Where Should You Invest Your Time and Effort In Creating Content?
Choosing the right platforms to focus your time and effort on as a new creator can be challenging with so many options available today like YouTube, newsletters, podcasts, LinkedIn, Instagram, and more.
Early on in my journey as a creator, I received advice to pour all of my energy into email since “social media is like building your business on rented land.” I followed that counsel and invested heavily in email and podcasting. As a result, I built strong connections and a distribution system I controlled, but I also missed out on opportunities for greater audience growth.
Now I want to provide you with a more balanced guide to help determine where you should invest your time and effort in creating content.
The creator model is centered on getting attention and building trust, which are key parts of my PARTS framework.
To gain attention, you must make and distribute high-quality content.
Earn their attention
Creating and distributing content requires making a few key choices:
Ultimately, the platform choice is the most significant and what I really want you to take away from this. But let’s break down each of these decisions.
Choose your medium
When choosing a medium, ask yourself if you enjoy writing, want to be on camera, or like speaking with others. Each medium has its strengths, challenges, and quirks.
Writing
Writing is a valuable skill that enables other skills. To write well, you must think well. Writing allows you to convey information efficiently and gives you the ability to do audio and video without improvising. However, writing is difficult and painful, even for great writers.
Audio
Audio alone is the least flexible medium. If you like speaking, your options are typically podcasting and public speaking. But if you’re a great speaker, you’re likely clarifying your thinking in real-time. You may be able to capture and transcribe your audio to edit rather than writing from scratch.
Video
Video is currently the most powerful medium for audience growth. Platforms focused on video creators have gotten very good at helping build an audience, especially for short-form content. However, video requires many skills like scripting, editing, performing, and packaging. Video has huge potential but being on camera doesn’t mean you’ll automatically make great videos.
Choose your format
After choosing your medium(s), consider your content format by thinking about the depth and length of your work. Short-form content dominates social media, enabling fast audience growth. However, short-form content has a short shelf life, requiring constant creation of new ephemeral content to feed the machine. This can build an audience but fails to create an enduring body of work without repurposing ideas into long-form content.
Long form
Long-form content continues working for you long after creation. If constrained by character limits or video length, long-form may suit you well. Long-form produces “sawdust” that can be repurposed into short-form content, requiring little additional work.
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Choose your platform
With many platforms available, think of them as either discovery platforms or relationship platforms. Discovery platforms have built-in audience discovery, while relationship platforms give you control and a way to communicate reliably with your audience, nurturing those relationships.
Today, there are many platforms available for creators:
…just to name a few of the major ones.
Discovery platforms
Discovery platforms are generally social media platforms incentivized to keep users engaged with content to show ads. They constantly look for user-generated content that achieves this, enabling reach beyond your followers if you create attention-grabbing content. However, new followers lack a true relationship, distribution is owned by the platform, and messages aren’t reliably delivered. Discovery platforms provide opportunity but build on “rented land.”
Relationship platforms
Relationship platforms focus on distribution you own and control. Followers opt into communication, giving you direct contact information and reliably delivering messages. Options include email, podcasts, SMS, and private communities. Relationship platforms typically require more effort and trust but build true relationships.
There are 4 primary Relationship Platforms:
Have a relationship platform at the core of your strategy to future-proof against discovery platforms changing. While discovery platforms are centralized with their own incentives, relationship platforms give you control of decentralized networks. You must work to get content in front of new audiences, but discovery platforms can direct attention to your relationship platforms.
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My strategy centers on email and podcasts as relationship platforms, with discovery platforms like YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Threads driving people to email and the podcast. The goal is capturing attention on discovery platforms and retaining it by delivering value and building trust on relationship platforms. If you fail to move people from discovery to relationship platforms, you’re likely failing to retain attention. Focus on solving this before chasing bigger followings.
My Content Strategy
The core of my content strategy is my newsletter. My Relationship Platform of choice is email.
I am also investing time in multiple Discovery Platforms:
They are all meant to drive my target audience to email.
In summary, the best content strategy uses both discovery and relationship platforms but emphasizes relationship platforms long-term. As you get great at creating content and connecting with an audience on one platform, add new platforms. Ultimately, you want your efforts to compound over time and create a distribution system you own, which requires investing in long-form content and relationship platforms. But leverage discovery platforms to accelerate growth in your relationship platforms. In fact, I recommend it.
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Originally posted on Medium