Does it matter what you write if you want to be a content creator?

It does, but not for the usual reasons.

Content creation is content creation

Everything under the sun and above can become content.

What you fear, what you do, what you agree, what you’re yet to see, sniff, or devour, you can shape all that into some form of content.

Through the written word, authors provide knowledge, support, entertainment, and more for millions of people all over the world.

If you’re good, you’ll deliver experiences.

The objective of creating content is transforming raw information into meaningful emotional bits capable of captivating audiences.

The challenge is in usurping people’s attention span for a few seconds, in order to meaningfully impact the rest of their lives. Or just a few minutes.

For this reason, content creation is easily miscomprehended.

Writers create content, so do Game Developers and YouTubers. Spectacles like concerts, plays, tournaments, can also be considered content as well.

In a broader sense, content creation might just as well be referring to the Entertainment business as a whole. But restricting its scope only to entertainment would leave out a greater purpose.

There are prescribed drugs with side effects, injustices to denounce, misconceptions to clarify, parental advice to share, agendas to fill.

While it starts as a form of entertainment, content creation isn’t limited to causing delight in its witnesses.

Content can be read, heard, watched, touched, smelled. Once assimilated, such experiences can, and should, transform the people you reach.

If you want to create content, you’ll transform your job into researching material for the purposes of delivering value to your audiences in the form of enhanced (curated) experiences.

For starters, what you write should matter to you.

Your own writing should delight you, preferably.

At the very least, writing should matter to you because otherwise, you’ll end up burning out. And you can’t write decent random junks of information once you do.

If what you write matters to you, you’ve already singled yourself among the crowd.

If English is your native language, you’re levels above a good chunk of the world population who doesn’t speak one of the main five.

If you’ve delivered well-thought essays before, you’re reaching a zenith most of your competitors never will. Except for this time, unlike a class or a training group, there’s no one with a rubric elucidating what went wrong with your pieces. The most basic level of neutral judgement you’ll get to come across is your own.

Do you like what you wrote?

If your answer is yes, congratulations. You have a step in.

That’s because your voice already resonates with a dormant audience eager for your work. And an overperforming market ready to receive you.

I’m not saying your writing should matter to you because it’s yours, but if your writing truly matters to you, then that precludes the existence of a captive audience, somewhere out there, willing to listen to you.

Because you are part of them.

With 1 billion English speakers spread around the world, some are bound to find your writing compelling. They are likely to understand the world in a manner similar to yours.

That will make you relatable. Or at the very least, your message will likely resonate with some audiences.

Resonating with your audience

Here lies the issue. It pays to be highly critical of wasted time. Yours, and theirs (your audience).

You can only get so far on your own, underperforming, or info-dumping.

To transcend and make your audiences easier to find you, you need to provide good quality content, regularly.

Not every day, not every time, not even most of the time. Just, regularly.

To accomplish that, research is the first part of the equation.

Never stop learning

Hopefully, you already know your stuff. Kudos if you can amuse yourself in critic. Regrettably, that’s not enough.

Like musicians train their voice, and athletes challenge their bodies, you’ll want to explore and expand your preexistent knowledge so that you can defy your own ideas.

This will allow you to enhance your reader experiences even further. You’ll fuel your imagination, adding more things to say and tools to do so.

Once you start working on a piece of content, research so that you can actually assess if what you wrote is true. Congratulate yourself if you discover you were wrong.

The second part is editing.

Self-edit, re-test your idea, edit and then edit some more.

If I were to show you this blogpost first draft, you’d never want to hear from me again. I know I would.

Editing shows you care.

Because your writing matters to you, you’ll want to make it as polished as you can get.

But at some point, you have to hit that Publish button.

If what you write matters too much, your pieces will never be ready.

The third part is moving toward your next piece

The final part is discovering when to move on.

Sometimes good enough is good enough. And that’s all you can expect from a piece of content.

It matters that your writing delivers what it promised, what’s next after that, is moving to your next work and start anew.

Because content creation is a never-ending series of productions.

They all will matter, some more than others. What you can reasonably do accomplish at each step, is finishing them with a good enough score.