Give me something! NOW!!!
Preamble
Recently I have not been giving much to my blogging. I think that the innovations of Instagram and TikTok have meant that I am sharing more on these platforms rather than on my blog.
However, I have decided that blogging is really good for me and it is about time I came back to it. This is not going to be a blog where I am going to cover topics to gain followers or promote anything. I just want to reflect on what is happening in my life and consider strategies to improve myself.
Why would people follow me!
I’ve been watching a lot of YouTube videos about growth recently. I produce my content mainly because I enjoy doing it but I once saw a reel that said the following;
Find a way to make money doing the things you enjoy the most then you will never have to go to work again.
With this in mind and with going part-time with my main job, I am keen to try and make money from the content creation I do. This would not necessarily be due to making ends meet financially but from the point of view that the next step with my content creation is to start looking at collaborations and sponsorships.
In order to achieve the next step, I started to explore ideas about niches. This niche represents my audience and the possible target for my content. The questions I was encouraged to ask myself by ‘itsmodernmillie‘ a wonderful influencer were – Who am I? What do I do? and What is in it for them?
The ‘them’ are my followers or subscribers and this was something that really hit home with me. Much of my content up to this point has been focusing on me. I would write scripts or posts that were linked to spreading the news about me. What are my favourite games? What are my favourite Apps? What is my morning routine? I was seeing the theme over and over again. My focus was not on my audience but on myself.
Now, this is not necessarily a negative thing. I’m sure someone out there would like to know more about me, but to attract new followers and views, it became obvious to me that I needed to change my tact. Instead of the focus being on me, I needed to focus more on the audience and write for them.
Thinking about titles
I have to say at this point, I’m not sure what my niche is or even what I can provide. But from Millie’s videos I mentioned previously, I wanted to try a range of ideas and then see what I naturally fell into.
But rather than putting everything on hold until I had found my niche, I decided to start action straight away. And, the easiest way to do this, was to think about my titles.
In order to demonstrate how I am changing clearer, I am going to provide an example from a video that I recently created and shared. As part of my Gibbering GM series of videos on YouTube, I wanted to talk about the opportunities and encounters that have happened in our RPG campaign as the party travelled to their location. Initially, I was going to create the video just as a recount of what happened and expect people to keep viewing it all the way through. However, with my new mindset in place, I changed my tact.
Rather than just describing what had happened I took what had happened and made these ideas for people to use. I could collate these into overarching titles and then presented them as “5 tips for making your journeys more exciting!” – or something similar.
I realise that this is still not the best title and or thumbnail, but I do think it is a step in the right direction.
What’s in it for them?
So this question is now always in my mind whenever I am making new content across all the platforms. Rather than enjoying what I do and sharing this, I am rebranding it to ensure that there is some worth in watching it.
Now, I ran into an issue with what I actually stream. I am not very knowledgeable about the actual games I play, my strength probably lies more with the technology or the approaches to streaming (a possible niche maybe). But I’m not going to let this change what I enjoy doing. It might be that streaming is purely for enjoyment and people come to watch me for my entertainment value. I’m happy about this and maybe in the future, as I try to learn more about the games I play, I will start to provide more ‘worth’ and/or value.
This change of mindset has really slotted into my content creation so well that I feel that is it the missing piece that I have been looking for for a long while. I’m definitely going to be focusing on it for the next two months and, well, we will see what happens when we view the results.
Outro
These blog posts are not meant to provide worth and/or value apart from demonstrating that when you see all these big content creators, they all started off somewhere and probably did the same journey I am on now.
I’m not sure how frequent these posts will be but I am initially thinking once a month – but let’s see what happens.
Thanks for checking in with me and remember to ‘stay positive’