Wanna be a “Content Creator”?

How to become a Content Creator?

Could I be a Content Creator?

These days, when I visit friends’ pages on Facebook, and on other platforms, a huge percentage of the people list their occupation as “Content Creator.” It would be my expectation that few of these people are content creators, and few of them make any money even if they are truly creating content. The vast majority, I believe, are content creator “wannabes”.

How much money do Content Creators Earn?

Well, the vast majority of those who classify themselves as Content Creators don’t earn any money at all. To earn money you need a huge following, and provide them with consistent content. It has to be content that draws the same viewer back time and time again, and also building more and more viewers.

Sometimes I think of becoming a Content Creator

Sometimes the thought will come to me that I should become a Content Creator… but within a few minutes I realize that for the time I lived in the Philippines I was a full time Content Creator, and made a great living doing it.

These days, from what I see, the majority of people who classify themselves as Content Creators make these types of content:

• YouTube Videos or YouTube Shorts
• Facebook Reels
• Instagram Reels
• TikTok

There are many other ways to make money as a Content Creator, but from what I see online these are the platforms that most people use in an attempt to monetize the content that they create.

How did I make Money as a Content Creator?

As I said previously, it seems like most people these days make content that is video based, mostly short videos. Although I did make some video content, or at least tried to do so, the vast majority of the income I earned from content was earned by writing. As I said, I tried to earn money from video content, but was not very successful at that niche. I believe that is due to the fact that video content (even YouTube) was not overly popular 15 or 20 years ago. Many people did not have enough bandwidth back in those days to be able to play video over the Internet, the written word was king back in those days.

Some methods I used to earn from my content:

• I had one blog that published content daily and had about 20,000 readers per day
• I had about a half dozen other blogs that published articles about niche topics that interested me
• I had over over 75 blogs that published news from around the Philippines
• I wrote more than 200 books
• I used my content to enable a consulting business
• I used my content to start a gift delivery business in the Philippines

What was my One Blog?

When I listed my methods of content creation above, my 1st item was that I published written content on one blog that had about 20,000 daily readers. This Blog/Website was Live in the Philippines (I’ll call it “LiP”). This site was all about how I moved to live in the Philippines and how others could successfully do it as well. There are a lot of ins and outs, and a lot of bureaucracy that you have to navigate to do anything in the Philippines (although it has improved a lot over the years). Because I had navigated the ins and outs of making a move to the Philippines and was having a successful life in the Philippines, I could show others how to do it. I could share my successes and my failures.

I started this site as the sole writer, and it did moderately well. After a year or so, I recruited about 5 or 6 other people to write on the site (including my wife, Feyma). When I added more writers the site really took off, we published at least one article every day, usually with a different writer each day of the week (except that I personally did an article on the site every day).

I will be publishing an article soon with more about the workings of LiP and how it earned an income.

My other personal Blogs

I had other blogs in addition to LiP. Some of them include:

• Ways to Make a Living
• Habits for Smart People
• 430 To Fit
• Bisaya Buddy
• Tagalog Buddy

Each of these websites earned an income just from writing about topics that I had an interest in.

What about those 75 other blogs?

I said that I earned income from about 75 other blogs, what were they all about?

I had a blog for every province in the Philippines (I just looked it up, there are 82 Provinces in the Philippines today). I hired a staff who worked for me in my gift delivery business, and during they times they were not busy, they would write articles giving the news in each of the provinces around the Philippines. We used a governmental news agency website to write the news articles, and would then link back to the governmental site for the “rest of the story.” These blogs became very popular, to the point that eventually, the Provincial Information Offices in many provinces would directly send us articles about news in their specific areas. We had exclusive rights to these articles and could simply post them with no re-writing involved.

I wrote 200 books?

Indeed, I did write more than 200 books on various topics. For the content on some of the books, I would take content from blog articles that I had written and combine 20 or 30 blog articles on the same or similar topics into a single book.

I sold these books (and am still selling these books) in two formats, both paperback and e-books. I had one book in particular (not from blog articles) that was very popular, 49 Ways to Make a Living, and I published new editions of this book every few years. This book is more or less about ways that you can make a living through both online and offline methods.

Consulting

I have had a thriving consulting business over the years, and it gets it’s start from creating content on the Internet. When I would write articles online, or write books, many times people would want to take a deeper dive into the topic that I wrote about. These people would be able to hire me to consult with them about the topic. This was, and still is to an extent, a good business for me.

I am a Content Creator

So, even though from time to time I feel I should get in to Creating Content, I am already a Content Creator, and over the past 20 years I have created a ton of content, and I still receive income from most of the content I have created over the years. I am proud of the content creation I have done. As I have thought about this topic for a while, I have become determined to again become active in creating content rather than just relying on income I received from past efforts in creating content.

Over the next weeks I will be writing more articles about some of the content I have written, and how that content earned money for me over the years. I hope you’ll follow along.