Approx.90% of b2b professionals are using content marketing as an important part of their marketing strategy. Therefore, content creators need to create top-notch, valuable, and compelling content.
Have you ever thought about what it takes to become a successful content creator?
Becoming a successful content creator starts even from hitting your fingers on the keyboard. Whether you are working as an individual content creator or with a whole team, you must know the habits of highly successful content creators.
Content Creator
A content creator is a professional who creates and provides engaging and top-notch content for different channels. Content creators usually create educational or entertaining content that caters to your target audience’s challenges, needs, and interests.
Common digital channels include social media, websites, eBooks, etc. That targets a specific audience or users. Professional content creators usually create different types of materials, such as:
· News reports
· Images
· Videos
· Infographics
· Blog posts, etc.
With people spending more time online, the importance of content creators has never been greater.
As individual content creators are growing tremendously at present, therefore, it’s important to learn habits of highly successful content creators. This will certainly help you stand out among others and do better business in this regard.
Habits of successful content creators
Everyone can become a successful content creator if they adopt highly successful content creator habits. Good habits can make a huge difference between struggling to meet audience expectations or achieving goals and maintaining work-life balance successfully.
Procrastination is the worst thing to do regularly, particularly when striving to meet deadlines. However, making small changes in your routine and developing good habits can make a remarkable difference.
Here we have listed common habits of successful content creators you must know. Adopting these habits will help you to achieve success in your career.
Top Habits of a Highly Productive Content Creators
1. Establish your own voice
Quick reality check: You’re not the only content creator in your industry. That means you’re not the only one offering the advice, observations, and thought leadership your industry is asking for.
There are lots of things you can do to stand out from the other content creators in your field: diversifying into a new content medium, promoting your content on different channels, and naturally gaining experience and trust over time.
But even then, the content producers with whom you’re competing for attention are doing the same thing. What you can bring to your content, that nobody else can, is your own personal voice.
Readers click on your content for the information, but they come back for the personality. Writing about cybersecurity? Don’t just offer fresh insight on today’s malware; offer analogies and personal stories of data breaches that justify your insights and that only you can offer.
The brand you write for might restrict you from opinionated or overly informal content, but that doesn’t mean you can’t indulge in the unique perspective that inspired you to join this business in the first place.
Learn how to blend your employer’s content guidelines with your own creativity, and you’ll become a much more valuable content creator in the long run.
2. Stay updated with the latest industry news
Read industry news regularly. It is because incoming knowledge always fuels up your creativity. Reading industry articles and the latest news will help you stay updated with the current market trends.
Getting all kinds of information can help you set yourself up to understand the context behind something that happened in the industry. Consequently, you can utilize your content to shape the mindset of your audience accordingly.
Creating great content that really resonates with your target audience requires you to know what’s going on in your industry. And the best content creators scour — not just read, but scour — the internet for industry news and trends.
This sets them up nicely to understand the context behind what’s happened historically in their industry and how that shapes their target audience’s mindset in the present.
Get in the habit of reading by putting everything you read in one place. You can set up an RSS feed with an app like Feedly for blogs you know that contain relevant industry news.
Also, ask a few colleagues what they’re reading these days and follow suit. Discover where your buyer persona spends time online and snag those blogs, too. Ahead of the game and have a few favorites already?
3. Time management skills
Mastering time management is key to becoming a successful content creator. You can’t be a great content creator without a healthy respect for your deadlines.
Learn to prioritize your content assignments and start working on them accordingly. Plan a proper routine and utilize your time in balance for both writing and researching.
This will help you improve your content quality and meet the expectations of your audience in the best possible way.
4. Study industry audience before creating content
You can’t direct your content without feedback. To get feedback from your audience, it’s important to research and understand your audience. See what others are doing in your niche to determine the type of content your audience wants.
Most importantly, different tools are available in the industry that helps in collecting audience data from different channels. Utilize these tools to get the right help understanding the type of content and voice your audience loves.
The third quality of all successful content creators: They know their audience inside and out. Examine your own readers and viewers: What do they want that you’re not yet giving them?
What problems do they have that you can solve for them? Here are some other characteristics of your audience you can identify for yourself or for your employer:
- Age
- Gender
- Location
- Family size
- Job title
- Salary
5. Create content regularly
Successful content creators flex their content-creating muscles regularly. Creating content daily helps them to work through different content ideas. Successful content creators know this practice would help them bring something inspiring out of their writing.
If you don’t use it, you lose it. Successful content creators understand the importance of constantly flexing their writing muscles.
Doing so helps them work through ideas that might be jumbled in their head and identify nuggets that could turn into fully realized ideas later. Successful content creators may not always be inspired to write, but they know something inspiring can come from their writing.
Get in the habit of writing by doing it daily or every other day. Figure out when your mind is the clearest — for most people, that’s after or during a cup of coffee — and just free-form write.
What did you read yesterday that stuck with you? What didn’t you understand? Asking yourself those questions should start the flow. Getting into the habit of writing daily can also free up your mind from different ideas and help you to generate and work on new ones over time.
6. Create but curate too
Becoming a successful content creator isn’t entirely about creating content without knowing whether it’s working or not. A great content creator also monitors what’s working well to select the best content only for his audience.
There’s no shortage of people curating content these days. In fact, anyone on the internet can take someone else’s content and retweet it, share it on Facebook, pin it — the list goes on.
But successful content creators know it’s not enough to take relevant industry news and spit it back out to your fans and followers.
“You must also position yourself as an expert and genuinely interact with your communities,” says Guy Kawasaki, the New York Times best-selling author. Sharing content isn’t enough. Engaging with the content you’re sharing now makes it unique to you.
Get in the habit of curating content when you have something valuable to add. Now that you’ve started scouring the internet on a regular basis for industry news, you probably have a wider depth of knowledge than you think.
So be confident, and give your readers additional, useful information or even a thought or opinion when sharing others’ content. Your networks will appreciate it, and the author probably will too (or it could at least spark a debate — bonus!).
Creating and curating are imperative parts of developing and maintaining a successful relationship with your audience. For this, you must:
· Research the content that your competitors are producing.
· Identify the desires and needs of your potential audience
· Create a calendar for content curation.
7. Network effectively
Even if it feels challenging, networking is important for growing as a content creator. Whether interacting with people online or offline, it’s always important to network effectively.
Help others and ask them to promote your content on different channels. Focus on creating a quality relationship in your industry. This will make improve your content sharing dramatically.
8. Understands their key performance indicators
Everyone works to get appreciation and be discovered by their potential audience. At present, the internet has become highly noisy.
Therefore, simply posting your content doesn’t mean you will automatically start getting a quality audience. So, whenever you share your content on any channel, keep track of its performance.
Arguably the outcome is majorly based on how you promote your content. However, setting your KPIs to judge its performance will certainly benefit you here.
A KPI is a specific metric you’ve chosen to measure how well your content is doing against your expectations. Modern KPIs include:
- Social media traffic, the number of visitors that come to your content from a social media post.
- Direct traffic, the number of visitors that come to your content by entering your website’s URL directly into their browser’s address bar.
- Organic traffic, the number of visitors that come to your content from a search engine result link.
- Submissions, the number of people who visit your website and leave having submitted their contact information in exchange for a resource you offered them (a form of lead generation).
If you or your employer chooses to focus on organic traffic, for example, it’s a good idea to study Google’s search algorithm to find out how it ranks content.
Then, optimize your content so that it performs well under the organic traffic KPI. The more knowledge you have of the KPIs available to content creators now, the more successful you’ll be as a marketer.
9. Focus on the end goal
Setting a goal and reaching that is important to becoming a successful content creator. Without any specific goal, you will struggle to follow a certain direction in content creation. Having a goal and focusing on that help serve as a motivator for content creators.
Focusing on the end goal will direct your content creation efforts to bring the goal closer. This will help you choose the right content ideas and create a successful content calendar.
10. Strategize well
If you are working with a marketing team, meeting them regularly is always important. It will pay off in your content results better. However, if you are working individually, evaluate your content plan regularly.
Create a documented mission statement and content marketing campaign. Evaluate your progress and see how your efforts match your documented plan.
11. Offer solutions, not just commentary
When you’re just getting started as a content creator, you might already have the knowledge your market is looking for. For successful content creators, however, expertise isn’t everything.
Want your audience to remember your content? Don’t just recite the things you know — explain why they’re important and what your audience can take away from it. The people consuming your content aren’t interested in just hearing you talk.
They come looking to satisfy specific needs. Whether those needs are to solve a problem to simply increase their confidence in your industry, it’s your job to put your market observations into terms they can understand and find lessons in.
12. Stay curious
Curiosity is highly important to becoming a successful content creator. Being curious to learn more about things can help create exceptional content.
Spending more time researching content-worthy topics can help you stand out among others. Thorough research can always help you create catchy content titles and an entire story.
Here are some key steps that can help underpin your creative ideas:
· Adding a source for brain ideas is essential for your content creation process. You can work with some media monitoring tools to keep checking on industry-relevant news. Adding stats and data-driven facts to your content will make it more valuable.
· Only the sky is the limit here when it’s about content creation. It is always interesting to work on different content types to use your content across multiple platforms. However, when starting in the world of content creation, it’s better to choose two mediums and focus on creating a loyal audience through your content.
· Use reviews, surveys and social media networks as these are goldmines of content ideas and feedback.
