As a content creator myself, I firmly believe in encouraging others that wish to make a career in this amazing profession. And not without reason. Content creation isn’t simply everyone’s cup of tea or coffee-whichever you like.
Instead, it requires a lot of skills. Some of these skills could also be inherent- meaning you’re born to be a writer and hence, could easily write essays and stories at school.
At the same time, content creation is a career that’s in high demand too. Therefore, if you’re planning to make your career as content creator, continue reading. Because I will be providing some valuable and useful tips to make your career as a content creator.
What are Content Creators?
To clear this confusion of what is a content creator you need to understand that there are a variety of works in this field.
Actually, there’re several types of content creators. I’ll be discussing about all of these. Here’s a list of content creators whose skills are in high demand round the year.
- Content Writer.
- Video Content Creator.
- Audio Content Creator.
- Graphic Content Creator.
- Social Media Content Creator.
You’ll see from my above list that the term ‘content creator’ doesn’t merely apply to one specific field.
However, they have one thing in common: creating content that people love, regardless whether it is written, videos that are engaging and interesting, audio files for podcasts and broadcasts, content with pictures and graphic designs and content that goes on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and LinkedIn.
Now let’s explore about some very strong reasons you should become a content creator.
Reasons to Become a Content Creator
There’re several strong reasons why you should make your career as a content creator. I will discuss some of these now.
1. Content Creators are Highly Paid
Even if you work as a freelance content creator or a content writer you can earn enough money to sustain a standard living.
That’s right. The pay of all the five types of content creators ranges from $45,120 to $120,000 per year, according to various reliable sources such as Payscale.com, Indeed.com, Bureau of Labor Statistics and Salary.com among others.
Of course this depends upon your skills and experience as well as the location in some cases. However, the median pay is $55,365, according to various reputed sources.
Speaking about hourly pay, content creators make between $17 and $79, also depending on which of the five types of content you create- text, audio, video, graphic or social media.
In fact, influencers, mini-influencers and micro-influencers also come in the category of content creators, though they work at an entirely different level. And such kinds of influencers can earn up to $500,000 per month, depending on their fame, number of followers and what stuff they’re promoting.
2. Content Creators are Always in Demand
As I mention earlier, content creators are always in demand, round the year. That’s because some or the other content is always necessary for large organizations to small businesses with websites, bloggers, vloggers and podcasters.
A superb example of this was during the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic in the year 2020.
While other professionals were shaky about retaining their jobs as several businesses began collapsing or declaring bankruptcy, the demand for content actually grew by some 23 percent from March 2020 to August 2020.
Therefore, I could safely tell you that content creation is a recession proof, pandemic and disaster proof profession. You will be in demand regardless of the financial situation of a country or anything that happens outside.
3. Fulltime, Part-Time or Freelancer
Content creation is one profession where you can take a fulltime job with a company, work part-time during your free time or even become a freelancer and work with flexible hours. This facility isn’t available for most other professions.
In fact, there’s a lot of money you can make as a freelancer content creator or even working part-time on hourly basis.
I’ve already mentioned the hourly and annual pay scales of content creators, so this would give you a fair idea of how much money you can make.
As a matter of fact, thousands of content creators with sufficient skills and experience are already moving to freelancing because of various benefits such as working with flexible hours, facility to demand own price for their work and online work.
4. Content Creators are Highly Respected
And finally, you will enjoy superb social and professional status because content creators eventually become a brand in their own right and merit. Once you become a content creator, it’s possible to become both rich and famous.
That’s because a lot of content creators get credit for their work. People will learn about your name, if they find your content is interesting, helps lead better lives and engages them in various ways.
To create own brand as content creator, you’ll require a lot of skills in one or more of the above types of content creation. And superb ways to present content.
This translates as high respect in both professional as well as social circles. More so because you’ll also be living a better lifestyle that most others working at various other jobs.
That’s because of high pay scales which would afford you a superb lifestyle too.
Becoming a Content Creator
Now if the above reasons are strong enough to attract you to become a content creator, here’re 10 useful tips for your content creator career.
Let’s get this clear before I start: you don’t really require any special educational qualifications to become a content creator.
Therefore, I am leaving out educational degrees out of this article but you will find a complete guide here on how to become a content writer.
You can be confident that whatever your academic qualifications, it’s still possible to create content that people will love and engage with. These tips are common for all kinds of content creators, so you can use them easily.
1. Select Your Niche
Select your niche. That’s the first tip that I provide to every person that wishes to become a content creator. The main reason being, you can specialize in only one or two fields to create content.
There’re few content creators that have more than two niches. It’s possible to have more than two niches after you get some experience and develop better content creation skills.
A niche could be from anything: your educational qualifications if you were good at specific subjects, passions and hobbies, profession or just about anything that you love such as travel, photography or even something as complex as ham radio and life in outer space.
The first requirement to select one or more niches is that you should have excellent knowledge and a personal interest in the topic.
For example, if you’re planning on becoming a content writer, you should have enough knowledge about what you’ll be writing about. The same adage holds true for video, audio, social media content creators.
For graphic content creators though, the niche doesn’t really apply. That’s because it would involve mainly taking pictures or creating graphic designs that match your employer’s or customer’s ideas.
2. Pay Attention to Research
Having the skills, resources and patience to research is the second biggest tip that I can provide to everyone that wishes to make a career as a content creator.
You could have superb knowledge about the niches you wish to work in as content creator. However, the world around us is changing rapidly. Hence, research allows you to know the latest information about the subject on which you’ll be creating content.
You’ll have to go through countless reliable sources of information online and offline to get the latest information about the topic on which you’re going to create content.
That means avoiding researching through copycat blogs, unreliable sources of information and also open encyclopedias such as Wikipedia. That’s because information that Wikipedia gives is not always accurate.
Instead, it is written from the perspective of the author. Two authors could have different perspectives and hence, avoiding Wikipedia as the sole source of information for creating content is something that you should avoid.
Instead, look for reliable websites to do research such as newspaper and news media websites as well as those of companies that’re leaders in a specific industry or field. You could also use Britannica.com and government websites because they provide accurate information.
It is worth remembering that audiences of your content could have the latest information about your topic.
Hence, providing outdated or incorrect information through your content can damage your career or create a poor impression about you as a content creator. Therefore, do as much research as possible with complete patience before setting out to create content.
3. Be Responsible to Your Audience
Being responsible for your audience is a something that all content creators need to follow. Let me explain it this way. You’ll be creating content for the largest possible number of people.
You can never say what are the audiences for the content you create? It could be a fourth grade student and 11-year old or even a top CEO of a multinational corporation.
They’re reading, watching or listening to your content because they expect to learn something from it and possibly take some action that would benefit them in some ways.
Therefore, the first duty of a content creator is responsibility towards your audience. This not only includes providing accurate information but also ensuring that nobody is put to any losses when they take any action due to your content. Furthermore, your content should be actionable.
Meaning, the audience should be able to take the necessary action after going through your content. And they should be able to get the desirable results.
For example, if you’re writing about how to get the admission to a specific university, the content should guide them step by step on how to go about it.
And in some cases, provide the web address or a hyperlink to the website where they could take such action. Unless the audience can take action, your content in any form is useless.
4. Avoid Plagiarism at All Costs
For those who don’t know, plagiarism simply means taking someone else’s content, making a few changes and claiming it as your own creation.
This is a crime under Intellectual Property Right laws in the US and most countries around the world. Not only can you be convicted but also have to face stiff penalties, you may also have to serve some term in prison.
Nowadays, there’re lots of content spinners available free or paid on the Internet. These are mainly used by people that create written content or content writers that lack any content writing skills but wish to open own blogs.
And a few fake content writers also provide spun or plagiarized content to their clients and employers.
Another way of plagiarism is by changing a few words in the content. The commonest way is lifting someone else’s content directly off some website and rewriting it in own words, without doing any own research to check facts and figures.
This is also being irresponsible to your audiences. If someone has read the original content and later sees your, they’ll immediately sense that you’re faking it to make it.
Therefore, at all costs, avoid plagiarism of content in any form. It can destroy your career as a content creator and you could end up with a criminal record too.
5. Update Your General Knowledge
In my humble opinion, always updating your general knowledge about all topics is the best way to create content of any type- written, audio, video, graphic and for the social media.
That’s because your general knowledge helps you in research, enables you to write what your audiences could find interesting and engaging while helping you create original content.
The best way to update your general knowledge is by reading newspapers and visiting news websites to find out what’s going on around the country, world and in your own field or niche too.
Very often, something from your general knowledge that you believe is unrelated to your niche could suddenly provide that missing link you’re looking for.
Another superb way of updating your general knowledge is by keeping your eyes and ears open all the time. You’ll observe a lot about what’s happening around you this way. This can help identify opportunities to create content of any type.
I always encourage content creators that I train to continuously update their general knowledge. Even sparing half an hour to one hour to learn something new will often pay rich dividends when you’re making a career as a content writer.
6. Use Google Trends
Google Trends is a wonderful resource that I encourage every content creator to use. That’s because it contains brief headlines about what kind of news, views and topics are trending in America and around the world.
This would definitely help you create all sorts of content that people are looking for on social media, through graphics, text, videos and podcasts.
If you’re unaware, Google Trends is a free resource and accessible by every Google user. If you don’t have a Google account already, I suggest you create one immediately as part of your efforts to make your career as a content writer.
Though some of the headlines or trends that you’ll come across may have nothing to do with your niche, it could have some indirect relation. And that would prove pretty useful if you can weave it in your content in some way.
There’re strong reasons I recommend using Google Trends as a resource for content creators. If your content is in sync with Google Trends and on topics that’re trending heavily, there’re high chances that Google will rank it among the topmost websites and video channels while displaying search results.
This can push up the number of users of your website, video, podcast or graphics and social media posts soaring high almost immediately.
7. Create Content with SEO in Mind
Regardless of what content you create, always keep Search Engine Optimization or what’s commonly known as SEO at the top of your mind.
That’s because there’re all chances that your content- whether it is for social media, websites, graphics and pictures, podcasts and videos will go online.
Therefore, the customer will always perform SEO processes on your content to ensure that audiences can find it easily online. SEO helps to push your content on top of Google and other search engine results.
This can be done by researching about proper keywords on websites such as SEMRush.com and Ahrefs.com. They charge a nominal fee for a monthly or annual subscription.
However, the expense will prove worth it if you’re serious about creating content that reaches the widest possible audience worldwide or even locally.
In most cases, a customer will provide you with keywords that should appear in the content. For graphics and audios such as podcasts, these keywords will appear in the form of descriptions.
The same holds true for social media content and videos posted on YouTube channels as well.Study a lot about how keywords work in helping content to gain ranking on Google and other search engines both in America and other countries.
The customer or website or YouTube channel owner has a specific audience in mind and wants to cater to that niche. Hence, always keep SEO in mind when creating any content or writing its descriptions.
8. Create for Human Attention Span
The human attention span in 2021 is just about eight seconds, down by four seconds from 12 seconds in 2020, says a study by Microsoft. Therefore, you have only eight seconds to catch the attention of your target audience.
During this very short time, you need to deliver some words, phrases, pictures or other content that actually attracts a person to continue reading, listening or watching your content. If not, all your efforts to create content would go waste.
One of the best ways to create content that catches the human attention span and keeps them engaged till the end is by using the Pyramid technique. The Pyramid involves starting your content or its description with words that get the audience thinking.
The words you use have a powerful impact on the brain and get the audiences thinking. It is well known that thoughts convert as emotions which in turn translate as action.
Getting people to take action is one of the prime objectives of all organizations and individuals that require content. They want their audiences to read, listen or view their content till the very end and take action.
The Pyramid structure begins by using words that appeals or immediately draws the attention of the audience. And later, it goes on to describe various facets and features about the topic.
And the end has all the necessary information that helps the person take action. This technique is very useful when you’re creating content for marketing something or want the audiences to remain engaged for long.
9. Get into Proper Frame of Mind
The best time to create any of the five types of content that I mention earlier is when you’re in the proper frame of mind. This could be anything. Some people get sudden ideas and begin creating content.
Others draw inspiration from something they see or read or listen to create content. And yet few others can create superb content after a couple of shots of alcohol.
Getting into the proper frame of mind varies from one individual content creator to another. Therefore, never fix any specific timings to create content, especially when you don’t have any inspiration.
At the same time, content creators also have to bear in mind that sometimes they may have to deliver content of any type to a client before a specific deadline. In such cases, you might not have the time to get into the proper frame of mind. That’s a myth.
All humans get inspirations from something or the other and you’ll find something that spurs you to create superb content too and deliver it right before the deadline expires.
However, if you decide to wait for inspirations and ideas, the best thing to do is ask for a longer deadline from your client or employer. A couple of days here or there usually don’t matter because that would help you create wonderful content.
10. Learn to Overcome the Content Creator’s Block
And finally, all content creators often stumble on what’s known as the writer’s block. This is just a state of mind when you don’t have any clear ideas about how to start creating content.
This happens with all sorts of content creators. Hence, you need to learn how to overcome this content creator’s block.
One of the best ways I know is by resting yourself awhile. Give yourself some time and space to freshen up the mind. The human mind is almost always full of useless clutter from various things as well as distractions from various sources.
And sometimes, we content creators suffer from what I describe as mental fatigue.This is nothing to worry about. You could simply rest or watch a movie or sports, read something interesting or even have a cup of coffee or tea or your favorite drink.
Relaxing and not worrying about how to start the content or what to create works wonders. After some relaxation, you’ll find that ideas flow to your brain almost by magic. You could start creating content with these ideas.
In some cases, content creators watch or read or listen to what their peers have done in the past. This provides some idea about how to begin the content. And once you begin, there’re no further stumbling blocks or content creator blocks that would stop you.
This is one idea I personally use sometimes. However, use this tip with some caution. Else, you might end up like a copycat by creating content that lacks uniqueness.
Conclusion
These 10 useful tips to make your career as a content creator are from my personal experience. There was a time when I too was a fresher or a raw hand at content creation.
However, over the years, I’ve seen that these tips do help aspiring and budding content writers as well as some with enough experience. I’m sure they could help you as well.