Why Consistently Creating Content Online May Change Your Life.
In the digital world, content is king.
If Bitcoin is digital gold, then online content is digital oil.
Content is the fuel that powers the online world and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
But unlike real oil, you don’t need to pillage and plunder the world to get it.
There are no barriers to being a content creator and there are infinitely more ways to engage in the creator economy than any previous time.
Only a few people understand this shift and even fewer are taking any action to capitalize on it.
The future is here, it is just unequally distributed.
You don’t have to be Gary Vee to understand the power of content creation. Our parents would have killed for the leverage we have available to us.
Whether you’re an artist, podcaster, or writer you don’t need anyone else’s permission to create. There is a platform to monetize any skill or passion you have. All that’s left to conquer is courage and persistence (no biggie).
Everyone will be a content creator in the future. Whether you want to be or not, that’s the direction the world is headed. As one of my favorite writers on Medium wrote, “the job of the future is content creation”
Whether you love it or hate it, content creation is here to stay.
You don’t even need to leave your job to create content and make money online. Start with creating content before and after your 9–5 job. Invest your weekends to learn how to create compelling content.
After building the habit, use the daily momentum and skill development to scale your income over time.
Before you know it, your side hustle of being a content creator will start to make more money than your full-time gig.
As Hans Moravec said:
“In time, almost all humans may work to amuse other humans, while robots run competitive primary industries, like food production and manufacturing.”
Content creation is the key to participating in the future economy.
If you’ve got social media, you’ve got a brand.
Congratulations.
Whether you post content on it or not, you’re building a reputation for yourself.
The question becomes whether you’re actively creating a brand or letting a brand be created for you.
People find building a ‘brand’ or ‘network’ gross to say. But these are just new forms of documenting your experiences.
CVs and resumes are dead. They are a static measure of your previous employment and do a poor job of fully detailing what you did.
It would be like trying to fit your entire life into one portrait.
Regularly posting content is allowing you to create your new digital CV. You can document your achievements, learnings, and even your failures.
To borrow a crypto analogy, creating content is your ‘proof of work’ that you validate by sharing with others on your social network.
While not exactly a blockchain, your social media profile creates a collection of your work and proves to others that you can do what you say you can do.
Here is one great thing about content creation.
People know you before they meet you.
You can reach millions with a click of a button.
The twenty-first-century economy allows you to deliver passion and intimacy at scale.
Creating content helps you build leverage that scales well.
Leverage allows you to do more with less effort.
Traditionally, leverage took the form of capital or labor. You either needed to have a lot of money or many people working for you.
Your investments made money through dividends and capital gains. Your employees worked for you while you vacationed or slept in.
The 21st-century leverage is more egalitarian, permissionless and scalable. Anyone can access it with a laptop and wifi. And the only limit to scale is the number of internet connections around the world.
You can build digital leverage through:
Code
Community
Products (e-books)
Podcasts
Blogs
Social media
When you build a consistent bank of content, you are building leverage for yourself. The momentum allows you to keep the snowball rolling until you’re reaching hundreds of thousands or millions of people.
You are not constrained by your local environment. It’s why a small blogger from Australia (me) can make a nice side profit from writing to a mostly American audience on Medium.
“You are able to combine the best elements of the nineteenth century (artisanship and tinkering) with those of the twentieth-century (scale),” writes Adam Davidson.
Ownership is not everything, it is the only thing.
What’s the best part of this form of leverage compared to capital and labor?
You own it.
Especially if you use your name to create an eponymous brand like Joe Rogan or Tim Ferriss.
Money can be taken away from you. People can revolt and refuse to work for you.
But your digital leverage will always belong to you. For better or worse. No one can be Tim Ferriss other than Tim Ferriss. And no one can be better at being you than you.
Once you’ve built an audience on a platform, remember to translate that to a direct connection via an email list. Platforms come and go. Algorithms get changed at a flick of a button.
Create your audience, and then own it.
If everyone is creating content, what about competition?
Everyone in the future will be a content creator but not everyone will be your content competition.
Just remember:
When the barrier to entry is high, the value of authenticity is low.
When the barrier to entry is low, the value of authenticity is high.
In short, you can escape competition through authenticity.
If you’re competing, you’re not being authentic enough.
Everyone can be the best at something. You’ve just got to keep redefining what you do until you are the best at it.
Get so good at your niche that ignoring you is impossible.
“For most of the twentieth century, the safest, most lucrative strategy was to be as much as others as possible.
In the twenty-first century, the best strategy is to be fully yourself and to highlight your areas of difference from everyone else.
That’s where the money is.”
— Adam Davidson
Create your own money tree
I never started creating content to make money, but it is a useful by-product.
There is an infinite number of ways to monetize your content creation.
You can attract brands who align with your values, and patrons who align with your mission, by running ads or direct monetization through subscription models like Medium.
Ever since making my first $1 from writing online in 2020, I’ve been hooked.
I’ve since scaled my income to multiple hundreds of dollars a month and also created other streams of wifi money.
But money was never the most important thing for me. Making money online was teaching me a new way of thinking, a way of seeing a gap, and starting a small business to provide value.
My perspective on how to make money online has been distorted.
Money is made through providing value, not how much time you put in.
Some of my best-performing articles on Medium are the ones I spent the least amount of time writing.
But in the article, I managed to strike a chord with a lot of people and provide value that solved a problem at scale.
No one cares how long it took you to write an article or create a video. They only care if the content you create solves a problem they have.
Summary:
Consistently creating content in a niche you’re passionate about can change your life for the better.
Whether it is making more money, building digital leverage, or monetizing a brand, content creation can provide all of this and more. Start creating content today.
Here’s how you become a content creator:
Choose a format that works for you. You have a choice between video, audio, writing and images or a mixture of 1–2.
Pick a platform that works with that format.
Understand whether you want to teach, educate, entertain or make people laugh?
Pick a genre that aligns with your personality.
Start creating and publishing online consistently.
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