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What do you really need to focus on to grow as a content creator or blogger?
As a blogger, I find a ton of content dedicated to creating, growing, and maintaining your blog or platform. A lot of it useful, much of it is repetitive. But it’s addicting to keep reading it because you feel like you’re missing a magic key or golden nugget that everyone else seems to have figured out.
Stepping back, if I had to summarize all the advice I’ve ever seen, there are really just three key activities that any blogger or content creator really needs to master and focus on consistently.
Any other advice you see will just be a tactic that fits into one of those three key activities. And if they don’t, then they’re unlikely to move the needle to help you grow your brand.
Here’s how I like to think about blogging:
- create,
- promote,
- analyze.
Each time you do this cycle, you’ll get better at it. You understand who your audience is and what they really want. Repeat these activities. If done right, you’ll start to see exponential growth.
Being a content creator or a blogger is a marathon and requires mindset shifts to see success as a content creator. And then there are, of course, a lot of ways to be more productive each day. All of those tactics can help. But at the end of the day, focusing on creating, promoting, and analyzing will help you pave a path to success.
Create
This is, of course, the big chunk of the task. You need to create. Whether you’re a food blogger creating recipe videos, or a productivity blogger writing content, all creators create pixels that should either entertain, inspire or educate.
Some of the content will work for your audience, other content will get lucky with the “algorithm,” and some will fall flat. Not everything you do will go viral.
But for your content to have a chance to be seen, you NEED to put it out there!
Key activities:
- Idea generation – you’ll need lots of ideas because you can’t stop at one. Some ideas will surprise you and do exceptionally well, other’s that you pour your heart into will flop.
- Write/Record/Film – whatever your platforms and how you plan to convey the message.
- Edit – this is the key. It is how you bring your story together in a way that gives the audience your unique perspective. Whether it’s because of the songs you pick to overlay onto your video, the headline for your blog post, or the images you choose to include, they can all provide ways for your audience to get hooked to your content and feel the right emotions.
- Publish – Once you put it together, don’t overthink this part. Just publish it. Then, take a break – you earned it! After that, move on to your next piece of content.
Tips for Content Creation:
- Focus on a few platforms, especially at the beginning and if you’re the only person.
- Play around with your style while seeing what content draws you or would draw your audience.
- Don’t be a perfectionist – unless you’re the one in a million whose first post goes viral; you don’t need to worry about the world judging you in your practice phase.
- Find the intersection of what others want and what you enjoy – especially if you have long-term plans for your brand.
- There will always be someone out there doing something similar. But you are you, and no one has your perspective.
- Always try new things – your schedule should not be so rigid that you lose any joy from creating the content.
Promote
If you create content and no one sees it, did you really publish it?
As a content creator, you must rely on algorithms to get your content seen unless you have a massive email list or an offline influence.
Whether it is social media or search traffic, all of your traffic will rely on how the different platforms view your content and whether the algorithms think a viewer is a good match for that content.
There are tactics that work better for some, while other things will work better for others.
At the end of the day you have to find ways to make sure that your content is being seen by the right people.
Key Activities:
- Find the best platforms for your content – these are the platforms where your people exist and the platforms you enjoy the most if you’re going to be the one managing that content.
- Create a schedule/content calendar – This helps with staying consistent. Your audience and the platforms you publish on all expect you to feed them content consistently.
- Stick to the schedule – Planning is useless without execution, and if you don’t promote the content, you create no one will see it.
Tips for Promoting your Content
- Stay consistent – algorithms and people need to recognize and trust you and your content
- Don’t try to be everywhere all at once.
- Facebook Groups and Twitter threads will only get you so far. They can be a great way to meet others in your space, but their eyeballs won’t get you too far if they are not your target audience.
- Figure out how to repurpose your core content to the platforms
- No algorithm is personally attacking you – they’re all trying to keep people on their platforms for longer and keep them coming back.
Analyze
As a creator, if you want to monetize your creative pursuits, a combination of good content and good promotion will get you further.
The platforms are constantly evolving at rapid speed. There is no shortage of features and new tactics to experiment with. If they’re holding you back from publishing, then all they are doing is distracting you from what matters.
You need to find the best path for your flavor of content and use it in a way that keeps your passion for your content alive.
The biggest questions you are trying to answer is:
- how do new people find you?
- why should your existing audience keep coming back?
Key activities:
- Metrics and KPIs – Most platforms have analytics built-in. Understand the metrics, then pick a couple, focus on, so you can analyze them every week or month.
- Keyword Research – SEO / Pinterest / YouTube are all great ways to get your content seen. Figure out what people want, so they can be sent your way.
- Social Media Tactics – Each platform has a unique personality. It’s hard to master them all, but you do need to spend time understanding how they can help you grow your audience. Ask questions like: how often do you need to feed each algorithm to stay relevant? Where do you want to direct people after they find you?
Tips:
- Don’t get caught up in the numbers – but rather use them to do a quick gut check.
- Only pick a few metrics to focus on – tie them back to your overall goals for your brand.
- Pick a combination of metrics that you can control and those that help you get results.
- Don’t let the metrics hold you back – at the end of the day; you need to continue creating the content you planned to analyze.
Final thoughts
Once you get in the rhythm of creating content, promoting it, then analyzing it to see what works, you’ll start to notice patterns.
At the end of the day, content creation is not a get-rich-quick scheme for most people. You need to be passionate about the content, dedicated to the process, and committed to continue learning. You need to continue to create content that can help inspire, educate or inform your audience and is enjoyable for you.