The content creation industry is a jungle right now. With over 40 million content creators being professionals or experts, and another 139 million chasing the leading pack, it’s no question that it is a competitive market to thrive in. You are probably looking into how to better yourself as a content creator to surpass your fellow competitors.
A common mistake among dedicated learners is that they focus so much on what they should be doing and ignore the tips that contain what they shouldn’t do.
What you should do as a content creator is to get people’s attention and encourage them to engage with your content. However, it’s what you shouldn’t be doing that has the ability to put people off; thereby causing them to stop midway through your content or never come back after coming across just one of your contents.
We’ll be looking at 5 practices common among content creators that either do no good or have just run out of style in recent years.
Talkytimes is a streaming network where video content creators start their careers in content creation. Nevertheless, these points will be all-encompassing — useful to bloggers, podcasters, and every other content creator out there.
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Not Taking The Time to Create A Brand
A lot of content creators feel like they were born to do this. It comes to them naturally, they don’t struggle with creating the content, and people seem to like the content. What they fail to understand is that talent and content only get you halfway to the top of the industry. What does the rest– is your brand strategy.
Branding is essential for every content creator. It helps define a number of things which include:
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Your identity
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Your niche
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Your target audience
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Your content-type
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Your aim/goal
Though a lot of this is not important to your audience, it is very important to you. Having this information documented will help with your decision-making on things like topics, collaborations, and even the presentation of your content itself.
It’s bad practice to ignore branding. There’s an ease that comes with having a structure and knowing your limits, as well as your do’s and don’ts. Your content will be better for it.
2. Being Anonymous
It’s possible that the mere essence of your brand relies on you being anonymous. In such a case, it’s fine to stay on brand and avoid adding as much personality as possible.
For other brands, the personality factor is very important. Parts of it would have been handled when you make your brand strategy but the other parts deal with who you are and how you handle the job. People are more drawn to humane brands. Having a sense of relation helps to appease the audience (they are human after all).
A habit common majorly among the earlier content creators was to keep their personal life off their content, trying to only deliver content without giving as much information about themselves as possible. This practice has grown to die out. Content creation is a personal activity, you have to show parts of yourself, through stories, comments, and activities.
3. Having Little to No Visual Inputs
There are many ways to present your content. Bloggers and copywriters use text; podcasters use audio; some other creators use Infographics and pictures, and the choice for many other content creators like the streamers on Talkytimes is video. Not to undermine the power of text, but viewers retain more information when they watch content than when they read it, with this likelihood being 9 times more for visual content.
Visual content will, somewhat, be an area of expertise when it comes to the Talkytimes platform. The video content creators on the platform work to perfect their craft and present enjoyable content for the audience. There’s much more attention and engagement from the audience when they are streaming content live as opposed to the easily paused and replayed videos saved on their phones.
Visuals make your content more attractive and call attention to it better. A normal amount of visuals is needed in every content. You can enhance the non-visual content with some complementary visuals. Adding pictures to blog posts or having descriptive infographics for your podcasts are little ways you can be intentional about your work. Try not to leave it plain!
4. Following Trends
This is one for the “do less” category and not one to totally stop doing. Trends are great, there’s always something new every week. You can be certain that a good number of people are consciously looking out for content that involves trending topics, and this makes it a good opportunity to take advantage of.
But, what’s the downside?
Trending topics are so magnetic and certain that you could live off them as a content creator and still do amazingly well. The downside, however, is that if you live off trending topics long enough, people would begin to question your creativity– and if there’s one thing you don’t want your audience to have doubts about, it’s your creativity.
In simple terms, learn to reduce your dependency on trends for inspiration. Come up with your ideas and create great content with them. Once in a while, you could throw in trending topics that are doing really well.
5. Not Putting Enough Effort Into Titles and Introduction
Chances are that if the topic of this article stated “What Talkytimes has to say about 2022” you wouldn’t go through it. That’s the same way a lot of the audience makes decisions regarding your work.
“You don’t judge a book by its cover” but the truth is that a lot of people still do. And what is the cover of your content? It’s the title and introduction.
Failing to put in the work to make your content titles and introductions appealing will reduce the likelihood of engagements you could receive. Your perfect content could be ignored all because the title isn’t appealing.
Optimizing your introductory elements is one of the best practices in content creation and you can achieve this by:
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Copywriting
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Keyword insertion
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Keeping it brief and understandable
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Adding relatable examples etc.
