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Pulling Back the Curtains
As of 2024, the global creator economy is currently worth $156.37 billion US dollars. This is a huge, huge industry.
It is competitive, but it is growing at such a fast rate at over 22% year over year, which means there’s definitely room for you in the industry, if you want to get a slice of that pie.
In this episode, I’m going to paint a full picture of this ecosystem, what being a content creator entails, what the quote unquote job description is like, what your life will be like.
I’m going to be speaking on this from immersing myself in the industry, knowing a lot of famous and successful content creators, seeing behind the scenes of how they run their businesses, and also my personal experience with the whole content creation industry.
Although I’m going to add in a little disclaimer here. I wouldn’t call myself a full-time content creator at this point in my business anymore (here you can listen in to the full story of how I transitions from travel influencer to business coach).
There are many other streams of income in my business personally outside of content creation, but I will dive into all of this later in this episode.
Full-Time Content Creation
I want to first paint the picture of being a full-time content creator.
What this means is that the majority of your income is coming from a social media platform paying you for views and the byproducts of that, which means because you probably will have a lot of followers and engaged audience, brands and businesses within your reach are going to pay you to create content to share with your audience that drives traffic to their product.
Essentially, you are creating an advertisement for those brands on your own channel.
Think of it as your own TV network or TV channel depending on what your content and what your niche is about.
You can also monetize through paid press trips where countries, tourism boards or different hotels or travel brands will invite you to stay or experience whatever they have to offer so that you can share it with your audience.
Full-time, content creators. In order to make this sustainable, you need to spend the majority of your time creating content that your audience will consume.
If you are just creating content for your closest friends or your family documenting what you see on vacation, you don’t know that that’s what your audience wants to see, right? You’re kind of doing it for yourself.
The same thing with content creation on a blog. You’re not just writing for your parents, you’re writing for the world. You want to write about what other people are Googling or what are they searching for.
The same thing on social media. You’re not creating for yourself. You’re creating for your growing audience.
This is especially important, if you are traveling.
Often what I’ve noticed on certain platforms like TikTok is that your location matters. Your location determines who sees your videos because it’s not always going to be people who are following you.
The main thing to keep in mind is you want to be creating for your audience. When I was in Brazil, I noticed that lots of my new followers were Brazilian, and so I would talk about topics that were around my experience in Brazil.
Same thing when I am in Southeast Asia, the content is going to be different if I am focusing on the content creation side and monetizing that side of my online business.
The reality of this whole industry is that unless you go viral, which is easier to do on certain platforms than others, and we’ll go into that in a bit, unless you go viral, it might take years for you to see any traction or make any money from the income streams that I’ve listed.
From the social media app itself, from sponsorships, paid press trips, paid campaigns, it might take years for you to grow your audience to a size where you’re noticed (I have a blog with tips here). This is the rule, not the exception.
However, there are always exceptions, right? So if this is something that you are willing to take on, if content creation is something that you want to dedicate the next year or few years to if recording videos or writing or whatever form of content you wanna dedicate yourself to, if you’re happy doing that, creating content from your day and filming and sharing and editing, if that is what you want to dive into, then this is going to be for you.
But if you’re just doing it for the money to see that instant success, that might not be the best to start with because if you don’t see that traction you’re looking for, after a few months, you are more likely to give up or burn out.
Choose Your Platform
The platforms for fastest growth, in my opinion in 2024 are TikTok, Instagram and YouTube in terms of getting paid by these platforms.
I do want to let you know that if you choose Instagram, Instagram doesn’t pay you per view.
It might give you some bonuses that they have a few times of the year, and they may pay you a few hundred dollars per reel, but it’s not consistent and it doesn’t have the payment structure of pay per view.
If you choose YouTube or TikTok, they pay you per engaged view. So the more viewers that view your content, the more you get paid.
This is why creators on YouTube or TikTok tend to make a lot more than creators on Instagram. That is something I would keep in mind from the beginning.
If you do want to make money from the app itself and just get paid per video view, choose TikTok or YouTube over Instagram.
All of these platforms are video based, which means that if you wanna dedicate yourself to growth on these platforms, you need to learn how to take videos.
You need to start taking videos, and you need to learn how to edit and share the videos in a way that audience members and new audience members will want to consume and follow.
So the first step of choosing your platform with TikTok all vertical with Instagram, you want to be focused on Instagram reels. Those are also vertical videos.
If you share static photos or carousels on Instagram, it doesn’t reach new people who aren’t already following you. You have to optimize for Instagram reels, especially if you’re starting from scratch with YouTube.
YouTube, you film horizontally. So depending on what type of content you plan to share, this might be better. You might do screen shares or you might do walkthroughs or maybe your videos are more cinematic.
Whatever it is, choose the platform that is most suited to what your niche is.
Define Your Niche
If you want to just start vlogging your day-to-day life, which one of these platforms is going to be the most sustainable for you to create?
On which niche do you already have maybe some kind of expertise or authority on already?
Which niche is going to be easiest for you to create consistent content for?
Because once you become a content creator, you need to start documenting. You need to start getting comfortable with filming yourself maybe out in public or setting up your phone in front of you when you’re having a meal.
The ecosystem of being a creator means that you’re creating content from your day to day-to-day life.
And so if you don’t want all of your life on YouTube or you’re filming all the time, and most videos are 10 to 20 to 30 minutes.
Maybe think of something shorter where it’s less commitment, where you just need to create 15 second reels or six second Tiktoks, right? Think about that when choosing your platform and choosing your niche.
Create Quality Content
The next step to make sure you are doing this right from the beginning is to create quality content.
We don’t want to just half-ass the videos we took years ago, put it all together and share it thinking that it’s going to grow our audience.
We want to invest our time, our energy, our money into learning how to create quality content.
How do we become better videographers, better content creators? How are we looking to improve and make this our professional full-time career?
If we could just share videos that we took years ago thinking that it’s gonna work that way, then most people can be content creators and most people aren’t.
Which brings me to my next point is to create what people want to watch.
Your videos can be very simple. It doesn’t have to have fancy editing or effects, but it has to be digestible, catchy, and consumable.
What I notice on certain platforms, the more you study other viral content creators videos, you’ll notice that they either hook you in the beginning with a catchy headline or they edit their videos so that each clip transitions very quickly and very smoothly.
You don’t want to see the cuts very obviously, but people also don’t have 30 or 40 seconds to spend on one TikTok video or one Instagram reel.
So there is an art to creating content that people are going to want to digest, which brings me to my next tip, which is consistency is key.
If you are monetizing from purely content creation, you are going to make money per video, and the older videos aren’t going to make you as much money as the newer videos because the newer videos are going to be seen more.
So you want to be consistent.
Your income kind of depends on new content being created, which now leads me to things to kind of keep an eye out for and almost like beware with this industry is you don’t want to burn out with certain types of vlogging or with certain types of platforms.
It’s really easy to get sucked into the content creation hamster wheel.
What I’ve seen a handful of really, really amazing creators go through is burnout because they feel like they can’t take a break or they can’t stop documenting their life because their income relies on it.
Another few people that I know, they burned out because of all of the trolls on the social media platforms. They let comments and strangers comments get to their head and it really affected them mentally.
So if you keep an eye out for these things that could happen on this trajectory, I think you will be very well equipped to handle them when they arise. It’s also a sign that you are doing it right, like you are reaching a level where all of these new problems are coming into play.
The last thing I want to leave you guys all on, if you are thinking about entering the content creation industry, it’s what I recommend in all of my programs is that if you couple content creation with your own products and services and not have to rely on only content creation and income from the social media platforms, you will make a lot more money and you will especially make a lot more money in the beginning stages where you don’t have a large audience yet.
So it’s not like you have to choose whether to focus on growing your audience or monetizing. You can do both. You can have multiple streams of income.
If you’re thinking about starting. Just start. Done is better than perfect and it is never too late. if you have any questions about this, feel free to reach out in my DMs on Instagram and I will see you guys in the next episode.
Have an amazing week my loves!
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