📝 Start content creation

If you love writing or want to get into the world of content creation, then I hope this article will be highly beneficial.

Shot on Canon 600D

🏁 Why did I start a blog?

I consume a lot of content - on YT, Spotify podcasts, blogs, and newsletters and also follow a lot of micro-blogs on Twitter. And most content creators insist on making an online presence and why each and everyone should try to brand themselves. Apparently, I kept on watching these, hearing them for years and then I realised if I am going to consume this content I will be forever a consumer and not a producer of content. That hit like a ton of bricks and eventually forced me to buy a domain and start writing blogs. In fact, consumption enhances creation, which is why restaurateur (who owns and manages a restaurant) travel to dine at the world's best restaurants and serious painters do a tour in Paris or New York.

🏎️ Speed Vs Perfection

Many of my friends have always wanted to write online but there is always hesitation about whether they would do justice to their blogs or if they would be catchy for their readers/audience. There is always a trade-off between Speed vs Perfection. If you ask me, I will always pick speed over perfection.

Why is that? If you pick speed, you can re-iterate your work as many times as you can. True that your 1st draft would be the worst work that you have done but at least you would have started. But if you pick perfection, you would be always in the gratification of perfection. You would be in the pursuit of perfection and you would be in the same stage as day 1.

BUILD FAST, FAIL FAST ! - This is a recurring cycle.

This is what US businesses in fact provide which other countries couldn’t. They allow businesses to scale up faster with no strings attached. For example, Slack (the prof communication app) was supposed to be a metaverse gaming app but it failed so fast and that they had this communication protocol which the community of developers in their firm used to communicate the project updates which they decided to build this app, re-iterate it and market it which eventually became slack. They had the ability to fail with no strings attached and experiment with things.

Perfection is a distraction—another shiny object taking your attention away from your real priorities.

- From the book Make Time

The startup world has this concept of 'Minimum Viable Product' (MVP). What’s the most basic (yet functional) version of your product that you can create and test out? This lets you get real-world feedback faster, and stop being a perfectionist (it’s just a crappy first draft after all). You also get momentum from actually doing something tangible. Sure you'll make mistakes. But that'll accelerate your progress more than just tweaking your master plan and making no mistakes at all.

Minimum Viable Product

🤢 Bitter Truth

The truth about content creation is that it is impossible to create perfect posts in the beginning.

Because content creation is a skill and like any skill, it takes practice to develop. As I said before, I was consuming a lot of content and never really created one. Sure, you can read and consume a lot of content but until you put that into practice, it won’t help. Your first 50 posts will be bad but without them, you wouldn't have that 1 great one.

“If you want to make great content, you have to make bad content first”

🏋🏽 Personal Branding

I love to brand myself aka Personal Branding but I know it's gonna be a very long game. Finding a very niche audience but also sustainable for me is a herculean task. Sometimes you'll find something that works for your audience but not for yourself. And sometimes it'll be the other way round.

Here are some tips to create a personal brand.

• If you are introverted, don't post selfies. Don't show your face in videos. I know I am a super introvert. That's why I have been writing online instead of video content creation. (Trivia: Jason Chin made $200K with his personal brand on Twitter at 20 years old, and no one even knows what he looks like)

• Choose a medium that fits you but there's one for everyone. YouTube is great for extroverts. Instagram and TikTok are great for people that love rapid engagement. Facebook is to grow your audience in European nations. LinkedIn and Twitter are great for writers.

Hey! by the way, I have recently been writing on LinkedIn (Please do check it out here). And why am I doing this? I know I can explain blockchain or recommend a stock in a very long article which can be boring and

• I always wanted to create value for my audience and also

• Wanted to master the art of short-form content. People are so tired of consuming long content and they want everything to be done in less than a Maggi cooking time (like everything 😛).

So, I really wanted to explain things in 2 lines so that I can evolve as a better content creator. Twitter is another super place to grow your audience if you are great with short-form content creation. Youtube shorts is now an emerging trend. Check out where one of my favourite YouTubers Johnny Harris explains inflation is just 60 sec.

If you are excited after reading this and want to start your own, I have already explained how you can write online in one of my previous articles.