What Makes for a Successful Content Creator?
If you’re dreaming big and want your videos or podcast to hit the big time, here are some things that make for a successful content creator!
What Is a Content Creator?
What is a content creator? A lot of the time we immediately think about people vlogging on YouTube, or creating snappy videos for TikTok. This is content creation, but so too is recording a podcast, writing a blog, and designing infographics.
Content creation goes hand in hand with marketing – especially digital marketing. Normally, a content creator would produce, well, content, for businesses or brands to help them advertise their products or services. This content can be shared on websites, social media, even television.
Independent Content Creators
Not all content creators are employed by businesses. The big names you watch on YouTube every day started out, in lots of cases, as independent content creators.
A lot of the famous YouTubers of today began their journey recording videos in their bedrooms, and editing them themselves. Their dreams might have been to become a household name, share their knowledge, or earn money through YouTube.
These are all things you can do too, if you really want to!
Becoming a Successful Content Creator
Success means different things to different people. To you, it might mean landing 500,000 subscribers on YouTube. To someone else, it might mean becoming a brand ambassador for a particular company. For others, it might mean being able to make a living purely off of video creation.
Whatever success means to you, there are some habits and practices that will help you on the road to success.
Find Your Niche
If you want to start a YouTube channel, it’s important to find your niche. The same goes for pretty much any platform or channel you want to share content on.
Having a niche will ensure you appeal to the right audience. It will also make it easier for people to find you online, and get a quick understanding of what your content is going to be about.
Trying to be specific is a wise move. If you’re into baking, try and go a step further. Maybe you’ll settle on dessert baking. If you can, go another step further, maybe you could focus on vegan dessert baking.
Set (Realistic) Goals
It’s difficult to reach success if you don’t figure out what that is. It’s also difficult to reach success if you don’t map out your route.
Setting an achievable goal at varying intervals will help you to see if you’re on track. Whether that’s a financial goal, or an engagement metric is up to you.
Making sure they’re realistic goals will stop you getting disheartened. It’s always good to aim high, but we all like to be able to pat ourselves on the back now and then.
Work Efficiently
When striving for success, it can be common to overwork ourselves and experience burnout. It may seem like a good idea to work as hard as you can for as long as possible, but this’ll be counterproductive in the longrun.
It’s wise to work out a system that allows you to create content efficiently. If you want to be popular, or make money, or have your stuff viewed lots, you’ll need to create lots of content first.
With video content, creating longer videos that can then be broken down into short form video content and shared on multiple channels, will help to promote yourself to a wider audience.
Be Consistent
We covered it slightly in our last point, but being consistent when creating content will speed up your journey to success. The Instagram algorithm favours creators who post regularly. It’s a similar story with the mysterious TikTok algorithm too.
Consistency is also key for building a loyal following. You can’t expect people to stick with you in anticipation if you keep going quiet for 7 weeks between every couple of videos or podcasts.
Engage
People like to feel like they’re connecting with the people they watch, or listen to, or read. If you’re sharing content on social media platforms, then the clue is in the name. Social.
Interacting with your followers will encourage them to keep consuming your content. This might mean more views, added followers, more clicks, more money. Whatever being a successful content creator means to you, you’ll find a lot of it hinges on engaging and growing an audience.
Becoming a content creation success won’t happen overnight. It requires motivation, patience, and hard work. The main thing is that you have fun whilst creating content. Because if you’re having fun, chances are your audience will be too!