APRIL 19, 2022

Welcome to The Tilt, a twice-weekly newsletter for content entrepreneurs.

In this issue:

Full Tilt: The Habit of Content Creation
Content Entrepreneur: Never Give Up the Blog
Content Inc: What If You Stopped Publishing?

full tilt

How To Make Content Creation a Habit

I published thousands of articles, videos, and podcasts over 10-plus years.

But still, when I don’t do it for a week or longer, restarting my content creation is hard. I feel like a rusty engine. Words don’t come as quickly. The entire process is slower than when I started.

This is why content creation must become a habit – and possibly a daily habit. It should be as normal as waking up. (In other words, if you don’t create, you better be “dead.”)

Atomic Habits by James Clear is an all-time bestseller. He proposes a science-backed approach to building habits – you can apply the strategy to make your content creation efforts automatic and reliable. Here’s how:

Quit setting creation goals: To understand the importance of building a creative habit, ditch the traditional beliefs about goal setting.

Successful and unsuccessful people have the same goals. What makes the former achieve them? The answer is they have systems – a set of actions they commit to regularly repeating (i.e., a habit). As James explains: Systems without goals guarantee progress. Goals without systems can’t guarantee anything.

Think about how that works for your content creation habit. Publishing a video on YouTube every week is a system. Writing 250 words every day is a system. Calling 10 prospects every week is a system.

Reaching 100K subscribers by the end of the year is an outcome, not a system. It doesn’t detail how to achieve that goal. It’s vulnerable to factors outside your control.

How to develop an unstoppable creation habit: Find the right systems for your content business and make them automatic. Progress will be inevitable. A habit is a behavior repeated enough times to become automatic. In other words, your systems must become habits.

James Clear gives four laws to create a new habit and make it stick:

Make it obvious.
Make it attractive.
Make it easy.
Make it satisfying.

Your next step in the content creation habit: Find the easiest way to create content today, tomorrow, and the day after that. It could be committing to writing a few words or spending 15 minutes on a phase of the creative process. Maybe it’s recording a one-minute video. The point is to commit to doing it every day at the same time.

At the end of each week, evaluate how it’s gone and start developing your system to make the content creation habit stick.

– Alberto Cabas Vidani

Get all the details on how to implement James Clear’s four habit-making laws for your content business.

content entrepreneur spotlight

https://www.thetilt.com/content-entrepreneur/kat-kamalani-changes-tilt

Entrepreneur: Ashley Cassidy

Biz: Blonde Collective

Tilt: Fashion, travel, and lifestyle

Primary Channels: Instagram (123K), website

Other Channels: YouTube (1.35K), Pinterest (11.5K), TikTok (2.6K)

Rev Streams: Brand partnerships, affiliate sales, preset sales, Poshmark sales, photo shoots

Our Favorite Actionable Advice:

Commit to your content dream: Ashley Cassidy used her spare time thinking and working on her Blonde Collective content. Eventually, she went full time with it.
Keep your blog: Ashley is growing her audience on social media, but she still continues her blog because it’s the only content platform she controls.
Test and adjust: You don’t know what will work with your audience unless you test it. If it works, adjust your strategy accordingly.

– Sarah Lindenfeld Hall

Read all about Ashley Cassidy and her advice for content entrepreneurs.

Know a content creator who’s going full tilt? DM us. Or email [email protected].

quick talk

Caught on … Twitter

“Figure out if you’re doing YouTube as a hobby or if you want it to be a career.

If you want to post what you want, when you want, it’s a hobby.”

– Roberto Blake (2022 CEX speaker)

things to know

Money

Breakout Tubers: A new global talent show will award $100K to the next breakout gaming creator. The uTure contest is open through May 8. The show begins in June with weekly challenges. (Variety)
Tilt Take: Winning the grand prize is great, but participants should compete for the marketing value alone.
New ad network: Email marketing platform Paved recently launched an ad network to let newsletter creators place the ad unit in their template, and sponsorships will auto-fill with every send. (Product Hunt)
Tilt Take: It can be a helpful tool if you don’t have the resources to sell sponsorships. Just make sure you know the advertisers fit within your content mission, or your audience won’t bite (and may unsubscribe.)

Audiences

No syrup: Using the Waffle House Marketing Strategy (spend zero dollars but locate near a Walmart for a big return), a Twitter creator grew to 435 followers, $500+ a month, and 183K monthly views. Find your Twitter “Walmart,” make value-added comments daily, and track the data for 30 days to see what works. (Jon Brosio; h/t For The Interested)
Tilt Take: Jon goes into a lot more detail. But we love the idea of finding and juxtaposing with your content brand’s “Walmart.”
Relate publicly: Check media outlets or blogs that cover content like yours. Read the writer’s profile. Contact them with a personalized pitch about you. (PR On The Go)
Tilt Take: Don’t just make it about you – connect it to the writer’s audience, too.

Tech and Tools

DEIP dip: Web3 tech like DEIP “eliminate publisher lock-in whereby a centralized entity can hold creators ransom with unfair conditions and make it difficult to take their intellectual property elsewhere.” (Bitcoinist)
Tilt Take: We get it. All those acronyms and jargon can be off-putting. But creators should pay attention to the growing options if they want to sustain a long-term business.
Long and short: Subject lines are designed to get recipients to open the email. Data shows the longer the subject line, the lower the open rate. (Kayleigh Moore [CEX speaker] in Klaviyo; h/t Growth Marketer)
Tilt Take: Check your newsletter open rates to see what your audience prefers. Still not sure? Try A/B testing for long and short.

And Finally

Creator-adjacent: With the growing creator economy comes the growing need for tools to help them create, organize, and operate their businesses. It’s a big, untapped market. (Money Control)
Tilt Take: Yep.
Artists’ take: Many NFTs are created by artists on freelance platforms like Fiverr. Their trick to make money while producing thousands of NFTs? Draw dozens of basic traits (eyes, clothing, hairstyles, etc.) and programmatically combine them into the final art. (Vice)
Tilt Take: It’s a good idea for all creators. What can you create that you could repackage or spin-off into multiple content products?

the business of content

What If You Stopped Publishing? (Content Inc.)
It’s CNN Minus (This Old Marketing)
Small Business Administration Announces New Equity Action Plan (Small Business Trends)
Post-Acquisition Lessons on Time and Energy Management (Hacker Noon)
How To Invest in Startups Through a Roth IRA (Investopedia)

the tilt team

Your team for this issue: Joe Pulizzi, Ann Gynn, Laura Kozak, Marc Maxhimer, and Dave Anthony, with an assist from Angelina Kaminski, Alberto Cabas Vidani, Sarah Lindenfeld Hall, and Don Borger.

Your Rusty Engine – April 19, 2022