What To Do Starting From 0
How I’d Become A Full-Time Creator As A Noob
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I was a full-time creator for about 5 years. No boss. I made my own hours. Worked whenever I wanted. Sometimes, went whole weeks without doing anything productive. It actually was pretty great.
But it was not easy getting there. It took years of effort and work. At times, it was deeply unhealthy. All things considered, it was still worth it.
Here’s how I would do it again if I was starting from scratch.
Push yourself to try new weird stuff
You never know what’s going to work until you try it. Many creators pick a single platform and double down on it before they have any traction. Big mistake.
You should be playing around with every new platform. TikTok, Substack, Instagram, and anything else.
One of my most lucrative side hustles was an Instagram meme page. Before that point, I didn’t even have Instagram installed on my phone. And before I knew it, Instagram became a consistent source of income.
Believe it or not, it really wasn’t that hard. Once a week, I would spend about an hour finding memes. Then, I would schedule out posts for the rest of the week. The only other part was answering DMs for ads about 30 minutes a day.
It never would’ve happened if I hadn’t randomly tried Instagram.
Pick things based on secondary benefits
The one downside to my Instagram side hustle was that it didn’t come with many secondary benefits. I learned a little about sales and negotiating. But that’s about it.
I learned a heck of a lot more from writing blogs on Medium. Covered all kinds of topics. The thing that stuck? Programming and tech. Little did I know, I would eventually become a technical writer at Edge & Node.
Before you make a commitment to creating content, you should spend some time considering the secondary benefits.
This doesn’t have to necessarily be skills. It can be building relationships, exposure to interesting ideas, and even enjoyment.
If it’s not a huge success it’s a failure
One of the real struggles of constant experimentation is that some will kinda feel like winners. But they’re not.
This has happened to me & every creator. You start a new account. You get the hang of creating content. You spend a few months on it and get to a few thousand followers.
You’re not making money (or hitting any of your other goals) from it but it feels like you’ve got enough traction to not quit.
So, what do you do? You force yourself to keep going. This might go on for months or years even. It’s hell.
If you ever find yourself in this situation, drop it immediately. Delete the account if you have to. This is where people end up losing years of their life on the content hamster wheel.
How can you put this into action?
Set hard deadlines for your goals.
When I started writing articles on Medium, I decided on making $50/month within 6 months was my bare minimum to keep going. If I didn’t get there, I would’ve dropped it.
I barely hit that goal. But ended up CRUSHING it about a year later.
There’s no magic formula for this. I just wouldn’t make the timeline too short. 3 months should be your minimum amount of time. If you can’t bring yourself to keep going for 3 months, you probably shouldn’t start anyway.
DIVERSIFY YOUR INCOME
This one is extremely important and only really applies if you’ve got some traction.
If you’re even close to thinking about going full-time, diversify your income. Think about other ways to make money. Different business models.
Most platforms come with an easy way to automatically make money. Adsense on YouTube for example.
If something like that is your only source of income, then you’re setting yourself up for a disaster.
Think short term for traction, long term for payouts
When you’re just starting out, the only thing you should focus on is getting traction. Views, comments, engagement.
This should be your only priority at first.
But once you cross a certain threshold, things change. You don’t want to maximize getting attention for its own sake.
You should have a larger vision in mind. Ideally, one of the following:
launching your own product
Selling the account
Affiliate sales
Launching a membership program
When I had my YouTube channel, I was in a real dilemma. My niche was really hard to build a product for (horror story fans). Selling books didn’t work. Merch didn’t work.
I really couldn’t think of a way to monetize the audience other than ads.
Instead, I sold it.
That’s actually the best option in a lot of cases. If you can’t build a product for your audience, then the next biggest payout is selling your account.
Unless you absolutely love doing it, this is probably the way to go.
And when it comes to that payout, think long term. How do I go from having a popular social media account to an entire brand? How do I build a huge amount of trust with my audience? What’s a product my audience would love that I can build?
Takeaways
Try new things
Consider secondary benefits
Don’t let lukewarm wins fool you
Diversify your income
Get traction in the short term and payouts in the long term
