As a web designer, great content can help win over clients, build your reputation, and draw traffic and business to your website. Consistently producing quality content across blogs, social media, email campaigns, and other channels can feel overwhelming, but a well-executed content flywheel can make it more manageable. 

In their four-part Circle Day session, Teresanne O'Reilly, Clarrie Johnson, Hayley Fedders, and Omari Harebin shared tips for making content creation an ever-improving, self-reinforcing practice. 

Teresanne O’Reilly, Founder and Managing Director of The Forest, kicked off the session with tips for making the most of the all-important email list. The brand and business development strategist was quick to point out that the tried and true marketing method has one of the best returns on investment out there, generating an average of $36 for every dollar spent, according to Forbes. 

Building a great email list isn't as simple as posting an opt-in form. A compelling call to action (CTA) is where it all begins. Lead with value and ensure there’s something in it for future clients. Instead of the uninspiring “learn more about our business,” lure subscribers with the promise of a great SEO checklist, interior design cheat sheet, or whatever could be of interest to your particular market. 

Focusing on value helps you sidestep marketing pitfalls. Pop-ups that target visitors as soon as they land on your site can be aggressive and annoying, but not if they’re balanced with a compelling offer. Once someone joins your newsletter or mailing list, keep the value coming. Pay careful attention to which pieces of content are hits, and keep priming your leads with free website design tips, checklists, social media best practices, and other great resources to keep your brand fresh in clients’ minds. As a rule of thumb, Teresanne recommends sending three value-led emails for each sales attempt. 

Every audience, big or small, is composed of multiple subgroups. Segment your audience so that each group gets the right email(s) for them. You can segment by behavior, like organizing your list based on what content they’ve downloaded or by engagement. Your high-engagement audience is ready for your sales pitch, while your low-engagement audience desperately needs value before they drop out of your funnel altogether. 

Leading with value means being consistent. When you deliver value before, during, and after a sale, it signals a lot about your character and professionalism. Make your subscribers feel like VIPs with early access to content and subscriber-only discounts.

Pro tip: Keep emails friendly and short, ideally between 50 to 100 words. 

TapThat Digital Founder Clarrie Johnson returned to the Circle Day stage after sharing how to use digital products and downloadables to refine lead conversion in 2023. This year, Clarrie shared tips for helping businesses and individuals transform existing assets into valuable digital products. Website designers are what Clarrie called “creatrepreneurs.” As professionals with strong creative impulses, and business savvy to match, they’re often sitting on a digital goldmine of processes, insights, ideas, and content that can be transformed into revenue-generating digital products. 

While many web designers are intimidated by the perceived expense, effort, and time commitment involved, Clarrie’s talk is full of encouragement to get you over the hump. Building, launching, and selling is easier than you may think. The key is to think of your creative intellectual property (IP)—anything that’s the product of your creativity—broadly. 

Anything you’ve made for your business has the potential to be a digital product. That can include a lot, such as the way you interact with clients, how you onboard and offboard, and any of your unique systems. For example, at TapThat Digital, the team creates e-book templates that they use internally, while also offering those templates as digital products. Any community you’ve built—like your email list—is also IP that you can leverage.

Studio Seaside Founder Hayley Fedders has strategically grown her social media follower count to more than 100,000. Unlocking the consistency and quality necessary for success starts by realizing that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Hayley multiplies her content volume by reformatting content across platforms. She starts with a blog, the long-form version of the idea. You can turn a blog into a video. Or, with some creative graphics, an engaging social media post. You can also shorten the blog and turn it into newsletter content. Some make great digital products, too.

Whether you want to stand out as a thought leader in web design or attract more clients, a blog is a must. It has the power to improve your site’s SEO performance and establish you as a go-to expert. When you can repurpose blog posts into multi-platform content, the value is a no-brainer. As you build your audience, you can expand your business, offering digital products, courses, one-on-one coaching, and more. 

Digital alchemist Omari Harebin has been working for a decade without any signs of slowing down. Sustaining a high level of output without burnout, he says, is a matter of giving yourself some grace. When content creation is a minefield of judgment and self-criticism, it’s unsustainable. On the other hand, quality content is what wins people over. Judgment is also unavoidable. Anyone who shares content with the world will be judged. The key, according to Omari, is to separate creation from criticality. 

Start by giving yourself permission to create. If you’re launching a new project, begin with a judgment-free timeframe to get going. Omari can stay in this phase for as long as a year before he looks back on his output with a critical eye. With persistence, ‌repeating cycles of creativity and critical reflection build up. Persistence is key to awe-inspiring creativity, output, and quality. 

Creators may be haunted by the enigmatic question of whether what they have to say is valuable. The more expansive your definition of value, the more opportunities you’ll find to create it. For Omari, value is best thought of as anything that creates a change in state: from boredom to excitement or from confusion to clarity. One surefire way to consistently deliver value is to look for things that are inherently fulfilling to you. Passion-driven content isn't only self-motivating; it’s something people are hungry for. 

Each presentation was packed with polished insights, but there’s no substitute for the magic and creativity that emerge from lively discussions between professionals. Panel host Sudy Majd, Squarespace Senior UX Research Manager, followed up with questions about everything from avoiding burnout to maximizing engagement.

• Teresanne prompted designers to differentiate between an audience’s newsletter fatigue that’s leading to persistent declines in sales, clickthroughs, and open rates, and the more common “faux fatigue” that’s all in your head. 

• Hayley added that while you should adjust your content to each platform, you don’t need to shift your messaging. People have different consumption habits, but they’re all hungry for the same information. 

• Clarrie drilled down into the technical details of maximizing engagement. Personalized subject lines are a must, but even minor adjustments in wording or capitalization can signal formality or friendliness—as do emojis. Think about which approach is likely to perform best in each situation. 

• Omari tackled the dilemma of adopting content to ever-evolving trends. Instead of chasing trends, understand that they’re cyclical. If your content catches the start of a trend, you’re in luck. If it misses the trend, it’s only a matter of time before its topicality comes back around. 

  
  
  

Without a content flywheel, content creation is an uphill climb that takes infinite energy. With a little forethought and some efficient systems, you can produce content in a way that is enjoyable and generates positive feedback loops. 

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