend product sprint.
If you want to follow along as I grow throughout 2026, then join me: