The internet is a powerful tool for getting information. There are tens of millions of articles being consumed every day across the globe. Nearly 5 billion videos are watched on YouTube every day. It has never been easier than now to start creating things to put on the internet; yet, nearly 99% of the internet never do. Here’s where you come in.
The 1% rule of internet culture
“The 1% rule states that the number of people who create content on the Internet represents approximately 1% of the people actually viewing that content” — Wikipedia
This article from Wikipedia states further that the balance is closer to 90% — 9% — 1%, where the 90 percent are those who only lurk around, consuming content. The other 10 percent are those who contribute anything, and the last 1 percent of the internet are responsible for nearly all the content on the internet. Between comments, posts, videos, questions, websites. Almost everyone in that ten percent contribute something. It’s the 1% that is ruling the content we consume daily.
It is those that produce content that have the greatest advantage.
Work yourself out of the shadows
So how do you move out of the shadows? Isn’t everything on the internet just noise? Yes. Yes, it is. But the only thing you need to do is start. You will never climb out of the shadows if you don’t contribute. Start something that can be easily managed, and something that can be put up on a consistent basis.
I started a Twitter account back at the beginning of 2016 to be able to post design related content. Something I could use to front face my design work. After a while, someone recognized there was potential and invited me to Dribbble and I started writing here on Medium.
Is it easy to post things? No. A large portion of the time I have been inconsistent or sharing inconsistent to my agenda. I wanted to get my brand out there and build a reputation. What I didn’t realize is that was already starting. As I started to share more often, it became easier to create more content. It just took time.
The call for curating your content
There is a sea of content out there floating around. Most of those who are creating content already run a blog, they market on Instagram or social media, post to Dribbble and YouTube. What holds a lot of them back is posting only the things they are interested in. Anyone who has followers on their accounts, when you post a piece of content, you are sharing something that impacts your audience.
After an undetermined amount of time, it will become obvious to what kind of content is performing better than others. You have to understand who you are trying to reach and what their goals are. This goes back to a point I was trying to make when building a brand in my previous post about brand success. You need to have a greater understanding of your products, services, and the audience you are trying to reach.
Don’t think you don’t have anything to share
Your experience is unique. Everything you have gone through to this point has shaped your view on whatever it is that you do. What people fail to realize is the experiences that you have can help anyone on a similar road to you. If you have gone through countless tutorials to teach yourself design, you already know some of the pain points people have when they start out with self teaching. Maybe you’re from a social, racial, political, or majority group that experiences a difficulty most other groups don’t when doing what you do. The point is to never think you don’t have something to contribute. Move into the 1 percent.
What to expect when creating content
Let’s get back to the rule of the 1%. You need to have realistic expectations when creating content on the internet.
No one noticed anything I was posting during my first two months of new content. I had an audience that consisted of my mom, cat, girlfriend and twenty or so spam bots that followed me from a hashtag I put out on my first post. Eventually I started to build an audience around the design related content I was sharing. After that undetermined amount of time, (really, that amount of time is dictated by yourself and your own perception of your audience. A post for another time.) I started to notice a trend going on. Of the posts that were well received, my content was only getting about 2–10% engagement from my audience.
Researching this trend further led me to find that this wasn’t only my content that receives this level of engagement. I poured over 400 pieces of content consisting of YouTube Videos, Dribbble shots, and email statistics that others around me were posting as well. I thankfully had some ways of automating this task, but still, I went over 200 of the Dribbble shots by hand to get some stats on the levels of engagement you’ll expect from what kind of content you’re posting.
Though I know that likes don’t count for all the versions and levels of engagement, this was my first discovery of metrics, and what I chose to track for some of the sites. (I’ll be releasing this data in a future post)
Dribbble.com seemed to be the higher range of engagement with the number of likes vs. the number of views
Of the people that I follow with inclusion of my content, the likes to view count came to:
Total views of: 256, 487
Total Likes of: 16, 146
For a total of 6.3% engagement.
The most popular shots from all the people on Dribbble came to this:
Total views of: 73,968
Total likes of: 6,337
For a total of 8.57% engagement
YouTube was on the lower end of the spectrum with:
Total views of: 1,398,544,432
Total likes of: 31,130,855
For a total of 2.02% engagement.
Even from MailChimp’s Email Marketing Benchmarks, there was an average click through rate of 2.66%.
What can you do?
Build up that backlog of content. You position yourself as part of the top contributing members of society. Though you may feel a bit vulnerable putting out tiny pieces of yourself, your ability to help people out there will be a great advantage for you as a professional. Though the numbers will seem small and insignificant, your audience still grows slowly or quickly based on your ability to sense what your target audience wants. All this builds upon your own experience which then you get to share further and further towards mastery.
With mastery, you are able to:
- Charge more for the value of your products or services
- Hone in on the audience that you are best equipped to help
- Become better with promoting your brand and the content you produce
- Become better at converting the consumers of your content to your customers or supporters.
The only thing that’s holding you back from being part of the 1% is you.
Get out there and create!
Darian Rosebrook is the Design Lead over at keyspark.io His creative eye is driving us forward as an ever-growing, ever-improving brand.
