You’re a few paragraphs into writing a post when you mention a book title and, suddenly, you hit a tiny wall: do you set the title in italics, bold, “quotation marks”, or nothing at all?
You’re sure you’ve settled this once already, but the answer is gone. So you probably do what I used to: dig back through old posts until you find the last time a title showed up, then copy whatever past-you did.
Title formatting is just one of a hundred tiny unsettled questions. Is it “ebook” or “e-book”? Does a heading take title case or sentence case? None of them has an obvious answer, and each one lives only in your head.
On your own, you can muddle through. The real trouble starts when someone else writes for you. The first time you run a guest post or hire a freelancer, every one of those calls gets made by a person who has never been inside your head. They guess at your intentions, and they each guess differently.
Fortunately, all of this has one fix, and it’s simpler than you’d expect: a content style guide.
What Is a Content Style Guide?
A content style guide is a document that spells out how your brand writes. It captures your voice in plain terms and settles the small recurring decisions that otherwise get made differently every time. When you hand your content stand guide to a freelancer or a new hire, they can match your voice easily.
Why I Recommend a Content Style Guide to Every Brand I Work With (No Matter the Size)
A content style guide has strong benefits at every size, from solo creator to fifty-person team, but the earlier you create one, the more you’ll benefit.
It forces you to define your voice. Even if no one else ever opens the guide, writing your voice down makes you commit to it.
It settles recurring decisions once. Oxford comma? “Log in” or “login”? Without a reference, every recurring question gets re-litigated or answered differently by whoever happens to be writing. Decide once, write it down, and stop wasting energy on it.
Consistency builds recognition and trust. This isn't just about expectation. Consistent brand presentation lifts revenue by 10 to 20%1 A consistent writing voice helps readers recognize and trust your information and expertise.
It onboards contributors faster. It can take several contributions for a new writer to organically figure out your brand voice. With a content style guide, a new hire or freelancer can produce high-quality work from day one.
It cuts editing cycles. With a content style guide, drafts come back closer to being ready because every writer is aiming at the same target. Less subjective back-and-forth, fewer rounds before something’s publishable.
It protects the brand if you step back. If your brand voice lives only in your head, it leaves when you do. A content style guide ensures your voice survives a sabbatical or even a full handoff.
What to Include in a Content Style Guide
Every style guide looks a bit different depending on the brand's needs, but most should cover the following ten sections.
About This Guide: Spell out the brand's audience and explain how it positions itself.
Voice and Tone: Capture the core voice, including the personality attributes that define it, the tone, and how the voice shifts across different types of content.
What We Sound Like: Make the voice concrete by showing it in action with good-and-bad pairs.
What We Don’t Do: Name what the voice should never sound like, and the hard rules the brand never breaks.
Grammar and Writing Style: Settle the details like punctuation, numbers and dates, capitalization, text formatting, and prose preferences.
Headings and Captions: Cover the writing that structures the body copy, like headlines, the subtitle line below them, body subheadings, and captions.
Editorial Standards: Spell out how the brand handles attribution, source citations, quoted speech, disclosure and ethics, and fact-checking.
Structure and Formatting: Cover heading capitalization, bullet style, openings, closings, typical piece length, and how links and promotions work. Add a discoverability sub-section for SEO and AI citation patterns.
Content Themes: List the topics the brand returns to and the angle it brings to each, plus the content formats it publishes.
Image Use: Cover image style, what to avoid, sourcing, and accessibility.
How to Create a Content Style Guide
Building a style guide starts with reading your own best work. Rather than starting from a blank document or a template, pull up your five strongest pieces. These are the actual posts and pages that sound exactly right, and you can use them as the basis for your style guide.
Next, using your best posts, work through each of the ten sections, thinking about how you write or how you want your brand to sound, adding real examples when possible. Don’t worry about covering everything. The best style guides are living documents that can be added to and updated as needed.
Once you have a first draft ready, pressure test by sharing it with a colleague or contributor for feedback. If it’s just you, start using it for your next few pieces of content, and you’ll quickly discover what’s unclear or missing.
Ordinarily, this process can take several hours, but Really Good Business Ideas Premium members get access to a custom Claude content style guide creator skill that can take you through the whole process in 30 minutes or less.
Claude Content Style Guide Creator Skill
Creating a content style guide from scratch can feel overwhelming, especially if you’ve never done it before.
That’s why I built a Claude skill for Really Good Business Ideas Premium members. Claude will use the skill to build your style guide with you, by interviewing you, analyzing your published content, or both.
I’ve spent hours testing and refining the skill with different brands to make sure it produces a guide that reflects your unique voice and covers everything you or your writers need to know, with as little effort on your part as possible.
When it’s ready, you’ll get two versions of your content style guide.
A document for you, your team, and other contributors to reference.
A .md skill file that Claude can use the next time you need help with content work, like editing a post you wrote or generating meta descriptions.
To use the skill, all you need to do is add the Really Good Business Ideas Connector to Claude, then type “Can you help me create a content style guide using the Really Good Business Ideas Connector?”
By the way, if you’re using the Substack Creator OS in Notion, you can also connect Claude to Notion and ask it to update your style guide for you!
Content Style Guide Examples
Looking at other brands' content style guides is a great way to get ideas for what to cover and to see different ways of laying things out. Here are three examples I recommend.
Really Good Business Ideas Content Style Guide :)
Even though I am a one-person team, I reference my content style guide (stored in my brand vault) all the time to help me stay consistent and work faster. It also makes it much easier for me to work with contributors and guest posters.
MailChimp Content Style Guide
MailChimp is a big brand, and the level of detail in their content style guide reflects that. In addition to the basics, they offer specific guidance on topics such as writing about people, copyright, writing for translation, and content types like email and social media.
Buffer’s Style Guide
Buffer is a much smaller company than MailChimp, but they use their style guide (based in part on MailChimp's) to inform all external communication, from marketing to product to customer support. Since inclusion is important to their brand, their style guide includes a section on inclusive language.
The Best Content Style Guide Is the One That Gets Used
Keep your style accessible so you (and your team, if you have one) will actually use it.
I keep links to mine in my brand vault, alongside my brand assets and brand copy, and next to my content calendar (I use the Substack Creator OS to keep all of this integrated and organized).
Don’t be afraid to start simple! My style guide gets better and better because I update it whenever I catch myself asking the same question or giving the same feedback twice. A messy first version you'll actually update is worth more than a perfect one you never start.
To endless possibilities,
Casandra
PS. Don’t forget, Premium members can access my custom Claude content style guide creator skill through the Really Good Business Ideas connector!
Need More Help?
Really Good Business Ideas Premium: A membership designed to make starting and growing a profitable business easier. Full archive access, DM support, and a library of templates and resources.
Substack Creator OS: A complete operating system for planning, writing, growing, and monetizing your newsletter, all in one connected Notion workspace. (Right now, it’s free for Premium members).
Work With Me Directly: Book a 1-on-1 consultation or coaching call to get personalized help when you need it. Think of it as a focused working session to get unstuck, gain clarity, or move something forward.
Build Your Brand on Substack: Whether you’re still deciding or ready to build, I’ll meet you where you are. I offer executive briefings and hands-on strategy sessions for marketing teams that want to win on Substack.
