Content Strategy for Creators or DAOs

A creator makes things that other people want to read, subscribe to, or buy. That can be books, videos, podcasts, blog posts, courses, or apps. Content here refers to text and any visual or auditory media (video or audio).

A creator’s job is to deliver value to customers by figuring out what they will pay for and ensuring they get it. A creator needs to create content and know-how to collaborate with other creators (artists, musicians, editors, designers, marketers) when and as needed.

If you’re a creator looking to build and grow your audience, you need a content strategy. It is the art and science of the creation, curation, and management of content. Whether you are an independent creator or a member of a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), you need to define your content strategy so you can establish credibility, create community, and crush the competition. In this blog post, we will explore content strategies for creators and DAOs.

Because it costs so much (time, capital, energy) to create great content, you need to know what the market wants before creating it. Here’s how to do that.

The basic idea is to use short-form content to find out people’s interests. Then, once you have predictable formats that work, you can scale up with longer-form content.

Don’t know which short-form content will perform best? Create a variety of content and see which content resonates with your ideal customers.

Creating short-form content is easy and fast, and creating long-form content is rigid and slow. So start small and scale up when you have a proven hit.

Make longer-form content when many people benefit from it, not when only a few people will enjoy it enough to pay for it.

Create long-form content to establish credibility

Long-form content is the primary way of establishing trust or credibility on the web. That might seem obvious, but I think it’s important to understand why.

Your customers use Google to find information, and Google has created bots to crawl and search for content. If your website or web application has content, Google bots will find it and allow others to do the same.

Social media networks (Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) are different, and they are not easily indexable by Google. In other words, Google prefers website content over social media content.

Your goal is to publish content that stands the test of time. Since long-term content takes longer to publish, creators and DAOs need to focus on higher quality content.

Long-form establishes credibility by allowing you to demonstrate the depth of your expertise on a single topic. A person who knows a lot about one thing can be pretty valuable; a person who knows many things and can communicate that knowledge is priceless.

The best way to prove expertise online is to put that expertise into long-form content. If you have written an article 1,000 words long or more, you have demonstrated that your knowledge goes deeper.

Own your content by publishing it on your website

The best way to own your content is to publish it on your domain (yourname.com). We recognized this trend in 2017 and 2018, respectively, when ENS Domains and Unstoppable Domains launched an alternative to DNS domains. Your domain gives you complete control over how content looks, what happens when people link to it, who has access to edit it, and so on.

Most social media posts are ephemeral or brief, and most social media platforms are free to monetize your content as defined in their terms of conditions. By hosting your data on your server and publishing content on your website. With your website, there’s no platform de-risking.

Owning your content doesn’t mean you have to do everything yourself. Instead, I’m referring to that you should make your content and not let someone else control it or profit from it without you getting a share.

A content strategy helps you define how you post your content on the internet, and it’s the opposite of a social media strategy. Instead of worrying about algorithms, followers, likes, shares, and other ephemera of the moment, you focus on publishing content on your website.

Most social media platforms are closed systems that capture all the value created by their users. Creators and DAOs often use these platforms for network effects, but they also become dependent on them.

I’m not saying that closed systems are inadequate or that open systems are sound; they each have their place. But if you create content — stories, articles, music, photos, or videos — you should be thinking about owning your website.

Owning content is essential because creators or DAOs often rely exclusively on social media platforms. If you publish content on your website, you maintain ownership and control of the user experience.

Tokenize your content using NFTs

Tokenizing your content using non-fungible tokens (or NFTs) is an essential step in the process of maximizing project value.

Tokens have the potential to democratize the way we exchange value online. Rather than just being used as a currency, tokens can represent anything that people want. Tokens are well-suited to building community, governance, and economic incentives around communities, networks, or protocols.

Tokenization is one of the most powerful aspects of the crypto revolution. It allows us to create networks of trustless transactions between parties whose identities are not known or verified by any major party. Tokens allow us to build systems that were previously impossible or uneconomical to build.

Social media platforms incentivize content creators to create unique, original content without hyperlinking to other platforms. Incentivized content lives on the social media network. Any links to third-party platforms are demoted or downvoted by algorithms.

Most centralized platforms like Facebook, TikTok, Instagram have a monopoly on data. Tokenizing content with NFTs creates an incentive for creators to control their intellectual property (IP). They can then sell the rights to their content directly to consumers with no intermediary taking a cut. They can also transfer IP with more ease using NFTs. In other words, NFTs give creators and DAOs more freedom and control over their creative output.

Capture attention using NFTs

In the world of content, there is a race to capture attention. As more people find themselves with something to say, the competition for attention becomes more intense. And whether your goal is to share an idea or sell a product, the more crowded the playing field becomes, the harder it is to get noticed.

If you want your audience to discover your work, you have to understand how stories spread today. Because there are now so many stories competing for attention, the way they spread has changed. In the past, coercion captured attention: governments could rule by force, and churches could claim a divine right to your obedience. Now that we live in a voluntary society, it’s more complicated. The tools for capturing attention used by governments or churches won’t work anymore; technology has made them obsolete.

But there are still only a few ways to monetize attention indirectly, for example: selling advertising or doing sponsored content. The trouble with those methods is that they rely on what advertisers will pay for (mostly attention) and what sponsors will accept (branded content placement).

The attention economy is a competition for other people’s awareness. Attention is the ultimate currency in a world of distractions. To capture attention, you have to do something that makes people want to pay attention to you. With NFTs, you capture attention, then trade it for money.

A content strategy for creators or DAOs is to create content scarcity: give away things in limited quantities. Technology has changed the balance in favor of the creator or the DAO. What used to be hard to claim ownership is now possible thanks to NFTs. Thanks to blockchain technology, creators or DAOs now have tools to claim digital ownership of assets.

NFTs could change this dynamic by allowing creators to monetize their content through markets directly. NFTs have the potential to monetize attention. Creators can use NFTs for access to their work (paywalls), or they could charge money for any transaction involving their work (one-time payments), or they could charge money for other kinds of transactions (subscriptions).

The future of content monetization is token-driven

Content creation is changing. We’re shifting from platform-driven content to token-driven content. Creators of DAOs are shifting from web2 content to web3 content.

The future of content creation is token-driven. The future of content creation will involve paying users directly, with an open system that anyone company or organization does not control.

A new paradigm is emerging in the content creation space that can be called token-driven content. This model allows anyone to support any content they like financially. The token-driven model has several advantages over traditional models:

Token-driven content creators don’t need to worry about getting advertisers, subscribers, or sponsors. They make their work freely available for everyone to use. The creation of content is wholly independent of its distribution. It doesn’t matter whether the readers pay money; if they like it, they can pay; if not, they can still use it. Also, there’s no need for them to provide personal information when consuming the content — they don’t even need to register anywhere.

If your project needs creative content, you can pay people to create it with tokens instead of money. The token’s value depends on how much the creator’s work is worth to the project; you could estimate this by looking at what other projects are paying for similar content.

This model might be better than paying people with money because it gives them a financial incentive to create better stuff. If they get paid in tokens, they also stand to make more by selling the tokens later; that makes them more willing to take risks because there is less at stake if one particular project doesn’t work out.

Originally published at phoenixteam.io on October 9, 2021.