The skills to create, the passion for creation, and the ability to monetize what you create. Those are the three pillars of a successful content create a career. And in this episode, I'm going to share my thoughts on how to succeed with each one.
Good day, mate. It's the 20th of August, 2021. And my name is Rued Riis, still was yesterday, and will be tomorrow. I am sitting here in my home office. Preparing for a new YouTube video. And I thought, why not create a quick podcast on the same topic? The topic is how to become a content creator. What does it take?
How do you create a career around it and all that jazz? So this podcast is called the three pillars of a successful content creation career. And I thought a little bit about it's because I am a content creator myself have probably been my. Whole career since I was a young teenager. But now it's a pretty popular occupation.
It's a legit career. You can be a content creator either as a corporate employee or as a freelancer. And it's quite interesting because the term content creator is in my world already. A little bit diluted people use it a lot. Like they used entrepreneur begging the days. Everybody wasn't. Well, The first were rock rockstars and super cool heroes and idols.
Elon Musk, Steve jobs, Jeff basis, all these cool entrepreneurs. Now, all you have to do is order something cheap off of Alibaba and sell it a little more expensive in your country. And then you are an entrepreneur. That's fine. But it does something to the. To the term that everybody becomes one, it dilutes what it really is and means.
So what is the difference between an entrepreneur and a concent? Create them? Well as an entrepreneur, you build a business and as a content creator, you built content. And that was actually something that really attracted me because a business building is sticky. It is quite complex with employees and administration and accounting and all that stuff.
I think content creation is set much more pure and simple. It's all about creating a piece of content and not an entire entity and an entire business. So I think it, that is one major difference. The KPIs are kind of different, right? From a, from bottom line, as an entrepreneur, the KPIs is money as a content creator.
You're more interested in engagement, right? That is your main KPI. Then there is a market here. I also considered myself a marketeer for many years and probably still am Argosy in some ways. But then if you put it across the table from a content creator, I'd say. A marketeer can distribute very well and a content creator can create what is this repeated very well?
So a content marketing is set to be the future of marketing. And maybe we need to ask ourselves as a marketeer, if that is the only thing we are, do we need an extra add on to our skillsets? Do we need to actually be able to create a, create something real? You know, something, you can look at like an ebook or a video or a course, or a podcast or an article, many markets.
Yes. Are not really that specialized in creation. They're very good at distribution. So there's a difference there as well. That was a lot of introduction. I think we should just jump straight to the three pillars of a successful content creation career. And the first one is to be really good, to be really skillful at creating.
Right. That's what I just talked about with the marketer versus the content creator. Most markets. Yes, can't really create it. So that they are generalists. They know how to work Facebook business manager, and they've locked into Google analytics. A couple of times they know something about attribution and ad spent and all these fancy terms, but they cannot really create a full fledged video or they don't know how to write.
Blog posts that gets viewed a million times, right? Not to say that I do, but the thing is that I think that as developed kind of a T-shaped profile. Maybe you've heard about the idea of a T-shaped competency profile while the, the, the T shape is a simple of a generalist skillset with one deep dive, right?
So the T is made of a vertical line and a horizontal line, and the vertical line could be a small skillsets. Like I can write a little, I can record a little I can design a little, but the vertical line. Down into one specific skillset. And for my, in my case, it's animation video, I create explainer videos.
That is my deep dive, my expertise. And then I combined that with the more vague kind of good enough skills that I have around writing and recording and all that stuff, deciding. So he has to be really good, really skillful, not only at the creating, but also at their knowing what to create, answering questions that people actually ask.
So there is a little bit of search engine optimization skills there that you have to understand how to keyword research, how to figure out, how to match, what you know, something about with what people are asking. So be skillful. That is the number one thing. And of course that's what I provide and sell. I sell courses.
All kinds of cuts and creation skills, right? So so that's, that's the core premise for my business that people actually have to be good and skillful in order to be a good concentrators and make a living off that's the second pillar of a successful content creation career is to really love creation, to have a passion for it.
It might sound vague, but it is super important in order to develop the right level of skills. Deliver develop grit and persistence and you know, keeping at it. And it's hot not to sound fluffy when you talk about these terms, but I have experienced firsthand how much discipline and grit it takes to keep going.
Even though growth is slow, I'm working on my YouTube channel. For example, subscribe account, as we speak is 6,300 and something subscribers growing with about 500 a month. And that. That kind of growth factor is something that grows very, very slowly. And I have to put a lot of work into my videos, knowledge to make that growth curve a little bit steeper each month.
So if you don't love creating, you won't become good enough edits and you won't have the persistence needed to actually create a career around constant creation. Before you had to choose between following the money or following your passion. Right? I think that if you really love creation and creating contents, whatever format you, I love with you we'll be able to follow your passion and create content around that passion.
And that will eventually turn into a consecration career and you'll be able to make money off it. Either as an employee somewhere or as a freelancer or YouTube or influencer or whatever you want to kind of what direction you want to take. The third and last pillar of a successful content creation career is monetize station.
Yes. Well, it has to be something you can make money from in order to keep doing it. Right. That is the goal for me, at least there is no like crazy goal of a hundred thousand dollars a day or something. It's just, my goal is to keep doing what I do to be allowed, to keep playing the content creation game.
That is my core. How to monetize your stuff while you can do it through services or through products. If you are a freelancer, you can sell your service. You can sell, explain the videos to clients that pay you for that. So you can be in designer and design for people. It can be a copywriter and sell your articles to people who pay for that.
Right? So that is what most freelancers. But what I think you should do is to combine that with monetize creation of digital products. So you can sell your hours and sell projects to clients that pay for that. But I also think you should create. At block, for example, where you get organic traffic to your pages, and you have maybe some affiliate links that people click and buy and you receive a commission from that.
Maybe you have ads on your site. So you receive some money from Google every month. Maybe you do like me, you have courses on your platform. So you sell digital products. Maybe you sell eBooks and you have all these digital products in combination with freelancing combination with selling services.
So you have multiple legs in your content creation, freelance business there. Right? I'm going to end this episode with a quote from Hans Meravec more of a robotics professor who says that in time, almost all humans may work to abuse other humans while robots run competitive primary industries like food, production and manufacturing.
So content creation might become the only future profession. So you might as well. Jump into the game. If you want to learn a little bit about how to create different formats of content creation, I am hosting a concent creators academy soon. It's close for now while I organize the whole thing and get everything set up.
But you can go to ruedriis.com and sign up for the waitlist. Then I'll drop you an email as soon as. The doors open and you can enroll. That is a small tip. If you want to kickstart your content, create a career. That is one really cool way to do it. I think it's going to be a lot of fun and you will learn a whole bunch of stuff over the course of eight weeks until next time, remember to take care of yourself and those around you.
