Becoming a Content Creator
We have all done it – thought to ourselves how great it would be to be a famous YouTuber, travel blogger, or influencer – and we have all been wrong. If you are like me, not famous, then you are probably also like me in originally desiring those things because of how glamorous that life looked compared to yours. In my experience, that is not a good enough reason to actually do the thing. It is the reason I spent over 10 years living vicariously through the lives of others instead of creating content. For me, YouTube was escapism. It teleported me to a place where I was an important insider gaining special knowledge. It gave me the ability to hang out with people I thought were smart and successful, and it gave me the illusion of doing something important.
Fast forward to today, roughly 5 years after identifying this problem. I have a website, a few blog posts, and a backlog of video ideas. All these things were created in the past week… However, I have something else. Something that makes me fairly optimistic about my content creating future: a realistic idea of what it takes to be a content creator, and a realistic idea of what it takes to build a business. These two things are something I had been missing for a long time, and they have been extremely important to me in continuing to pursue this dream.
Both of these realizations have come from the lived experience of starting a financial advising practice. Was I extremely successful in this endeavor? No. Did I learn more in the first 2 years of trying to start a business than all my years in college (B.S. Finance)? Absolutely.
I can now apply this experience to the content creators I look up to. I can see the work they put in. I can realistically estimate the time they spend doing certain tasks. This knowledge of the day to day work is how I was able to decide if I wanted to keep my dream of becoming a creator. It is easy to say you want to do something, but do you actually? Do you actually want to sacrifice hours of your week side hustling a moonshot chance at becoming a million plus subscriber YouTuber? For most people, the answer is probably no. For a few of us, the answer remains yes.
I know what it is like to start from zero and build a business. Even the person who wants it the most will eventually be forced to surrender when his bank account hits zero. Trust me, I've nearly raised the white flag. You might be able to avoid this if you are still in grade school (if you are, take advantage of that time!) or have a trust fund, but for the rest of us there is no getting around the fact that you need to make some money to survive.
All this to say, I am going to pursue this dream and see what happens. Now, down to the how. My plan has 3 phases:
Phase 1: Blog
Start a website with a blog.
Write 100 blog posts in 6 months or less.
Go “public" with my website (share on personal socials: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn) sometime within the first 6 months.
Phase 2: YouTube
Post my first YouTube video.
Post 1 video per week for the following 12 months
Phase 3: Focus
Share my 18-month results!
Decide if I want to continue creating things casually, professionally, or not at all.
If continuing:
Narrow the focus of my content, potentially.
Upgrade the quality of my content more formally, if possible.
There it is. Basic and simple.
I am hoping to find some people to share in this journey with. If you are someone who is also an amateur creator, send me a message using my contact page!
If you are reading this, which you are, thank you for being a part of my journey to becoming a content creator!