Welcome to the Listening Time podcast.
Hey English learners, this is Connor and you're listening to episode 266 of the Listening Time podcast.
I hope you're doing well and that you're ready to practice your English listening comprehension with another episode.
Today, I'm going to talk about the difficulties of being a content creator.
I am an educational content creator.
I create content for people who are learning English, of course.
And there are many positives about this career and there are many negatives, difficulties.
Actually, yesterday I released the advanced episode, in which I talk about the benefits, the positives of being a content creator.
So if you want to hear that, make sure to become a listening time subscriber, family member, so you can listen to that episode.
And in today's normal episode I'm going to talk about the difficulties of being a content creator because, just like with many things in life, there are positives and negatives.
So today we'll cover the difficulties of my work of creating content for english learners.
So I hope that you enjoy hearing about this.
And remember that, if this podcast is useful for you, if it has helped you, it would be great if you could follow this podcast.
Press the follow button on Spotify or Apple podcasts.
That really helps the podcast grow.
And also, like I mentioned, you can join my membership and specifically become a Listening Time family member if you want my advanced episodes in which I speak fast.
That link is down below.
And the link for my US Conversations podcast is also down below.
If you feel ready to practice listening to authentic conversations that I have with other English teachers from around the country, then check that podcast out.
That link is also down below.
Okay, let's talk about the difficulties of being a content creator.
So the first thing that I wanna talk about is starting off, the start of being a content creator, starting this activity.
There are plenty of difficulties when it comes to starting this type of content creation.
Number one.
It takes a lot of determination and courage even to get Take the plunge, as we might say, like you jump in, you just start doing it.
It can be really hard just to start making content and posting it online.
I'm sure some of you might feel self-conscious about posting videos of yourself speaking and teaching something and thinking that people from around the world are going to watch you and critique you, criticize you, etc.
It can take courage to just take the plunge, jump in and start making content.
That's difficult.
And it's also hard to commit to doing this and actually convincing yourself to do this on a regular basis and continue to post, continue to record videos or make posts, whatever it is that you're doing.
It takes a lot of commitment and this can be especially challenging because at the beginning almost nobody has success for a while after they start making content.
It is very rare for someone to start posting content and then have success very soon thereafter.
That does not happen usually.
In the vast majority of cases, it takes a long time to have success.
Just to give you an example of my own case.
I think, if I remember correctly, I started posting content online for people learning English towards the end of 2017.
Well, when did I finally make enough money from my content to actually make this my career?
Well, that didn't happen until more than five five, five and a half years later, maybe.
So for about five or five and a half years, i basically uh posted just tons and tons and tons of content online for people to see, with almost no success, in the sense that I couldn't actually make this my career.
And then finally, five years later or so, there was enough, let's just say, traffic and revenue from the content to actually make this my main career.
But for Over five years, I had to just teach one-on-one classes online as my main job and do this.
The side dedicate hours and hours every week to writing scripts and recording videos, recording audios, editing them, posting them, making thumbnails, recording seminars.
All All these different things that I did and for basically more than four years, I received zero money, basically.
So I worked for free for over four years doing this.
Then maybe the next year or year and a half or so, the money slowly increased and then finally a Five, five and a half years later, maybe I was finally able to make enough money to make this content creation my focus, my career.
So think of how much commitment and how much just determination and discipline that took.
There were many times when I thought that I was just wasting my time doing all of this for nothing.
I spent years creating all this content and it didn't benefit me at at all.
I made zero money from it.
It was a hard period.
I'll just be honest.
And it was difficult to believe in myself that eventually I would have success with this.
And, of course, throughout those five, five and a half years, I was helping people and there was success in that sense that people were benefiting from my content.
But to be frank, meaning to be honest with you, I would not be able to continue doing this just because it's helpful for people.
Of course, I have a family to feed.
I have tons of bills to pay.
I live in an extremely extremely, extremely expensive place in this region of the us, southern california, where i'm from, so obviously i need this content to pay the bills, otherwise i have to stop and do something else.
So It is a big challenge to do all of this for years with zero financial benefit and just believe that eventually this will pay the bills.
It is not easy.
I can't stress that enough.
The vast majority of people quit because you have to work for many many, many hours for free basically, and create useful, meaningful content for people to eventually hopefully have success.
And some people, even though they do this for years, they don't have success.
So I'm very fortunate, I'm blessed, but I
I still deal with this type of difficulty of needing this content to generate enough revenue to pay the bills.
I'll talk about that a little later.
Let me also talk about the lack of stability.
So this is another difficulty of being a content creator.
There is not a ton of stability when it comes to this type of career in terms of being able to predict what things will be like next year or two years from now, because When you are a content creator like me, your content and the amount of traffic views downloads this fluctuates, meaning it goes up and down, up and down.
The number of views, the number of downloads is not a guarantee that I can predict.
I have no idea.
How many people will view my content next month?
Or how many downloads I'll have next year?
I cannot predict this, and for some people this lack of stability is unbearable, meaning they can't handle this, and so if this type of instability is just not your thing, then of course it's better for you to be an employee.
Not that being an employee is the most stable thing in the world, but at least you have a certain guarantee, maybe a contract and protection.
And even if you are laid off or fired, perhaps you still get some type of compensation afterwards.
I don't know how this is in your country, but typically people think of being an employee as being somewhat more stable than being a content creator or something similar.
I have no guaranteed salary.
There is no contract that I have that guarantees that I will be paid next month.
Of course there are some types of contracts that people might sign with different agencies and networks and things like that.
Of course, that exists in the content creation world.
But in general there's no guaranteed salary.
For some people that would be unbearable to not know if they actually are going to make money next month.
Right.
And the money that you do make.
It fluctuates just like views and downloads.
The money that I make goes up and it goes down.
There are some months where it's doing well, my content is doing well.
There are other months when it is not doing well.
And I earn significantly less money that month.
And it can be really hard to deal with that, especially when you're trying to plan for the future and you have kids.
It's tough.
Let me tell you.
So this is not for everyone.
And when you're in a down period, when you have a month, two months, three months or however long, of a lower revenue, meaning a lower income of money.
It can cause you to rethink everything.
You might question yourself and your career choice.
You might doubt whether or not you can still do this, because now suddenly you're not earning as much money.
This can be really, really challenging for people.
So this lack of stability is one of the difficulties of being a content creator.
Another difficulty is knowing what content to produce.
This is one of the most important and notable difficulties.
You need to know what is beneficial to produce both beneficial for you and your audience.
So you need to know who your audience is, who actually watches your videos or listens to your podcast or sees your Instagram posts.
You need to know your audience and You need to see if your audience likes certain content or doesn't like certain content.
You have to be aware, conscious If your audience is changing over time.
Maybe you had a different target audience when you started out, but now it's changing a little bit as you progress as a content creator.
There's a lot to consider when it comes to your audience and related to that.
It's also important to know whether or not your content, your strategy of creating, producing content, is based on being more general and having a wider audience, or being more specific and having a more specific, smaller audience.
That really affects the type of content people create.
For example, let's talk about me and my content.
I have a very general audience because of the demographics of who watches and listens to my content.
People from virtually every country on the planet consume my content.
The reason for that is because it's for people who are learning English, and there are people learning English in every country on the planet, basically.
So, because of that, I have a very general audience and the type of content I create is also Pretty general.
I'm not just focused on one tiny aspect of English, like I only prepare people for English job interviews or something.
No.
I help people develop their listening skills, and I also have training for pronunciation as well with my membership.
So basically, the sounds of English are what I focus on.
Basically listening and pronunciation, and everybody that learns English focuses on these things.
The sounds of English.
People need to be able to listen to and understand English and produce the sounds of English if they are English learners.
So I have a very general audience and general type of content.
And this can be tricky for me because I often get comments from people not often all the time, every day basically from people who are asking me for more advanced content and not the beginner content.
But to be honest, my beginner content usually gets a lot more views than my advanced content.
So, even though I want to make content that my audience is asking for, I also have to consider the fact that if I only make that type of content, or if I change my focus to that type of content, then I will probably get way fewer views and downloads and that will affect everything.
It will affect my revenue and I won't be able to continue to make content because I'll have to go and start a different career, get another job, because I won't be able to generate enough traffic to my podcast and YouTube channel to even pay the bills.
You get what I'm saying?
So it's tough because I have to think about what my audience wants, but also what allows me to continue, even making content.
You guys might not think about that when you listen to me, but this is not a guaranteed thing that I can do.
I can only continue making this content if, of course, it is successful and it pays the bills.
So I always have to think about that.
And that's why the model that I have used more recently is that most of my content for my YouTube and my podcast is more for like lower, intermediate and beginner type content.
And then the people that really want that advanced level content.
They can sign up for my membership, become a Listening Time family member and also join the US Conversations podcast so they can get advanced native level content.
So that's for the fewer people that are looking for that content, But then for the majority of people who find me online, these are people that need content that is easy enough for them to understand, because they can't understand other content.
And so most of my free content aimed at an audience that isn't super advanced.
You get my point right it's hard to please everyone and also pay the bills with the content.
So I'm trying to create content for everyone, but in a way that still allows me to continue this as a career, right?
Another difficulty that people deal with when they are content creators is coming up with new content and making it interesting.
Right.
I don't really make content about current events.
That's very rare for me.
Most of my content is evergreen, meaning you can listen to it at any time any year, and it will still be relevant.
So because of this, I have to constantly think of new topics to talk about, or talk about topics I've already discussed, but from a different angle, a different perspective or some other thing related to that topic.
And it can be hard to constantly come up with ideas when you are just talking about current events.
I think it's a lot easier to come up with content because You just talk about what's in the news, what everyone else is talking about.
It's a lot easier to know what to talk about when you have a podcast talking about the news, for example.
My podcast and my YouTube channel are not like that.
So I am always thinking of different things to talk about.
This can be one of the hardest parts, especially once you've created many, many hundreds and hundreds of hours of content.
You feel like you've talked about everything, of course.
You haven't, but it feels like this and it can feel difficult to think of new topics to talk about.
So that's a challenge.
And the thing about making content like mine that isn't about current events.
This means that my content rarely ever goes viral because I'm not making content about the latest popular thing that everyone is talking about.
I don't have that, so I don't really go viral.
That's a negative, but...
Of course, because people are constantly viewing and listening to my old content because it's still relevant.
That's a great thing, because I continue getting views and downloads on my old content.
So there's good and bad related to this, of course.
And then lastly, one final negative I wanted to talk about.
One difficulty is the constant question that you have as a content creator of how long can I really do this, for people ask me this sometimes.
Let's say connor, how long do you think you're going to continue with this as your career?
And It's a tough thing to hear because not everyone gets this question.
Like, if you say you're an electrician, most people don't ask you well, how long do you think you'll continue being an electrician for?
Because they just assume that you'll do this your whole career, because it's a stable industry and career.
But when you say that you are an educational content creator, Many people automatically assume that at some point you're gonna have to do something else, that you won't be able to continue with this.
I receive this question sometimes and it can feel a little bit negative to know that people are not confident that your career will last.
So this is a constant question that content creators have to ask themselves.
Will I really be able to do this permanently?
I hope that this is permanent.
I have had a certain amount of success so far, but when I go through down periods, when things are not great and I'm getting fewer views and downloads, I'm forced to reconsider my career sometimes.
This happens to me.
Some of you might be surprised to hear this, but many times I've thought that I'm not going to be able to do this for the long haul, meaning permanently.
To be quite honest, I have been going through that recently even.
I'm not saying that I'm going to stop making content very soon.
No, but I have been going through a period where I have had to reconsider and think of the possibility of needing to do something else, because there are periods like this, there are down periods when it comes to this type of career, because nothing is stable, everything fluctuates, and when you have to pay the bills, when you have a family to feed, when you deal with all the responsibilities of life, you question this sometimes, of course, because you have to make sure that you're doing what's necessary to to have enough success in your career, of course.
And I trust that I'll get through this down period and have a better period soon.
I have that belief, but that doesn't mean that I don't question things.
Question my career during down periods.
And I'm sure that's something that all content creators deal with.
Thank you so much for watching.
I try to make it very affordable for people from all over the world because I want many people to get that training and the advanced episodes and all that.
So please check that out and it really helps me out when you join.
It really helps me continue making this content.
So I really appreciate all the support that I get from people who join that membership.
And, if you feel ready, you should also start practicing with my US Conversations podcast, in which I talk to English teachers from all over the country.
It's so much fun and it's great practice for your listening.
That link is also down below.
Thank you all for listening to this episode and I'll talk to you on the next episode of Listening Time.
