techvx
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- Jan 29, 2023
- 24
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I may be (extremely) biased in a not-so-positive direction when it comes to this topic, in part because my brain still has a bit of trouble figuring out how is it, exactly, that a bunch of seemingly bright and capable folk have gone ever so slightly off the rails into a never-ending series of pontifications about subjects, completely disconnected from anything that could even remotely be considered genuinely useful, helpful, and beneficial to the end recipients. Yet here are my two cents.
Warning: strong language, emotionally charged opinion. Keep reading at your own peril.
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1) There's no such thing as a "content". The dictionary definition points out to the linguistic heritage, defined by:
The "content" is what you can see inside your bowl of cereal in the morning. The "content" is the heap of clothes, stuffed inside your cupboard. The "content" is that which is contained, in a clearly delimited container, of a specific shape, created for a specific purpose. I genuinely don't understand how the hell did this term came to be used in a corporatized, lifeless, completely devoid of any meaningful essence, setting of the modern trendy business-y jargon.
Perhaps because there's no need to pay anyone a few cents too many if all they're doing for you is "producing content" that only the Google crawler will ever give a **** about? It still eludes me, truly - up to this day.
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2) No one gave a heck, gives a heck, and will ever give a heck about any "content" that you'll ever produce. People don't go online looking for "content" to consume. Businesses are not built on "content". No one derives any value, any benefit, from any kind of a f* "content". People have problems to solve, and they have aspirations to fulfill. Period. Full stop.
Some of those are physical (a taxing illness - or a desire to get in shape, get noticed by the opposite sex, find the "one true love" or screw around with twice as many girls as the chad from your local circle of "buddies"), some are emotional (a gnawing sense of meaninglessness, boredom, pain - or a longing for the sense of peace and harmony with the world).
In business setting, people have intellectual demands (having too much information to process, too many risks to account for, too many unknown variables in the mix - or a desire to gain an upper-hand of a "genius entrepreneur" that will spot opportunities left and right, leaving the "competition" behind). A subset of those are "tactical" needs (how do I stop losing money on Google Ads - and how do I make the TikTok my b**** that will generate me a ton of leads for free).
"Content creators" is just an amorphous blob of a term that mixes together people that have nothing to do with each other at all: the clowns/entertainers, and the educators/teachers. Sure, it's a spectrum. Sure, Mr. Beast has, without a doubt, taught a whole lot of teenage boys about the value of persistence, and a whole lot more about the fact that they don't have to strive for the level of Elon Musk if they want to claim that they've "made it". Sure, you can be somewhere in the middle. No one will ever pay you for the "content" that you create, though - only for what it will do for others.
Which leads right into the next point.
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3) No amount of "content creation" will get you anywhere if you don't have any purpose behind it. Marketing is a tool - used to draw people's attention to the value of the service that you're able to provide. If you don't have any value, if there's no service provided, if your ability to get people from their horrid state A (for "agony") to the desired state E (for "ecstasy") is below zero, no amount of learning about any "content" strategies and methods will move the needle.
If you're just starting out, your focus should be on turning yourself into the kind of individual that will be able to help other people get what they want. That means A) learning to spot the problems people have, B) learning to differentiate between the problems that are mildly uncomfortable and those that people will actually be willing to pay for, C) gaining the skills necessary to drill down on one particular kind of issues, that can later on become your own "niche", and D) building a conveyor belt that will be able to solve those problems at scale, without your direct involvement later on.
Starting from zero and stuffing your brain full of ideas along the lines of "content should be personalized, the length of the content, the language of the content, voice and tone, and using memory emotion and motivation" - all the while having no perspective whatsoever where that would fit in the overall business cycle of the larger enterprise is just a plain waste of time. The one that feels "productive" because you're "learning" via some fancy "degree" - that was engineered and designed behind the scenes to make you feel precisely that, in order to bait you later on into going for one of their worthless "certificates", that will make the most wonderful addition to the rest of your toilet ambiance.
-
Get clear on you. What's your end game? Learning a bit of this and that because "this is the attention economy" smells a whole lot of "I have no clue where I'm going, but - ooh, shiny! - digital marketing's cool". Understand where you currently stand, understand your options, understand what appeals to you more and what doesn't spark any interest at all, project that into the next 10 years, and start picking up the skills required to get you there. Build the foundation first - the exact set of UTF-8 symbols that has to be "personalized" and adapted to the right "voice and tone" will come later.
And if you are sure that digital marketing is the answer for you, then build your foundation there. Look into copywriting if you have confidence in your desire to focus on joining UTF-8 sequences together, into SMM if you're interested in learning about the way dropshipping gurus keep luring people into the promises of easy money with their $299 courses that will definitely teach you all you need to know to launch your $1M/month store, and into psychology (and sales, in particular) if you actually want to understand the mental processes going behind the scenes in people's minds.
-
Best of effort, persistence, and discipline. Luck will follow suit.
Warning: strong language, emotionally charged opinion. Keep reading at your own peril.
-
1) There's no such thing as a "content". The dictionary definition points out to the linguistic heritage, defined by:
[Middle English, from Medieval Latin contentum, neuter past participle of Latin continēre, to contain; see contain.]
The "content" is what you can see inside your bowl of cereal in the morning. The "content" is the heap of clothes, stuffed inside your cupboard. The "content" is that which is contained, in a clearly delimited container, of a specific shape, created for a specific purpose. I genuinely don't understand how the hell did this term came to be used in a corporatized, lifeless, completely devoid of any meaningful essence, setting of the modern trendy business-y jargon.
Perhaps because there's no need to pay anyone a few cents too many if all they're doing for you is "producing content" that only the Google crawler will ever give a **** about? It still eludes me, truly - up to this day.
-
2) No one gave a heck, gives a heck, and will ever give a heck about any "content" that you'll ever produce. People don't go online looking for "content" to consume. Businesses are not built on "content". No one derives any value, any benefit, from any kind of a f* "content". People have problems to solve, and they have aspirations to fulfill. Period. Full stop.
Some of those are physical (a taxing illness - or a desire to get in shape, get noticed by the opposite sex, find the "one true love" or screw around with twice as many girls as the chad from your local circle of "buddies"), some are emotional (a gnawing sense of meaninglessness, boredom, pain - or a longing for the sense of peace and harmony with the world).
In business setting, people have intellectual demands (having too much information to process, too many risks to account for, too many unknown variables in the mix - or a desire to gain an upper-hand of a "genius entrepreneur" that will spot opportunities left and right, leaving the "competition" behind). A subset of those are "tactical" needs (how do I stop losing money on Google Ads - and how do I make the TikTok my b**** that will generate me a ton of leads for free).
"Content creators" is just an amorphous blob of a term that mixes together people that have nothing to do with each other at all: the clowns/entertainers, and the educators/teachers. Sure, it's a spectrum. Sure, Mr. Beast has, without a doubt, taught a whole lot of teenage boys about the value of persistence, and a whole lot more about the fact that they don't have to strive for the level of Elon Musk if they want to claim that they've "made it". Sure, you can be somewhere in the middle. No one will ever pay you for the "content" that you create, though - only for what it will do for others.
Which leads right into the next point.
-
3) No amount of "content creation" will get you anywhere if you don't have any purpose behind it. Marketing is a tool - used to draw people's attention to the value of the service that you're able to provide. If you don't have any value, if there's no service provided, if your ability to get people from their horrid state A (for "agony") to the desired state E (for "ecstasy") is below zero, no amount of learning about any "content" strategies and methods will move the needle.
If you're just starting out, your focus should be on turning yourself into the kind of individual that will be able to help other people get what they want. That means A) learning to spot the problems people have, B) learning to differentiate between the problems that are mildly uncomfortable and those that people will actually be willing to pay for, C) gaining the skills necessary to drill down on one particular kind of issues, that can later on become your own "niche", and D) building a conveyor belt that will be able to solve those problems at scale, without your direct involvement later on.
Starting from zero and stuffing your brain full of ideas along the lines of "content should be personalized, the length of the content, the language of the content, voice and tone, and using memory emotion and motivation" - all the while having no perspective whatsoever where that would fit in the overall business cycle of the larger enterprise is just a plain waste of time. The one that feels "productive" because you're "learning" via some fancy "degree" - that was engineered and designed behind the scenes to make you feel precisely that, in order to bait you later on into going for one of their worthless "certificates", that will make the most wonderful addition to the rest of your toilet ambiance.
-
Get clear on you. What's your end game? Learning a bit of this and that because "this is the attention economy" smells a whole lot of "I have no clue where I'm going, but - ooh, shiny! - digital marketing's cool". Understand where you currently stand, understand your options, understand what appeals to you more and what doesn't spark any interest at all, project that into the next 10 years, and start picking up the skills required to get you there. Build the foundation first - the exact set of UTF-8 symbols that has to be "personalized" and adapted to the right "voice and tone" will come later.
And if you are sure that digital marketing is the answer for you, then build your foundation there. Look into copywriting if you have confidence in your desire to focus on joining UTF-8 sequences together, into SMM if you're interested in learning about the way dropshipping gurus keep luring people into the promises of easy money with their $299 courses that will definitely teach you all you need to know to launch your $1M/month store, and into psychology (and sales, in particular) if you actually want to understand the mental processes going behind the scenes in people's minds.
-
Best of effort, persistence, and discipline. Luck will follow suit.