The Content Creator Lie
The tweet above is the story people love to tell. I see it in tweets all the time. I copied the tweet above from another one I saw and personalized it. The tweet is not a lie, but it's omitting a lot.
I compare myself to these tweets and mourn my slow audience growth. Content creators make it sound so fast and easy. But they hardly share the sacrifice and privilege required to work for free for an indefinite amount of time until their audience is big enough to monetize.
The story nobody tells is the fierce determination it takes over years to grow and monetize an audience. I've been creating content online for over a decade. I created multiple websites, blogs, YouTube channels for various niches and audiences. I've run five newsletters both personally and for jobs. I've not only spent thousands of hours of my free time, but I've also spent thousands of dollars on courses, SAAS services, and contractors.
No matter how motivated I get, my content creation consistency is volatile. I'll make weekly newsletters or YouTube videos for five weeks in a row and then ghost my audience for four months and try again later.
I've most consistently created content when I was unemployed or unfulfilled by my day job. I started blogging when I couldn't find a job after I graduated during the 2009 recession and lived in my mom's two-bedroom apartment with my four other siblings. When I was held hostage from the bureaucracy of my day job, I created a blog and online course to have a creative outlet without any approvals. I took content creation seriously in 2019 when I took a sabbatical and had the privilege of living off my husband's income. We could do this affordably while living in Mexico that year.
I stop creating whenever it feels like work or when my life/work priorities get in the way, like having a baby. But I keep coming back to making content mostly because it's fun and the personal benefits.
Even with such a small audience, there have been many rewarding outcomes over the years. I taught myself how to edit videos and write. I went from a boss recommending that I take a writing class to getting paid to help people improve their writing. My community health blogging inspired my grad school trajectory and landed me a job as a community health correspondent for a radio program. The LA Times linked to a blog post I wrote. When I had less than 1,000 YouTube subscribers, an Americorps program paid me to speak to their students.
After a decade of trying different things, I finally hit the right content and audience and started earning online.
Any content creator will tell you that the way to make it is to create content consistently and get better at creating over time. Although I've never gotten a regular cadence of producing down, I have consistently come back to making content after each break. I keep playing the game.
My content that finally took off was on applying to grad school in 2020. Instead of trying to force something, I kept surrendering to what was in front of me. Many friends asked me for help applying to grad school over the years. With practice, I got good at helping people get into top grad schools like Harvard and MIT. I started a YouTube channel to share what I had learned. Whenever friends asked for support, I sent them examples of my grad school essays and those I helped. This gave me the idea to put these essays into a PDF lead magnet. More than 6,000 people have now downloaded this PDF. People started reaching out to me for private services.
I never had to ideate on product/market fit because every service I created, people asked for. Most ideas I have for content come from audience questions. I felt awkward charging people, so I started with free office hours. My husband convinced me to start charging since I was limited in how much free time I could offer. Now, after two years, things are picking up. I have more people asking for services than I can support.
Creating content is like pumping oil from the ground. It takes a ton of pumping where nothing is happening, but after enough pressure builds, it all comes spilling out. Most people give up before they have pumped enough.
Unfortunately, the more people hire me for services, the less time I have to create free content. My goal this year is to create content every two weeks and start a learning community. This way, I can scale both my free and paid services.
I'm investing all the money I earn from my services into making it easier for me to create content. Over the past few months, I hired a part-time personal assistant and trained contractors to review essays with me. I'm not sure I will make enough money to cover the cost of my assistant, but I'm willing to take the investment risk to better balance content creation with motherhood. I'm working on batch processing content creation to make lots of content when I have energy and then take 1-2 weeks off when my creative energy is low.
I'm not making enough from my services to pay myself, but I don't need the income. This huge privilege makes my content creation possible, which I don't think enough creators talk about. I've heard many success stories from content creators, but I haven't heard enough from people in the rocky waters of the journey. I'm not sure how this year will go. I might lose a lot of money, or this year could be the turning point where this goes from a side hustle to a real business. I might get burnt out or bored and quit. Or I might build a team.
Whatever happens, my intention is to enjoy the process and share along the way.