Why Every Part of Your Life Needs To Be About Producing Content
Be Outstanding In A World Of “Experts”
Courtesy of Deep Bhattacharyya — Notes for FIT 3174 Monash University Week 1
There are a LOT of social media platforms right now. In fact, there’s probably a new one being introduced right this second. With so many sources of inspiration, where should you even begin to target our endeavours to build a personal brand and grow our corporations?
One might start to think that these platforms are overcrowded, and that the user’s attention has moved away from them. Yet, I would argue that if you can produce enough content for these social networks, you’re going to be in quite good shape.
How Much Is Enough
This talk generally begins with a discussion such as:
“I have room in my budget for only one more ad a month”
Wrong Approach! That’s one more than you’re going to need to grow your following for the long term. There should be a balance when it comes to developing relationships with your customers. Advertising is a strong medium for short term business development. However, if your goal is to influence customer behaviour in the long term, it is impossible to do just by creating more ads.
The Content Creation Mindset
You see a business running an ad campaign to buy a new pair of headphones. However, you’ve never tried these headphones before and you have no idea what they sound like. There are very few people who would actually check the product out, never mind commit to buying it.
If, however, someone created a brand and following for themselves using a reality TV like documentation of their endeavours. By reading this, their followers know that he loves his music. In fact, he’s quite a good music producer, frequently putting his music online for the world to hear. Finally, one day he decides to create his own headphones. He then puts it on a website such as amazon, and then asks his followers to support him by buying the headphones. Do you see the difference? One has a much bigger chance of working than the other because of one key element: trust!
My Own Content Creation Strategy
My content creation strategy contains several platforms, and I hope that I can cover even more in the near future. Why is this? If you can build an audience anywhere, you can scale, because any new platform you create a following in will attract some of the old platform’s followings as well as some people from the new platform, giving you even greater leverage.
The first platform that I would start off in would be the one which will best leverages your skills. Are you good on camera? Use youtube. Are you a star writer? Consider a blog. Are you good at frequent motivation or news? Twitter is your best bet. The best platforms are really person dependant, and I encourage everyone to leverage the skills they have developed. Eventually, you want to get to hosting your own meetups and conferences. This is how you get to know the big guns. However, start small, and then scale.
How many posts should I do?
This is a trick question. Ideally, the digital world we lives in loves content. The more you do, the more value you will be able to provide, and the more practice that you will have. This is an endless loop. How do you get so much practice?
“Post every part of the day that is not completely private!”
Driving?
Record a video or a podcast.
Making some notes for a widely used programming application?
- Record your thoughts and write a blogpost
Have to write posts for University?
- Post it on a note sharing site, Facebook, or record a video of you explaining the concepts. This will give you more practice in the content as well to make sure you are able to understand it.
Did you learn a new technology or programming language?
- Contribute to open source! You can go to GitHub and submit pull requests for common applications (check out First Timers Only) or make your own app with the new language to share with the world
Hope that gives you a few ideas! Critically analyse every part of your day. Think about what you could be contributing towards and how you can leverage the media already set out in front of you!
I hope this post has helped you decide on a medium, a post type and what to post about. If you take anything from this piece, remember this:
The internet is much more about scale and volume, rather than quality. There’s little point overthinking a piece of content. Take that gem and hit publish. Do the same again, and again, and again. Before long, you will be in a league of your own!
