Content is king and those that create them are nothing less than king makers.
Content creators are individuals who produce digital contents/ materials for consumption online.
Content creators create content/materials like videos, blogs, or social media posts, and images for business purposes or for clients.
Businesses that want to build a social media presence will most likely need the services of a content creator. Content creators are behind what we read, share, like, save, watch and engage with.
Almost all social media platforms depend on content creators to thrive.
Social media is like a ravenous wolf, it is insatiable and for that reason, demands for fresh and relevant content will always be high and talented creators will always be sought out.
In this digital era, any business that decides to go digital will almost immediately come to know why content is so important for business.
This article focuses on starting out as digital content creator.
So, stay with me
Starting Out as a Content Creator, there are few things you will do to have a smooth ride through the journey.
1. Choose Your Niche
Getting started as a content creator requires specificity. Just like every other thing, it all starts with your passion. Nobody knows everything and you must build the confidence that your dreams are valid. To find your niche, look into what interests you, what subject or topic you get fascinated on and what makes you get lost in time. It can be your course of study in the university or any other life interest.
Finding a niche can be very difficult times, however, one must understand passion drives creativity. To avoid getting discouraged in the long run or getting lost totally, one must try to narrow down the field he believes his interest lies.
when that is in place, you will be able to create content that will resonate with your audience because you understand who they are and what they really need. Audiences, whoever they are, crave authenticity, relevance and value.
Creating a buyer persona for your business will be useful to discover your target audience behaviors and how best to interact with them.
TIP: It is better to create an imperfect buyer persona than not create one at all.
So, get your niche. It all starts from that single task
2. Learn About Your Industry
To succeed as a content creator goes beyond taking a high-quality picture or editing images on photoshop or Canva. Coming up with quality content that adds value to the user
must be uppermost in your list. You should not publish low quality articles, email copy or infographics that add no value to the user. Digital consumers are wiser now than before and they choose with care who they give their attention and time to online.
Coming up with quality content requires deep work. To stay ahead of others, studying materials that pertain to your industry and scouring the internet for resources, news or industry updates should be taken seriously and done actively. No good thing comes so easy. Aside from any other thing, the exercise will set you up to understand the jargon and latest practices of the industry. With time, you will get comfortable with creating your own content.
Joining various groups on social platforms to network with like minds is encouraged too. Find and follow your industry thought leaders on Linkedin. Learn to participate or engage through comments, questions and posts.
3. Gather Your Tools Together
Content creation is a digital skill that can be done from anywhere. There are many softwares that can be used to craft high quality content. Some are free, most of them are paid. Nevertheless, the tools are :
Canva: FREE & PAID
Canva is a popular digital marketing tool for creating various digital materials. It can serve almost all the needs of a content creator. From creating high-quality graphics content with a simple drag and drop feature. It has thousands of templates for Facebook, Instagram, twitter and blog banners that can be taken and edited to test with a drag and drop feature.
Hashtagify: PAID
This will mostly
benefit twitter users because it allows finding the best hashtags for your
audience reach. It also provides suggestions and better competitor analysis.
Business Suite: FREE
Owned by facebook, Business suite is an online content scheduling software created by facebook for managing instagram and facebook posts all in one place. It has features that allow scheduling, content calendar and content reviewing.
Grammarly: Free And Paid
Grammarly is free cloud-based software that is harnessing the power of natural language processing and machine learning to help people communicate with confidence, and it mostly offers its services in written forms like emails, chat, social media posts, comments, blogs or big projects like book writing or projects like yours.
Grammarly allows you to fix misspelled words and punctuation mistakes.
4. Know Your KPI
As big as the internet is, your content will have a tough time getting recognized if left by itself. This is where the KPI comes into play.
KPI is a key performance indicator that shows how well or poorly your contents are getting. Of course, you can’t keep doing the same thing if you know it doesn’t work. KPI helps you see the problem and then you can go about finding the solution.
Some Key Performance indicators to watch include likes, shares, comments, retweets, etc.
5. Start Writing, Designing, and Keep Practicing
This is the time you get your hands dirty with the actual work. As soon as you start learning about your industry, you should start writing, crafting contents, designing flyers or infographics, creating and editing videos or putting up your own unique content. You will probably not get better if you don’t flex your content creation muscle. Adopting some habits will help you stay on top of your game if you plan to be here for long.
TIP: Your content should
focus entirely on the needs and problems of your reader rather than your interest. Follow the people, give them what they want and need.
6. Network With Other Professionals
This is where you join Linkedin if you are not on Linkedin already. Except you don’t plan to stay in the long run as a content creator. LinkedIn is the largest professional website and has more 500 fortune companies represented than any other platform. As a content creator, you will need to see what others are doing, how it is done and who does it best. Linked is hungry for content creators. Less than 2% of LinkedIn users are content producers, the rest are consuming it. As a content creator, you should utilize the opportunity afforded by Linkedin to both connetc with professionals and seek job opportunities from prospective clients. Using Linkedin to land a job can be easy when you set things right. And it will start with profile optimization. Optimizing your profile page should be done with care.
That is what search reads to understand the services you offer and the field you are knowledgeable about.
In addition, If you don’t market yourself, nobody will do that for you.
Linkedin is perfect just for that. Go on and create a professional profile on LinkedIn if you have not done that already. Optimize your profile page and get started.
Types Of Content To Create
Contents can come in different formats and each form will demand a particular but related skill to be high quality. Websites like Canva.com can be immensely helpful in crafting many of such content. Some content type to produce are:
Social media Posts
Video Content
Infographics Content
E-Books
Newsletter & Email Contents
How-To-Guides
Case Studies
Blog Articles
Visual Content Creation
You can choose to merge more content types together.
Finally, as with most things in life, content creators will require constant learning and adapting to keep up with the trend.