My Top 10 Tips for New Content Creators

Hi everyone, my name is Matt and welcome back to another episode of the Connect the Dots Podcast. I'm so happy that you're joining me today and thank you for all the support that you've given this podcast over the first few months of it being live. This is the first episode that I'm recording in Q2 of 2021. It's April 3rd to be precise. This is the first time I'm recording on a Saturday morning as well. And if you're watching this on YouTube, you can see that I got a little bit better lighting going on right now. So I've got this orange off to the side right here, and I've got a nice fill light off to the side over here. But I'm really pumped to be kind of upgrading the setup for you, and I'm excited to dive into the topic for today because it's one that I get a lot of questions about, but I haven't done, you know, kind of strangely, a whole lot of content about. So I'm excited to share with you my top 10 tips for creators. Some of these will skew towards a newer creator, someone who is still in the startup or side hustle phase of their creator journey, and also like thinking about it in terms of could I make this a career? Could I make this a thing that I do as my main, you know, revenue driver? So these are all things that I've learned over the past 10 years. You should also listen to my 10-Year Overnight Success episode as well, because it will give you a lot of context. It'll kind of help connect the dots and fill in the blanks a little bit of how my own creator journey has gone. Before we jump into these 10 tips for creators, I want to remind you that I've been writing daily emails for pretty much all year. And I'm going to start integrating more of a, like, creator focus onto one of the emails each week. I don't know if it's going to be like probably on a Wednesday or a Thursday. And so I'm thinking about it in those terms. But go ahead and go to raglan.com/daily to sign up for these daily emails. And you'll also be getting the creator-centric, you know, newsletters as well. The first tip that I have for creators is you'll never get anywhere if you don't start. So often, whether I'm coaching creators, I'm just like talking on social media or through email or on webinars that I host, one of the common things is like, well, I feel like I need this to happen, or I need to have this topic idea, or I need to have this many posts kind of written before I actually start. And early on, that is definitely a fallacy. It's not true because you will make so much more progress if you go ahead and start and just commit to consistent creation early on, which actually leads us into my second tip for creators, which is early in your creative journey, and honestly for a really long time, the consistency of your creation and publication is is more important than the quality. Now there's a unique little paradox happening here because as a creator, we want our work to spread. Like, part of the practice, part of what most people hope— I know definitely for myself— is that I want more people to see my ideas. I want my, you know, my audience and my influence to grow because I believe in the ideas that I'm sharing. And so we have this like long-term hope for ourselves, but One of the interesting things about early-stage content creation is that honestly not that many people are going to read, listen, or watch what you do, what you make. And that can feel kind of depressing, but I also hope on the flip side you can see it as a silver lining, as a benefit, that even if what you're making early on isn't as good as you want it to be, well, the good news is that not that many people are going to see those videos. What's important is that you practice early on. Ira Glass has a great, like, segment, kind of speech about this that has become known as The Gap. I'll actually link to it in the description in the show notes below. And what he says is that a lot of people get into creative work because they have good taste. You see people, you see brands creating the type of content that resonates with you, and you want to have that same level of quality. You have good taste. But early on, you're making things and you realize it's not really that good. It's not as good as I want it to be. And that can be depressing. But the only way to get as good as you want to be, to increase that quality, to close the gap, is to do the work, to have a certain volume of work that you are creating. That leads us into the third tip for creators. Which is to follow my milestones of the 10-100-1,000 round rule, or the, you know, the 100 rep rule. And what that is saying is what you should focus on early on is just getting your first 10 rounds complete. Get to those first 10 videos, those first 10 podcasts, those first 10 blog posts or email newsletters. Get those done because then you'll know enough. That might take you like 6 to 8 weeks or a few months, you'll know enough about your consistency, about your quality, about your interest in the topic and in the channel. You know, whether you're writing, podcasting, or making videos, you'll know enough about it to decide, okay, is this a topic I want to kind of keep going on? Is this a type of channel and platform that I want to spend more time on? And once you decide that, once you kind of run enough 10-round experiments, then your goal is to get to 100. Okay, now there are kind of mini milestones, interval milestones between 10 and 100. Certainly it feels really good to get to 50. I recently passed 50 daily emails, but getting to that 100, once you do 100 rounds of anything, you are going to feel that much more confident. And I can almost guarantee you that if you're consistent and pretty focused, not even entirely focused, but pretty focused on a topic and a niche for those 100 rounds of content, you are going to like have a little bit of an audience that you've built, maybe a larger audience. It was right around 100 videos that I reached 10,000 subscribers on YouTube, and I'm really curious to see like when I get to 100 episodes of this podcast, what's it going to look like? I'm about 20 episodes in right now, and I average, you know, 500 or 600 downloads per episode. So it'll be interesting to see, you know, you're going to be able to follow this with me. What are the downloads like? What is the engagement like when I get to 100 episodes? The fourth tip for early-stage content creators is to teach your younger self. Oftentimes it's tough to think about what, you know, what do I want to talk about, or who am I going to reach? Often the easiest person to teach is the younger version of yourself, the earlier version of yourself that was having trouble with the kind of topic that you're more of an expert in.. And so I always like to kind of ask myself the questions or offer the prompts of like, what, what would I tell my younger self, my earlier self, that beginner mind about this topic? Another way to approach this question of early content to create is thinking about like, around this topic, like what kind of questions do people commonly ask me about it? And so really the way that you want to be thinking about this is is how can I help one person? How can I lead into answering a question for someone? Which kind of leads us into our 5th tip for new creators or early-stage creators, which is just teach one person at a time. Don't think about, you know, getting to necessarily like 100 or 1,000 subscribers right now. And if you're right around in that kind of stage, in that number, this advice still applies for a really long time, if not forever. And so just think about that one person that you want to teach. Really individualize and externalize your content to think about helping one person. My favorite example of this is Tim Ferriss talked about when he was starting to write The 4-Hour Workweek, he was getting really stuck on the chapters and it just didn't have the kind of feel and flow and personality that he felt he wanted to bring to the book. And the breakthrough for him was that he had a couple glasses of wine and he just opened up Gmail and put in the subject line Chapter 1 and wrote the first chapter of 4-Hour Workweek in an email browser to a specific person. I think it might have even been to Kevin Rose, but I'm not sure about that. But he definitely like wrote the introduction and some early chapters of 4-Hour Workweek, at least like the getting started part just as an email to one person. So think about teaching one person as you are starting to create that content. You can really like nail down to their problems, to their needs, to the ways that you can uniquely help them. And that is a really good way to kind of get over the hump and break that writer's block or recorder's block of the content that you want to be making. The 6th tip that I have for content creators is to follow a simple audience building loop. As I've studied creators and worked with them very intently for the past 6 years, I've noticed that most creators for the majority of their career follow this really simple loop. And it's that you start with creating. So step 1, if you can, I can visualize this as a loop. Step 1 at the top, 12 o'clock, you create content. You create the content that you need in order to go to step 2, and share it. So we create content and then we share it with people. As people engage with that content, and again, it won't be many early on, and that's okay, but as anyone engages with your content as you share it, you are going to learn, which takes you to the third step in a very simple 3-step audience building loop. What you learn from sharing will help you understand and improve as you go back to the top of the loop, this flywheel, and start to create your next round of content. So, very simple: create content, share content, learn from what you shared, create more content. Very, very simple. This was how I, like, grew my YouTube channel early on, is when I shared that first bullet journal productivity video, especially like the big one that I did to preview kind of my annual goals, for 2018, I think it was. When I created that video and then I shared it, what I learned from the comments of that video is people were asking me, what is the 10-block method? How do you plan out your week? And my next few videos were, here's the 10-block method, here's how I plan my week, here's what time tracking is. And those 4 or 5 videos that were just a result of creating content, sharing the content, and learning from how people engage with the content so that I could then create more content again. That was a really simple, really effective creator flywheel that you can use, and you can follow that literally for your entire career. The 7th tip I have for creators is to find the creators that you admire and think about how you can emulate, but obviously not duplicate. All right, think about it in those terms. Emulate, not duplicate. And what I mean by this is basically doing some research. So if you're a YouTuber, go on YouTube. If you're a blogger, look at your favorite blogs or email newsletters. If you are a podcaster, look at your favorite podcasts. And you want to look at them in two different ways. You want to look at it and say, who are people that I follow, that I admire, that have a great style that I might want to emulate? Now this is kind of going back towards the hourglass gap comment and story. So don't think about it in terms of like, if I can't do this right away, then I'm a failure. I'm not going to produce. I'm not going to create content. But look at how they're doing things and just try and pick up like one little tip or one little effect that you want to emulate. I do this with like Matt D'Avella and Ali Abdaal and Marie Polin, some of my favorite creators on YouTube, and Amy Landino. These are all people that as I watch them, I'm like, oh, it's really cool how she did that. I'm going to try and like improve my lighting a little bit because I really love how Amy lights her videos. Same thing with Ollie. And so I'm emulating without duplicating. So it gives me some good ideas for style. The other thing is you can literally look at some of your favorite creators and observe what are their most popular videos? What are they talking about that is resonating with their audience? Now this is more specific to like people who might be in the same niche as you. Because what you can do is look at those popular videos, they're probably popular for a reason, and do a similar video in your own style. Again, I want to be really clear about this because you don't want to duplicate and copy what they're doing, but it is totally okay in my opinion to emulate some of the topics and style. Like, what if I was never able to do a bullet journal video because, like, you know, Ryder Carroll has, you know, a lock on all bullet journal content? Now I'm emulating some of that, right? What about, you know, daily vlogs and how people have emulated Casey Neistat's style for years now? So really think about how you can emulate your favorite creators both in style and content so that you can start to build more ideas for yourself and the content that you want to be creating. The 8th tip I have for creators is to start an email list. Yes, boring old email. Email converts for products, for engagement, for building trust way better than any other platform. And the engagement rate is so much higher. So let me give you an example just for me personally, since I know my numbers and I'm happy to share them with you. I have, you know, just as of this recording, just short of 60,000 subscribers on YouTube. Most of my YouTube videos on average is, say, get between 8,000 and 10,000 views. That means that I'm getting like anywhere from, say, 10% to 20% engagement from my subscribers. It's probably even lower because not everyone who watches is a subscriber, but I'm getting, say, between 10% and 20% engagement on average for my YouTube videos. Every single email that I send averages an open rate of 40%. So 4 times as many people engage with my emails as they do my YouTube videos. I don't have as clear of stats on like the podcast, but this is like how much more powerful email is from an engagement perspective. Now let me give you an even more startling number about like sales and revenue. I'm about to launch— actually, this is— I'm recording this a couple of days before I launched my Productivity Power-Up Cohort 2, Round 2 course. And I can guarantee you that probably 80% of the revenue that I have for this course is going to come through my email list versus YouTube or versus like people who came from the podcast. Even though I will tell about 8,000 people about the course and there are about 2,000 people who have like raised their hand to say, yes, I'm very interested in this course, So of those people, again, probably 80%, if not 90% of total sales are going to be people who are on my email list versus people who just hear about it on the podcast or people who just like hear about it on YouTube. It's that striking. It's that much of a difference. So even if you have smaller numbers, obviously you might have smaller numbers for your email list and some other platforms that you have, but the power to like engage with those people to build trust, and eventually to launch a product, to build a newsletter, to do a membership, whatever it might be that you want to create as your monetization model, the email list is going to be where you drive the vast majority of your revenue. It's the most direct example I can draw of the Pareto principle, that 80/20 power law distribution, that even though in terms of numbers, like especially if you like really compared to my YouTube channel. I only have 20% of my audience on my email list, but they will drive 80% of the revenue for my business. I might do a specific video or podcast about this in the future, but if you want to start an email list, the best way to do that, the best tool to use that in my opinion is ConvertKit, where I used to work. I was employee number 5 at ConvertKit. It's an amazing platform. You can sign up for a free account and have up to 1,000 subscribers to, to start with. So if you want to join, if you want to join ConvertKit, make sure you check out the link in the description and the show notes below. It is an affiliate link that you'll sign up through, and all that means is if you ever upgrade to a paid account, then I'll get a little bit of a kickback on that, but it's in no way an additional fee to you. It's just like a little thumbs up and kickback for me. So thank you. The 9th tip that I have for creators is to sell a product or some type of service or membership as soon as you feel able to. And you should probably do this earlier than you might be willing to, because if you want to make this a sustainable career, heck, even if you just want the money that you're spending on this, because like content creation does cost money. Like I've got a camera, I've got like website hosting, I've got like Podia for my courses, I've got ConvertKit for my email. It generates costs even if you keep them pretty low. So think about how you want to monetize. And I always think about like courses, digital downloads like ebooks. I think about membership communities. I think about live workshops and webinars that are paid. I want to control the monetization strategy instead of relying on ads, which by the way, ads for me on YouTube for over 50,000 subscribers come— has come out to less than $10,000 in a year, which is nice, but nowhere near Like, I would nowhere near be able to quit my job and do this full time if I was just relying on YouTube AdSense. It's the same thing for sponsorships as well. Like, it was probably around— it was probably around $10,000 last year that I made on sponsorships. But even like, I wouldn't quit my job because I was doing like $20,000 a year, if that, on ads and sponsorships. For most people, the vast majority of your revenue is going to come from products that you create. And so go ahead and start thinking about and start planning for how you want to create and what you want to create for that first product. And the reason that you want to do this sooner rather than later is you want to set up the expectation with your audience that you are running a bit of a business here. You want to build into a larger business, and businesses have products and ways that you can support them through those products. There's nothing wrong with it, and it's a, it's a great business model to have. So the sooner you can do that, the better. It also helps you understand how to sell, how to create sales pages and sales emails, and how to position your products. It helps you learn over time what kind of products and what kind of message is going to resonate the most with your subscribers, with your audience. So if you can do this sooner rather than later with lower stakes than, than saying— and I see this with a lot of people, they're like, okay, it's time. I want to do this full-time, or I'm doing this full-time now and I really need this course to take off, or I'm— I don't know what I'm going to do. You don't want that to be your situation. And if you have been able to practice over time with smaller launches, with smaller products, with really dialing in the positioning and the messaging of your products, of your offers, then it's just going to be that incremental build. And you might have a really, you know, you might have a really big blowout offer at some point, something that just takes off. That's an amazing spot to be in. But what I've often seen is those like, oh my gosh, I just did $100K on this launch. It's actually maybe like the 10th version of their— it's actually like the 10th version of that launch that they've done over the past couple of years. The 10th and final tip that I have for creators in this episode, in this version of the podcast, is is that tools and design are useful, they are helpful, but they don't matter as much as you think they do early on. What matters are the things that I just talked about in tip number 9: the positioning, the message, how it is going to impact people, the amount of conversations and feedback that you've gotten from your readers, from your subscribers about what they like and how it how it helped them or how it didn't help them. And so when you think about like, okay, I need my email tool to do this, or I need my course tool to do that, or I need my design to look a specific way, and I don't know why the white space is so much between these two sections. All of those things, like, they are important in some way, but if you allow those like tools and designs and looking for the silver bullet or the golden gun of like the perfect thing and the perfect look. Number 1, it doesn't exist. And number 2, those are actually secondary issues to your potential customer, to your prospect. What really matters is, are the videos that you're making, are the words that you're writing, are the words that you're saying resonating? Is the message that you're giving them solving a problem? That is what really matters, and that's what you learn through doing all those other 9 tips. Okay, so does the tool matter? Yes, it does. Does design and how it looks matter? Yes, it does. But the reason that I left this at number 10 is to tell you that all those other, you know, 9 tips, strategies are so much more important. And if you have consistent content, if you've built trust, if you've built your audience, if you have done all of those things and they understand the message and you know how to position the content in the course and the product that you have, that is going to matter so much more than the specific tool that it's hosted in, the way you're, you know, the way that your sales page looks. The message is what matters. I'll give you a really specific example. Literally the most expensive course that I've ever bought It was $5,000. That feels pretty crazy to say out loud, but the most expensive course that I ever bought was $5,000, and the only sales page I saw for it was on a Google Doc. Okay, that's it. I spent $5,000 on a course, and all I got to promote it was a series of emails from the creator, from the collaborator, that pointed me to a Google Doc with more information. And then I did have a one-on-one call with the creator, with kind of the coach. But the most money that I've ever spent on a course was just sold to me through email, a Google Doc, and a 30-minute Zoom call. That's it. So when you think about, I need to use a certain tool for this, I need to— like, my sales page needs to look a certain way, that is, you know, not, not as important as what it is and how it solves a problem for your prospect, for your customer, for your subscriber. Okay, thank you so much for listening to this episode of Connect the Dots, or watching it on YouTube. It was a lot of fun to put this together. I'm gonna do some more videos about the creator economy in the future, more podcasts about this, because I'm really fired up about it, and I think there is so much opportunity out there. So if you have any questions about this, the best place to ask me, to be honest, is on Twitter. So if you're on Twitter or you want to sign up for Twitter, just to ask me some questions. I'm @MattRagland on Twitter. Let me know either there or on email. You can also email me matt@mattragland.com to just ask any questions about the creator economy or how I see all these things fitting together. I'd love to chat with you about it. All right. Thank you so much for listening to this episode. I think I said that already, but I'm on such a roll right now. I'm not sure. I'll be back next week with another episode and really appreciate your support. Thanks so much. Bye.