When You’re a New Creator, Everything Sucks (Until It Doesn’t)
To get through it, say these three words in your mind — “I don’t care.”
“Another unsubscribe? An unfollow too? Oh no. They don’t like my content. I should switch it to something else. Maybe it’s the time of day? I should switch the time of day. Should I turn it into stories instead of lists? Ugh!”
If you’ve ever looked at your stats and thought these things, let me tell you some good news.
Your unsubscribes don’t matter right now. Your follower count doesn’t matter. Your likes don’t matter.
What matters right now is practice, practice, practice.
Every time you have a thought in your mind that you’re not doing this right, or if you even *think* about quitting, say in your mind, “I don’t care.”
“I don’t care if my stats are low right now. I’m going to keep going. I don’t care if no one is reading my stuff. I’m going to keep practicing until they do. I don’t care if this article flopped. I’m going to get better until everyone is reading my stuff.”
Here are 3 tips to help you stay the course as a new content creator and get through the sucky parts.
1. Create goals & stay consistent
Create some goals for yourself and stick to them. This will put you in the habit of creating content on a consistent basis.
(Here are my November Medium and X/Twitter goals, for reference. I also have a goal to send out a newsletter every weekday.)
When you create content consistently, people will begin to expect your content. They will seek it out.
One of my favorite content creators is a slot YouTuber (yea, that’s a thing), VegasLowRoller (Daniel). Daniel posts two new videos every day, one at 12 pm, and one at 4 pm.
Because he’s consistent and I know his schedule, I know exactly when to look for his videos. This is how you want to be with your future audience.
2. Create, create, create
If you don’t have many followers, that’s a good thing (for now)! You probably need more practice, and when you come back in a year and look at the content you created, you’re going to think it’s cringe. You’ll be thankful more people didn’t read it.
It’s just how it goes! Everyone goes through that stage because everyone is new at one point. So don’t worry about how many people are (or aren’t) looking at your content.
Keep creating. Because here’s what’s going to happen when you do:
- you’ll get better
- you’ll start to get signals from readers about what they like
- you’ll figure out what you like to write about
You’ll hear this advice often:
Pick a niche. The riches are in the niches.
You do want to settle on talking to a specific audience at some point, but you probably don’t know who that is yet.
Don’t worry about it. Keep writing until you find each other!
3. Iterate & improve
Once you get a few people reading your work, now’s the time to take a peek at your stats. Does anything stand out? If not, it’s OK. You probably don’t have enough information yet.
Keep getting content out there. Test the waters.
Eventually, see if there’s something that hits these 2 targets:
- it’s resonating with your readers
- you’re enjoying writing about it
#2 is just as important as #1 because if you’re not enjoying writing about it, you’ll never stick with it, and you’ll be back to square one.
Back in the Stone Ages when I first started out in affiliate marketing, I tried writing about things like watches and cameras. I knew those items would make me dollar, dollar bills, yo.
The problem?
I don’t care about watches.
I don’t care about cameras.
I couldn’t sustain writing about those things, and I had zero interest in learning enough about them to sound intelligent. That’s a surefire way to make no dollar bills, yo.
One of my other favorite slot YouTubers (I swear…it’s not only a thing, it’s a BIG thing on YouTube), Vegas Matt, said something in a podcast recently that I’ve now adopted as my motto:
“If it’s not fun, I’m not doing it!”
Save yourself the time and trouble of picking topics you already know you don’t like. If you’re not sure, go back to tip #2 and keep creating. You’ll figure out what’s fun to write about.
Final Thoughts
Ignore your stats (for now). You’ll need those later, but for now, concentrate on these three things:
- Creating goals and staying consistent with them
- Creating more and more content (putting in the reps, as the cool kids say) so you can improve
- Iterating and improving once you know what readers want and what you like to write about
And remember that everyone starts exactly where you are. Everyone sucks until they don’t.
About the Author
Hey! I’m Christina. I’m a married mom to two teenagers (and 3 cats and a dog). I love Vegas 🎰, hard rock music 🤘, and murder mysteries 📖.
I also love creating quick, easy-to-digest newsletters to help you find simple side income ideas online that won’t take over your life. 👈 Click that astonishingly long link to sign up for free.
