Guide · 6 min read
How to Write Content From Your Own Experience (Not Just Best Practices)
Your real experience is more credible than any best-practice list.
Best practices are table stakes
Every creator in your space knows roughly the same best practices. When you write about them, you sound like everyone else. The readers who follow you and eventually buy from you are not buying best practices - they're buying your take, your story, your read on the situation.
Mine the specifics
The raw material of experience-based content is the specifics: a decision you made and why, a mistake and what it cost you, a moment when the conventional wisdom broke down for you. Vague generalities are easy to write and easy to forget. Specific details are harder to source and much harder to ignore.
Ask yourself: what did I actually do, when exactly, what happened, and what would I tell someone in the same spot? The answers to those questions are the post. The best-practice version is what's left after you strip all of that out.
First-person is a feature
Using "I" in content makes a lot of people uncomfortable - it feels presumptuous. But first-person is what signals real experience rather than aggregated advice. "You should do X" reads as a tip. "I did X and here's what happened" reads as evidence. Evidence converts better.
Create content in your voice - at scale
SelfScale learns how you write from your own posts, so every draft sounds like you, not a generic chatbot.