May is a good month to resist the urge to create more and instead ask whether what you’ve already built is working as hard as it could.
There’s a version of content creation that’s essentially a treadmill: publish, repeat, publish, repeat, never quite stopping to ask whether the work is compounding or just accumulating. May is a good month to get off the treadmill for a moment.
By May, you have nearly half a year of content, decisions, and data behind you. That’s enough to start asking better questions than “what should I publish next.” The more useful question is: what do I already have that deserves more from me?
1. Identify your ten most valuable posts
Not your most popular. Your most valuable. Traffic matters, but so does what that traffic does when it arrives. Some posts attract readers who engage deeply, subscribe, buy, and return. Others attract high volumes of people who bounce immediately.
Spend time this month identifying the ten posts that are genuinely driving your business forward, whether through revenue, audience growth, or trust-building. These are your anchors. Everything else should either support them or earn its own place on that list.
2. Make each anchor post do more than one job
Once you know which posts are most valuable, ask honestly: is each one doing everything it could? Does it have a strong email signup? Does it link to related content that keeps readers on your site? Does it mention a product or resource you genuinely recommend? Does it give a new reader a reason to come back?
A single well-optimized anchor post can generate email subscribers, affiliate revenue, and return visitors at the same time. Most valuable posts are only doing one or two of these things. May is the month to fix that.
3. Audit your internal linking
Internal links are one of the most underleveraged tools in content. They help search engines understand your site’s structure, guide readers to related content they’ll find useful, and keep people on your site longer.
Go through your anchor posts and look at what’s linking to them. Are your newer posts pointing to your most valuable older content? Are there posts sitting without a single inbound link from anything else on your site? It’s quiet, unsexy work, but fixing your internal linking structure pays consistent dividends.
4. Think seriously about one new revenue layer
If your content business runs primarily on ad revenue, May is a good month to think concretely about what a second revenue layer might look like. Not necessarily to build it this month, but to get specific enough that it stops being a vague intention.
What does your audience already trust you for? What do they ask you about? What would they pay a small amount to have in a more useful format? A digital product, a paid newsletter, an affiliate relationship with something you already recommend, a course built around your most common content topic. Pick one and do the research to understand what it would actually take. Getting specific is what turns a vague intention into something you can actually act on.
5. Plan your mid-year review
June is coming, and with it the halfway point of the year. The creators who make the most of their mid-year review are the ones who prepare for it rather than doing it reactively.
This month, set aside time to pull together the data you’ll need: traffic trends, revenue by source, email growth, content performance, goal progress. Schedule the actual review session. When June arrives, you’ll be ready to look clearly at the first half of the year and make real decisions about the second half, rather than gut-feeling your way through it.
Clariti is built to help you understand what’s actually happening in your content business: what’s working, what needs attention, and where your real opportunities are. With the mid-year mark coming up fast, it’s a good time to make sure you’re looking at the full picture. Explore the demo.
Volume is easy to measure. Depth is harder. But the content businesses that last are built on depth, not volume. May is a good month to remember that.
Back to April. See what to focus on in June.
This post is part of The Creator’s Planning Guide, a month-by-month series to help you build a content business that lasts.
About the Author
Jen is the Associate General Manager at Clariti with a soft spot for great tech and good snacks. She has a Master’s degree in Human-Computer Interaction (which is a fancy way of saying she’s really into how people and tech get along). When she’s not working, you can usually find her hanging out with her family or baking something she’ll insist is “just a little treat.”
