Become a More Effective Content Creator 📬

Top 3 highlights from my interview with Dan Hunter (DKH) - who writes some of the most informative and actionable content to help creators get their message heard!

Hi everyone - creating content is hard. Getting people to notice your content is harder. Having people meaningfully engage with you after reading/watching your content…well, fuhgeddaboudit!

Despite the difficulty, content creation is something many of us actively participate in. Like many artistic and creative pursuits, it can be a very rewarding activity! Also like many artistic and creative pursuits, there are behaviors and patterns we can use that will help us be more effective. To dive into what some of them are as it relates to content creation, I had a great chat with Dan Hunter, one of the best educators on this topic:

I always end up learning a ton through these conversations, and below are the Top 3 things I learned along with a link (👉) to the point in the interview where we discuss this.

🚂 1. Play the long game. It is about the journey! (👉 12:10)
Content creation is no different than any activity that we want to be good and successful at. It takes time. It takes practice. There are no shortcuts, as nicely illustrated by Ash Lamb:

With content creation, it is tempting to focus on quick wins. A better path is to focus on the things we can control - the quality of the content, learning new things, experimenting with different content types, developing a consistent process, and more. These activities will create a sustainable foundation that, over the long run, has a greater chance of helping us become more successful.

🧠 2. Content creation is a great way to retain information (👉 8:24)
If you are on the fence about creating and sharing content, here is a motivation that may help: one of the best ways to retain knowledge is to share or teach what you just learned with others (source):

Related to the earlier point, sharing content so that you can better retain knowledge can be a core part of building a long-term foundation. It is a desirable intrinsic motivator.

🧮 3. Be data-driven and focus on meaningful metrics (👉 37:50)
A recurring theme in much of Dan’s content revolves around the importance of using data to help us make better content decisions. This doesn’t mean all data is equal. Examples of meaningful metrics that signal quality are followers, direct messages, and comments. Less meaningful metrics may be the number of likes and retweets.

As we focus on the long game, it is important to identify the meaningful metrics for you and how to improve them. Unless, of course, you are MrBeast and all of your metrics are consistently sky high:

In all seriousness, MrBeast is a great example of a content creator who played (and continues to play) the long game.

Till Next Time

I hope you all enjoyed a TL;DR highlight reel of my interview with Dan. These interviews are available on a bunch more platforms beyond just YouTube, so check this interview out on Spotify Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Anchor, or Google Podcasts if that is your preferred platform for listening/watching content like this.

You can discuss this interview further by posting on the forums or just Tweeting at me. If you have suggestions for talented creative people I should chat with in the future, please do let me know as well.

Cheers,
Kirupa 😀

---