"I feel so self-conscious. How do I get over my fear of listening or watching to myself?" Have you asked that question, too? Join me on this chat about the evolution of content creation. I'll reflect on my own journey from the consistent efforts of 2018 to the content overload of 2021. Along the way, I'll share the valuable lessons I've learned on strategy, SEO, and nurturing an audience.
By looking back at my earlier perspectives and how they've transformed over the years, you'll gain a fresh understanding of what it truly means to craft content in today's ever-shifting digital terrain.
Creating content can be challenging, so I'm sharing how I overcame my doubts by switching to a more mindful approach. Jenny, a member of our YouTube audience, asked me about dealing with anxiety, and I offer advice for anyone on their content journey. Authenticity and connection with our audience are the secrets to creating engaging and valuable content.
This episode is a practical toolkit for those starting their creative projects. I'll guide you through setting deadlines, fostering accountability, and the magic of taking action. The shared insights will encourage you to start where you are, with curiosity as your guide, and embrace the journey ahead. Join empowered content creators navigating the thrilling seas of digital expression. Tune in and subscribe.
I love it when content has been out for a while and it comes back around. It has, like this super long shelf life for the next generation of people to find it. And today I specifically want to answer some questions and talk about some things that I've recently gotten on a YouTube video that I put out about two years ago. That is called what is a Content Creator? Now, what I love about this is it's kind of evolved, so this is like the newest version of what a content creator is. But also, I feel like I would answer this question very differently two years ago as opposed to today and the different perspective that I have on being a content creator, what it means to be a content creator and what it looks like for me as a content creator now. So let's get right to it.
Krystal Proffitt:
Welcome to the Proffitt Podcast, where we teach you how to start, launch and market your content with confidence. I'm your host, Krystal Proffitt, and I'm so excited that you're here. Thanks for hanging out with me today, because if you've been trying to figure out the world of content creation, this is the show that will help be your time-saving shortcut. So let's get right to it, shall we? Okay? So, as I mentioned in the beginning, we are talking about what is a content creator. So there's a video right here that I want you to go watch. If you haven't checked it out already, it's on my YouTube channel and it will be linked in the show notes if you're listening to the podcast version, but I put this out. It is like roughly a 12 minute video on what a content creator is and what you can expect if you're creating content on a podcast, on a YouTube channel, you're writing blog posts, you're creating content on social media and in 2024, the way that this looks different for me is things have evolved since I originally put this video out, because, right after the year 2021, this was the craziest year of my content creator journey. Like if I were to map it out, I went from in 2018, creating consistent content every single week, then ramping it up a little bit, getting some more visibility in 2019 from these different partnerships and working with you know businesses like Buzzsprout and starting to get a little bit of notoriety in Amy Porterfield's community, to 2020, being like the year that everyone decided they wanted to be a creator. And then in 2021, I was like I'm going all in, I'm going to create all this content. So I was creating an insane amount of content. Let's just call it what it is.
Krystal Proffitt:
I look back on that time and I am still asking how did I do this? How did I create this much content? Because I was doing three YouTube videos a week, two podcast episodes, five episodes on my daily podcast. I was writing at least one newsletter a week, posting on Instagram every single day, posting in our Facebook group. It was bananas. It was 20 plus pieces of content and my identity at that time was the more you put out, the more opportunities you're going to have to attract new people to your email list or get people to look at your content. Your SEO is going to explode. Like I had all of these reasons why I was creating that much content, and so this original video I created was right after that time.
Krystal Proffitt:
So I had kind of tapered down how much content I was creating, but I wasn't openly and honestly sharing how much. It was insanity behind the scenes of everything that I was creating. So I wanted to really preface everything else that I say after this to. I know that that was bonkers crazy in 2021. I would never recommend doing that today. I don't do that today, like I am, at a bare minimum, posting on Instagram maybe three to four times a week, like actually posting something in my feed. I'm on stories maybe every day, if not every other day, and I'm posting in my Facebook group maybe five to six times a month, and I only do one podcast episode, one YouTube video, a week and I don't even have my daily podcast anymore. So I really wanted to share all the behind the scenes Cause if you've been around here for a while, you know I love behind the scenes and I know that you love behind the scenes.
Krystal Proffitt:
But we had a specific question that came in for today's video. It was actually in the comments of this original video. So, jenny, thank you so much for your comment. I wanted to read it and then give you my direct advice, like how I see answering this question today. So Jenny says hello, Krystal, hello to you back. First of all, I never comment on videos at all, but this was so informative I had to reach out. Question how do I get over my fear of what I look or sound like to be able to create videos, podcast material? I run a flower farming business, growing flowers from seeds in my backyard, which we make arrangements out of and sell at Farmer's Market. I only use Instagram and know I need to branch out. Any advice is appreciated. So, jenny, again, thank you so much for your question, and this is so common. This is so common. So before I say anything else, I just want to acknowledge that you are not the only person that struggles with this.
Krystal Proffitt:
I've had so many conversations with people about the very first time I went live. It was on Periscope. This was before Facebook Live, which is how long I've been around and creating things and it was terrifying. I remember I was shaking in my office. It's not in the house that I'm in, it's not in this office. We have previously moved and I just remember being in that office and I was like I'm going to do this, I'm going to go live for the first time. My hand was shaking, I had my phone in my hand and it was just like going crazy and it was so terrifying because I thought I was gonna say something stupid. I thought I was gonna look stupid and I thought that if I press this magical button, the go live button, that all of a sudden, millions of people would be there or thousands of people would be there, and if I was lucky, hundreds of people would be there.
Krystal Proffitt:
I don't think a single person saw that live video. I really don't. If somebody did, it was one of those like they hopped into it and then they're like oh wait, this is not what I was looking for and they hopped out of it. That was my experience of creating for the first time and at that point in time in my creator journey, I was mostly doing written things. I was trying to be a blogger. I was like that was the path that I was going down and it wasn't doing a ton of audio and video stuff. I had experimented with doing YouTube videos, but I did not know what I was doing and I had no clue how to edit things or make transitions work other than like it, just it wasn't great. If you want proof, go back to the YouTube channel and look at my very, very first videos. They were not great, they no, they just they weren't good at all.
Krystal Proffitt:
But all of that to say is I got started somewhere. It's why it's the motto around here Keep it up. We all have to start somewhere. So, jenny, we all have to start somewhere. So, jenny, my advice to you is your question is my fear of, or how do I get over my fear of what I sound like or look like to be able to create videos or podcast material?
Krystal Proffitt:
I always go back to what's in it for my audience, because when you take yourself out of it, you don't like, you're not so worried about what I look like Like. How's my hair, how's my face, how is my clothes Like? What does my background look like? I really don't think about those things anymore. As much as I'm thinking about is this going to add value to my audience? Does my audience care about this, or is this something that's going to be memorable and make an impact on them so that they take action, whatever that action is, after they're done with that piece of content? So, as much as you can, remove yourself out of the content formula equation and really put your audience's focus on there.
Krystal Proffitt:
Now this could look like a few different things. It could look like your messaging. It could look like the topics you want to cover. It could look like the offerings that you want to have within your content, whether it's educational material or it's examples, or it is all about your business. And because I'm so fortunate, jenny, thank you so much for telling me a little bit about what you do, because we can actually get more specific to your particular case instead of it just being so generic. But I really just want to focus in on the important thing is it's not about you, it's about your audience, because what I find so often is people will make their content about them and no one else cares. That's really what it comes down to Like. I know it feels like the tough love, like the harsh thing that the coach has to say, but I have to say it no one cares about what you're doing, unless you make them care, unless there's a reason to care, and most people don't care, honestly, unless you have a celebrity status. That's really what it comes down to. There are podcasts that I listen to simply because it is someone getting interviewed that I'm like I want to hear who they because they're a celebrity status, but if it was a no-name podcast, I just I wouldn't care about it. And the way that you make people care is you show them. Oh no, I care about you as someone in the audience. I care about you. I am delivering exactly what you are looking for, and it is in this content.
Krystal Proffitt:
I'm gonna tell you a quick story about something I stumbled upon recently. So I was looking for something else on YouTube and my algorithm threw something at me that I was not prepared for. How much I was going to love it. So this is going to be ridiculous, but bear with me. It was the Vanity Fair. They have this whole segment that's called Actors on Actors. Maybe you knew about this I'm late to the game. I didn't know that this existed, but there were incredible interviews with Anne Hathaway and Emily Blunt and they're talking about their acting careers and I was infatuated with this whole thing. It was Katherine Heigl and Ellen Pompeo.
Krystal Proffitt:
I've been a Grey's Anatomy fan since the very beginning of the show starting, so I became obsessed with it. There was a Bradley Cooper and Emma Stone one that I started watching. I saw that there were like dozens of others. Like I was like where has this been? I love these type of interviews. Give me more. I want more. But that's an example of.
Krystal Proffitt:
I stumbled across this content but because it was created for me right, I'm the audience I was so excited about it. I didn't care where it came from it was. I honestly didn't even know it was Vanity Fair. Outside of it had the logo up there. I didn't care. I just wanted to listen to that interview. I cared about the content, I cared about the topic. I wanted to hear the message from those people, and that is what your audience will care about. So people spend so much time trying to make themselves look bigger than they are or try to have this persona that they really don't have, and then it feels awkward because they're like this isn't really me or this isn't my style.
Krystal Proffitt:
My advice to you is focus on what you know best and if you really know the customer, the audience, the person that you are trying to reach, that's what you focus on. What do they want to hear? So, jenny, I want to go back to your specific one. You say I run a flower farming business, growing flowers from seeds in my backyard. So let me stop there. Who are you targeting right? Are you targeting people that want to buy those seeds? Are you targeting other people that want to run a flower farming business from their backyard? Like that would be the first thing. That that would be my piece of advice.
Krystal Proffitt:
We're in a coaching session now, and if I were giving you a full session on what you should do with your content you know whether it's videos or a podcast. It would be getting very clear on who are you trying to reach. Are you trying to reach a version of yourself from, let's say, five years ago, when you were sitting somewhere dreaming about having flowers in your backyard that you could walk out and snip every day and take them into your kitchen and put them in a beautiful vase and have them decorated around your home? Who is that person? Is that who you're talking to, a previous version of yourself? Or maybe you have aspirational thoughts of creating digital products or other things that you can sell to this audience one day? Well, you need to set up your content that way, because if you are just telling your own story over and over and over again, someone that's listening, now all of a sudden you're selling things to them. They're like hang on, like that's not really why I came here, and there can be kind of like this bait and switch thing that happens. If you start your content one way and then you just fully switch it on your audience, they get really confused and some people leave and never come back. It's this whole weird thing that happens. So I would get very, very clear on who are you wanting to listen to this content and if you were like well, Krystal, I'm not sure, I think it's going to be this person, but it's also a mixture of that person, that's okay, but you just need to have a starting point. So the great example is the Proffitt Podcast, my show.
Krystal Proffitt:
I started talking to beginners. I was just talking to people that wanted to start a podcast. They're trying to figure out, like, what is the title of my show? What am I going to talk about? You know, what equipment do I use, how do I edit this thing and how do I get it out there into the world? Right, those are the main things that they wanted me to cover. So for the first year or so of me putting out any type of content, it was only about the beginner podcaster and the challenges that they faced. But as my content continued, like I put more stuff out there and people would reach out and ask questions and students would come to me and say hey, Krystal, I ran into this issue or you haven't talked about this before. Like I'm not a beginner per se, but I've been in your audience for a while and you've never covered this. Can you talk about podcast ads and getting sponsorships? Can you talk about speaking on stage and what that looks like to get speaking opportunities from your content? There were just these things that happened.
Krystal Proffitt:
Naturally, that now I talk about this way wider spectrum of all the content, from this little bitty thing from helping beginner podcasters to now I mean it's content strategy, it's so many other things. So you just need to get started with the place where you feel most comfortable. So maybe you have a confidence in you on certain topics. That's where you need to get started. You don't need to try to tackle these things because people will come to me and say, well, I'm not an expert in this, so I don't feel comfortable talking about it. Well then, don't talk about it from an expert's point of view. You don't have to be an expert in everything to talk about it in your content. I've covered so many things in my content that I will rightfully say I am not the expert on this topic, but I will share what I'm curious about, what I'm thinking about, or I will just share. This is what I'm trying.
Krystal Proffitt:
So if you want to reach an audience of people that are just curious about maybe, what you're doing or how you've gotten started, start with your FAQs, right your frequently asked questions. This is a great place to start and actually I have a fantastic digital product that you can go check out. It's called One Year of Content in One Hour and in this it's like it's a $27 product. It is one of the cheapest things that I offer and it will help you so much in just really guiding along. Like well, what should I talk about? It has so many ideas for what you could do and the FAQs are one of the default things that I tell people to do.
Krystal Proffitt:
It's like if someone wanted to get started doing what you do today. What are the questions that they would ask? What are the questions that you asked when you first got started? So what this looked like for my content is what is a podcast host? What recording equipment do I need? What like? How do I decide on the topic that I'm going to choose? How do I know you know if the this is the right person to interview? How do I script a podcast episode? Like? These are all of the questions that a beginner podcaster would ask. So that is where I started. I literally started with how to start, launch and market a podcast. Those are some of my very first episodes after I rebranded my show and I just got started from there and from there this happens all the time.
Krystal Proffitt:
I have so many Proffitt podcasting students. So shout out to everyone in the digital course community because they have said oh yeah, that a hundred percent happens. You will have ideas and there's a challenge within my program. I will say, okay, I want you to think of your first 20 episodes. And then from there they will say, oh, I know, you told me to just do 20. I came up with 57. Or I planned these episodes and it was like a dam had broken and then all of a sudden, I had a flood of ideas and I could not stop them. I was so excited about this and then that spiraled into that and then I thought about oh, I could interview this person and that person and this person. So there will be so many creative things that happen once you go down the journey of just getting started.
Krystal Proffitt:
I know it sounds cliche, it may sound even a little silly, but it is absolutely true. Once you start planning, once you get in the mindset of this is what I want to do, so many magical things happen, and I think it has to do with just making a decision I have had, and at first I didn't understand. This was a profound compliment. But I've had many people tell me over the years like Krystal, you are just very decisive, and maybe it comes from being a mom, three boys, and just having to like make a decision when a toddler does not want like make a decision when a toddler does not want to make a decision, or maybe it has to do with just I don't know, maybe it's a personality trait, I'm not sure, but I'm very decisive. So whenever I do make a decision, it's like okay, this is the journey that we're going on. It could be a good decision, it could be a bad decision, I could be making 70,000 mistakes along the way, but getting into action will help you so much gain that clarity that you are looking for. So just making a decision.
Krystal Proffitt:
So, jenny, back to your original question make a decision on who are you speaking to. Who is this audience that's going to be listening to this content or watching this content, whatever type of content that you end up creating? Who is that person? Because then you can make other decisions on the topics you wanna cover, how you wanna approach it and maybe even how often you wanna put content out because, like I said earlier, all of this question and everything today originated from a video called what is a content creator?
Krystal Proffitt:
And one of the things that you have to decide you listening, and Jenny is what type of creator do you want to be? Because I don't subscribe to you have to create 20 plus pieces of content every single week. I've done that, let me tell you. I can tell you all the reasons why that is not sustainable. It was not sustainable for me. I did it for a short period of time. Would I do it again? No, I really wouldn't, even if I had a whole production team and so many people supporting me to do every single like all the editing, every single piece. No, I would not do that because it was so much. It was way too much for me personally.
Krystal Proffitt:
So, again, this goes back to the type of creator I want to be. I want to be the type of creator that turns off my computer and has dinner with my family. I don't wanna be the type of creator that's working on Saturdays and Sundays. I don't wanna be the type of creator that has to log in when I'm on vacation and do 50 things when I should be spending time with my friends and family. So go back to what type of creator do you want to be? I want you to answer that question and think about all the consistency and all the different things that you wanna commit to as a creator and know you can always change it in the future.
Krystal Proffitt:
I love to live by. The rule is there are no rules right. There are only guidelines that I will share with you about being a creator. There's never gonna be a. You have to do this in order to be a successful creator, because I don't think that that works, because it's always changing. Like I said, I recorded the original content two years ago. I'm a different person today. I'm a totally different creator today than I content two years ago. I'm a different person today. I'm a totally different creator today than I was two years ago. So I don't live by. It can only be my way, or the highway, or it's only one way and it's gonna be like that forever. It's just not true. It's not true in the creator space, which is what I love about doing this work and what I love about helping you with your content.
Krystal Proffitt:
So, jenny, once again I want to give you a huge shout out for asking this question and being brave enough to put it out there. I think, when it comes down to you, getting over your fear is make sure that you're making it about the audience, because it's not about you, right? Even this content today it's not about me. Sure, I've shared stories, I've shared my own experience, but I've only done that to share it with you. This was made for you, dear listener and Jenny. This was created for my audience, and I really encourage you to put your audience at the center of everything that you do, because they will feel that I can tell when someone has created something Vanity Fair. This is your shout out, this is my shout out to you. I can tell you made the actors on actors segment for people like me that want to hear these candid conversations and these candid interviews, and I am so grateful to you because they made my heart so happy whenever I stumbled upon them. So, make it about your audience, don't make it about you and just get out there and start creating. That's really the other big message is make it about your audience, get out there and start creating.
Krystal Proffitt:
You will figure out so many of these other questions, because I know you probably still have a million questions about should I do this and should I do that? Do I need solo content? Do I need interviews? Do I need to have a fancy background? Do I need to have this? All of those will work themselves out, but you just have to get in motion, make a decision to really put your content out there.
Krystal Proffitt:
And one final thought for everybody that's thinking about launching a podcast or a YouTube channel I love a deadline. I know those are scary. It makes things scary. That's what they're there for. So if you are trying to light a fire underneath yourself and you need some accountability, write out a deadline for when you're going to launch your podcast, your YouTube channel, your blog, your newsletter, whatever it is. Even if it's a superficial deadline, put it out there. It's the only way that you will actually get this thing launched and put it out into the world. So create a deadline and hold yourself accountable and come back here, because if you need some motivation and some accountability, it's what I'm here for, but that's all I have for you today.
Krystal Proffitt:
So again, jenny, thank you so much for asking this question. If you have questions and you're watching on the YouTube channel, put them in the comments. I want to hear from you and if you're listening on the podcast, go over to the YouTube channel and leave a comment, because I want to hear from you. I love answering these questions, I love hearing from this community and I love it whenever we can tie some of these theoretical things back to real people, because it really grounds the message in exactly what you can do to make your content stand out. But that's all I have for you today. So make sure you hit that subscribe button and follow the follow button wherever you are listening and, as always, remember, keep it up. We all have to start somewhere.