Getting Started as a Content Creator & Quora’s New Monetization – The InTakeCreate Podcast

This week, Anthony discusses the methods and mindset they use to get started as a content creator. It’s important to get off on the right foot as a creator in order to avoid bad habits that lead to burn out in the future.

Getting started as a content creator is daunting, and most of us can overthink the entire thing. Even worse, we can talk ourselves out of getting started as a content creator at all.

Thankfully, there are some benefits to being small content creator. Many of which we don’t take advantage of enough. In the first half of this episode, Anthony runs through those.

In the second half, they talk about the new changes to Quora’s Monetization. With the introduction of Quora+ and Quora Spaces – there is a lot of opportunity starting to pop up for online writers.

Watch on YouTube

Comment below, or tag us on Twitter – Share your favourite part of getting started as a content creator!

Want to listen to the previous episode? “Time Management for Busy Creators”

Transcript

Welcome to the InTakeCreate Podcast. A podcast from InTakeCreate.com helping you, create better content and create a better life. 

Last time we showed up in your feed, we were talking about time management for busy creators and how to actually build creativity into your schedule. This time, it’s more about how to get started as a content creator.

I’m your host Anthony and you can follow me on Twitter at intake Underscore Anthony (@intake_Anthony) , where I discuss content, creation, productivity, creativity, and healthy ways to think about all of those things. It’s my little content creator campfire that I have going on along with some content creation experiments that I post publicly about. 

Trying something a little bit different with this podcast where we’re going to hit the big chunk topic at the beginning. And then at the end, we’re going to start talking about just different news and frameworks from the creator economy and content creators around the web that brings this podcast, sort of in line with our newsletter, which goes out on the opposing Mondays. 

So this is every second Monday, the weeks in between you’ll get our newsletter creators notes. If you want to sign up to that at intakecreate.com, they’ll be buttons there for you to press to sign up to that newsletter. 

Getting Started as a Content Creator

So let’s get into the big topic, how to actually get started creating content and really it’s how to get started. Doing anything any hobby. Any habit, any thing or skill that we want to build? The first steps are incredibly daunting and typically we over plan over prepare. Overthink it’s what we do especially if you have a creative personality overthinking and over planning and over preparing is just embedded. 

So deep into us that sometimes creating content to actually pull off that great idea. We have we think so much that it grows into such a daunting task that we just simply can’t get started. We don’t even know where to start. So I’ve got three sort of frameworks. You can call them to make sure that you’re giving yourself the right push to get started. 

And whether this is creating content, if you’re building personal brand on Twitter and want to just really get started at it, whether you’re starting a TikTok account and you really want to give that a push. If you’re starting a newsletter and you want to really give that a push, if you’re starting a YouTube channel, if you’re starting a workout regimen, if you’re starting a meditation practice, it doesn’t matter. 

This is sort of the framework that I use for everything.

Setting Healthy Goals

And so, the first part is setting healthy goals for content creators. It’s really easy to get this kicked off and have this wild goal of. I’m gonna have 10,000 Twitter followers by the end of the year. Or I’m gonna have 2,000 Twitter followers by the end of the month or 1,000 newsletters subscribers by the end of the week or due to this one landing page. 

These things are just unrealistic and their unhealthy goals. So kind of the the framework that I’m setting for healthy goals. Is that my goals can’t be based on metrics my goals and content creation? Can’t be based on likes. Follower, counts, engagement rates, any of that? Any of these metrics that get tracked. 

Those can help me in my journey but they cannot be my goal. Instead, I want to use experience and skill-based goals. So take my personal brand on Twitter. For example, I’ll plug it again intake. Underscore Anthony, my goal with that Twitter account is not 10,000 followers or crazy engagement rates, crazy retweets. 

That’s not the goal. My goal there is to build my skill of posting every day hitting a niche, which is content, creation, writing threads, once a week and landing freelance creation, jobs, freelance content jobs. Those are all things that I actually get to control. So, my goal is a thread written every week posted on Wednesdays. 

And I get to control every facet of that goal, I come up with threads, I write the threads. I post a threads. How many likes they get is not part of my goal. Sure. My goal can be to improve those threads and I can track those metrics, but those metrics are not the goal. 

My goals are the skills that I’m building and the experience that I’m gaining.

Pull the Carrot

With the second framework to make sure that we give ourselves the right push to get started is pulling the carrot. So, oftentimes as creators, we jump onto these apps and there’s just so much value that we can find. 

I’m finding this, especially true for Twitter. 

There’s there’s a lot of value on Twitter that I really dig into some monster threads from people like Alex Lieberman or Sahil bloom and there’s just like so much data and value and information that you can pull out of these things. But the best thing to do is to pull the carrot so that we actually see what’s buried beneath that is usually there sources and where they’re getting there information. 

So you can read a really, really good thread from Alex Lieberman and want to learn a little bit more and maybe his source was building on top of Paul. Graham you go read Paul grams article on why combinator and then back can lead you to a further source and you dig deeper and deeper and you pull the carrot so you don’t need. 

So you unearth the actual nutritional value. Beneath the dirt, where on most of these platforms, we’re seeing the green carrot tops, not that carrot top but you know, carrots. So pull the carrot, find sources, really broaden your learning flex, your learning muscles and growth just sort of happens when you start learning publicly. 

So if you make your it’s almost like setting healthy goals. If you make your goal on Twitter, or your goal on TikTok, or your goal on YouTube to just learn as much as you can about, either that content or some topic, you’re at a huge advantage to everybody else who just wants to read a tweet and repurpose that tweet or see a YouTube video and make their version of that YouTube video. 

Pull the carrot and really dig deeper and you’ll find something you never expected.

Start with 1

And finally, if you’re really struggling to get started building any habit, my favorite rule is to start with one. This is how I approach push-ups. This is how I approach meditation and this is how I approach content start with one push ups is the easiest example, to illustrate this with, I want to do push-ups. 

I want push-ups to be a regular part of my life. Same thing with sit-ups. But if I’m sitting at my desk and I tell myself, okay, I’m gonna get up, I’m gonna do 20 push-ups, or I’m gonna do 16 push-ups that’s way more daunting than just sitting at my desk and saying, all right? 

Taking a break, one push-up. And I’m done get up down on the floor. One push up is so easy. There’s no excuse not to do it. I do the one push up. Chances are feels pretty good. I’m already down on the ground. I’m gonna do more push-ups. So then I bang out 16 push-ups after telling myself. 

I’m gonna do one instead of telling myself. I’m gonna do 16 and doing zero. It’s very clear where the benefit is there. Same thing with meditation. I told myself I wanted to meditate every single day. That’s pretty daunting scale that back to. I’m going to meditate today. That’s pretty good. 

Scale that back again. I’m gonna meditate right now. Easier to act on still kind of daunting. So what if we just start? It’s still kind of daunting. So what if we just start with one? I’m going to take one deep breath now. 

Well, hey, that was pretty great. Maybe I might as well do a second deep breath and I’ll do another one and a third deep breath and I’ll do that a few times. And by the end of the my time doing that, they feel good. I practically do a full meditation and it’s just one domino tipped over to make the meditation actually achievable. 

So, how do we apply this to content? I did the very same thing with this podcast. Told myself, I just wanted to go make one podcast. Record it with myself phone. Do it on my lunch break edited over the next couple of days. Post it find out how to draw clips from it. 

I big plans, I wanted to do a full series but instead, I started with one came up with one idea that I wanted to write about made the podcast and that that was my plan. I only wanted to do one, it went well, I enjoyed the process. Someone actually listened to it, which I can’t still can’t believe. 

So, I made another one started with that one, and then I made four more. And now I’m here, and I think this is the seventh one that I’m recording for this podcast, all because I decided to start with one when I started intake create and it was more of a personal blog. 

For me, it started with writing one sentence in my journal that became one page in my journal that became one blog. Post that one blog post became a second blog post and then I blogged almost every single week for two years. Now I’ve lost all that content since then, and my heart is a little bit broken but intake create is in a different direction now. 

And of each each iteration of intake create started with one idea I started with one blog post on Tim Ferriss. What I had to restart and then that helped me make one podcast on Tim Ferriss and then the content just sort of keeps going, you start with one. If you can’t write anything start with a single line, right? 

One line that you kind of like right one line that you hate, even if you can’t write a line, right? A word, just write down a list of words that you like, right, one word. That you like just take these big aspirations, take these big goals, scale them down to one single step. 

So, those are my three sort of frameworks, to make sure we can actually get started doing any of these things, just to go over them again. Set healthy goals, not metric based goals. Pull the carrot and dig into the sources behind the content that you like and start with one rep. 

Creator’s Notes – Quora Monetization

So let’s shift gears a little bit and talk about news from the creator economy. We could even call this segment creators notes, that’s the name of the newsletter. You should go subscribe to. So the big news that I want to talk about today from creator, economy is monetization on Quora. 

They just announced a couple of new initiatives to generate some money for their writers. And the writers on Quora are very adamant. That Quora is the best platform to write for and I’m starting to see their arguments clearer and clearer. One of the first conversations I had on Twitter was actually Nicholas Cole from Ship 30 for 30. 

Telling me not to do a personal blog and to write on Quora. This is a common piece of advice that he gives now, I didn’t listen to it, I don’t write on core regularly but he peeked my interest and I really started to look into it. And now with this monetization strategy it’s pretty tempting to get into Quora. 

So here’s kind of the layout of what they’re doing. So they now have core a plus that you and me can sign up for is five dollars a month or $50 yearly really similar to being a medium. Remember to pay for a medium membership. And if you’re a writer on Quora, you can choose to put your piece behind that core plus paywall. 

That way, only people who pay for core plus can read it. And if a lot of those people read your post, then a bigger portion of their five dollars a month. Goes towards you very similar to medium, couple of interesting things that they’re trying is dynamic paywall. So they’ll choose to sort of show your paywalled content for free. 

If they’re AI or their algorithm things, that has a good chance of converting, a free user to a paid user and similar to that. There’s also an adaptive paywall where the algorithm will choose what of your content to put behind a paywall, what content to give for free and allegedly or theoretically really takes the pressure off of creators, trying to decide what content to get for free and what content to put behind the paywall? 

You see some, some creative struggle, a little bit with that balance, especially on things like patreon, where they want to have free value there to pull more people in to convert to more. Paid patrons. But where do you strike that balance of what content is free and what content is paid? 

A lot of people struggle with that. So maybe this adaptive paywall and quarter will catch on and do that work for you outside of Quora. Plus there’s Quora Spaces. Now if you want to put this in terms of medium that a lot of listeners would understand, this is sort of like your publication or your home base. 

Your publication in medium terms. So your space you as a creator, you get to choose the price point to join your private space. So I can, you can join an intake create space, for instance, and all set that at $100 a month ridiculous. It doesn’t exist, not doing that. 

But if I did that, you could pay a hundred dollars a month. Quora gets five percent of your hundred dollars a month and you get access to all of the content on the intake. Create space. Now that I’ve set it out loud, it’s so ridiculous. It might just work but now I’m not a very prolific creator on core. 

I haven’t dabbled enough yet. But this is fascinating to me and I really want to hear from anybody listening who is on Quora, what this actually means for the writers on Quora? How accessible is this monetization strategy, and is it possible for a really wide margin of writers? Or is there a narrow crew of like, really prolific writers? 

Who this applies to? I’m, I’d be interested in to see how that works because at the same time that this announcement came out. I think actually the next day or the day before medium announce changes to their monetization, that actually made it harder for smaller creators meet things better for big creators but small creators. 

Now are just entirely blocked from the partner program without having so many followers. I think it’s like 150 and for new writers, that’s a pretty big bar to hit before you can monetize. So maybe Quora is more accessible for new writers than medium. I would, I am not saying that’s true right now, but I would love to see how this shakes out in the months coming ahead. 

If you have any opinions on this, leave a comment on the post for this on intakereate.com or reach out to me on Twitter and take underscore Anthony or tag intake, create on Twitter intake underscore create. Now, there’s a lot of information in this episode. I talked to pretty fast, I think, highly caffeinated, but there’s some gold in here. 

This quora stuff has me excited. How to get started as creator. Just is it exciting conversation for me to have because I love helping new creators. If you want any advice in your beginning creator journey, reach out to me on Twitter. I’m really serious intake underscore Anthony. 

So that’s the end of the show for this week. If you liked any of that, leave us a review on your podcast player. Follow us on your players. So we show up in your feed every two weeks. If you want more content from us, you can sign up for the newsletter to supplement those other weeks and just visit intakecreate.com to read more about upgrading your content game. 

Thank you for listening. You’ll hear from me in a couple weeks, keep creating until that.

It’s Your Turn

After listening to this episode, we want more people to feel inspired to get started as a content creator. We want people to feel less intimidated by the idea of getting the ball rolling.

If you’ve hesitated, but know that you want to get started as a content creator – do it today.

Use #InTakeCreate on Twitter so we can see your work and help all content creators ride this rising tide known as the creator economy.