Matt Ragland and a guest discuss building consistency when creating content part-time. Each format takes five-plus hours weekly, so focus on one platform first, set realistic hour targets, and repurpose content across channels to avoid burnout.
Chapters
I have a question to ask you about that.
Yeah.
So taking it back to creators for a second, obviously this is our job to do this, right? To, to be on these meetings, have these conversations, keep the machine going. If this is your other project, say you have a full-time job in—
Yeah, this is your side hustle.
Sure. In a normal white collar, blue collar, whatever job, and your side hustle is to be a creator. I feel like the conversation we're having about, oh, I don't really feel like doing this is more applicable to that person. Where you've already worked for 8 hours, right? And now you want to carve out 2 hours on a night, or maybe before you start working, or maybe if you work from home and you have a flexible schedule, like in between your day, and you never really find the time to make those 2 hours or make the X amount of time you need to write a newsletter, make a video, the things any creator will do to get their word out there. How do you think about the discipline to make that time to either write, post, whatever their thing is?
It's a really good question. Something that almost all of us go through at some point in our creator journey. Like, I did this for myself. The discipline of even what we're doing now, even though this is like the job for us, of sitting down and doing the thing when you know that you can protect the time to do it. And obviously, you Some people, people have different lives and different responsibilities. The way that I could carve out a couple hours before we had kids or when we had one kid was different than when we have 3, almost, almost 4 kids. The mistake that a lot of creators make in this stage though, and I wish I would have known this better, is still trying to do too many things. We talked about this in some of the like the creator obstacles a couple episodes ago. But when you're trying to like post on multiple social channels and you're making like, want to do a podcast and you have a YouTube channel and like you want to do all these things, you have to get really clear. And this is something else we can talk about. You have to get really clear about the amount of time that you have available and what you can actually do in that block of time. And something that I always advocate for like anyone to do, but especially creators and especially creators who maybe don't understand how long things are going to take yet. And I'm not even just talking about like, oh, it's gonna, it might take longer than you expect to go from 0 to 1,000 subscribers. That might take longer. Like, I mean, it will probably take longer than you think just to make the video, just to record the podcast, just to write the newsletter. So if you look at it and say like, okay, if I'm disciplined, then I can dedicate 5 hours a week, say an hour a day, or like 2 hours a couple, 2 or 3 days a week. Say I can give 5-ish hours per week to my side hustle. Well, if you think that you're going to post consistently to social media, if you're going to have a podcast and you're going to post videos to YouTube and you're going to write a newsletter, I can tell you that any one of those things to be done well and create momentum, any one of those things is probably going to take 5 hours all by itself. You and I can talk about, and something we're going to talk about, is like the content multiplication system, how you can repurpose effectively. And that's something that I think more creators should be willing to do early on. Not everything you do has to be unique. It should be specific to the platform that you're using, but it doesn't have to be unique ideas, especially when your time, when your time is more constrained. There is like a level of discipline to it. But you can be more effective in your discipline decisions when you have a better understanding of the things that you want to do and the amount of time it takes to do those things. What has it been for you? Because I know you do some video work on the side, and that was like, that's something that you were doing even before we started working together.
The part that resonated most with everything you just said is the importance of picking the one platform to start. For the longest time, for me, that was YouTube, and then it became Twitter when I was trying to become like a big basketball creator. Twitter was my main focus. TikTok for when I wanted to have my own videography and then straight up video editing business. Found some success there off of, we talked about before, posting 100 videos, but just on TikTok. I was not really focused on YouTube Shorts. Instagram, I had a hard time, like remembering to go post my TikTok and Instagram too. And then Twitter, I just wasn't like set up properly to even think about tweeting to get clients or tweeting to build a business. So just focusing on TikTok did wonders for me. TikTok and email were like the two things. You get on my newsletter, you start to like me more, we work together, but it all comes from the TikTok side of it. The, the brand deals that I've gotten, The, the clients I've worked with are all butterfly effect of making TikToks. So the one platform, I've had 10 hours a week, I've had 2 hours a week to do the side thing. And because I focused just on TikTok, I was able to build a business that supported me outside of a creator.
The one platform is something like I didn't really start to take off until I really focused on YouTube. Entirely. And what trips people up, even now it still trips me up, is saying like, oh well, and we talk about this with repurposing and the content multiplication system, is this idea of like, let's say I record a YouTube video or we're doing this podcast, like, okay, if we do this, then I can use parts of that. We do this for clients. I record a podcast and I can use some of that for short clips. I can use that for longer, like 10-minute YouTube segment videos. I can pull out tweets. I can do LinkedIn. There's so much that I can do with just one podcast recording. And I'm glad you said this is like, even if I'm using the same exact thing, like I have a TikTok video, I have like a YouTube Short. Well, especially if I'm like editing that in something like Premiere or Final Cut where it doesn't have like the, the social watermarks out on it. Yeah, I can, I can put that into TikTok and I can put that into Instagram and I could put that on Twitter and I could put that on LinkedIn. And yes, there are some like content, there are some things like Buffer where you can say like, yeah, this like just push it out all those things. But people underestimate how that still does take time. And it takes like extra mental capacity to do those things.
