Last week, we discussed the initial baby steps for you to transition into the creator economy, focusing on publishing online and cultivating a strong personal brand.
Notably, I learned that I did a really terrible job with the email title last week. Sorry guys, my read open rate was half of what it normally is.
So please make sure you read both newsletters in tandem.
Building on that foundation, this week, I want to explore deeper into the systems that will propel you through this transformation.
This week we’re going to cover the systems that will help you never get replaced by AI.
Even if you don’t plan to make a personal brand, read about the systems because they will help you organize your hobbies and interests too.
You don’t have to publish anything online to write it for yourself!
If you’re just starting your journey, this “Lazy Social Media System” is designed to streamline your processes and maximize your success with minimal ongoing effort.
The goal is to start a personal brand with as minimal effort as possible so you can passively gain authority and a community over time.
Remember, your goal shouldn’t be to amass a large following, but rather to connect deeply with just 1,000 true fans.
Methods
Creating video content isn’t the only way to build a powerful personal brand; written content can be just as effective, if not more so, for some.
Focusing on one platform to deliver high-quality written content allows you to solidify your personal brand, ensuring you remain at the forefront of your industry.
A strong personal brand cultivates trust and puts you in a position of power, giving you leverage over employers.
This can lead to higher earnings, as well as an increase in passive job offers and attention.
This leverage empowers you to pursue positions where you are treated best, allowing you to leave any job that does not serve your best interests for one that truly values and appreciates you.
If you ignore this strategy, you risk losing a vital form of job security in today’s volatile market.
By not enhancing your personal brand, you’ll continue to see your resume overlooked in job searches, forfeiting the chance to build personal leverage that often leads to wealth.
The ultimate goal is to make yourself the first person that comes to mind in your niche, rendering you irreplaceable by AI or any other candidate.
This distinct recognition, alongside a proven track record of your skills and the trust you’ve built, safeguards your career far beyond the traditional routes.
Essential Setup for Success
Set these up early to simplify your life.
You don’t need to deploy these systems broadly from the start.
Instead, keep them forefront in your thoughts.
In my view, the most effective approach is to download the apps and explore their functions naturally.
Avoid spending countless hours on tutorials, videos, and customization; just begin by experimenting with them.
As you use these tools, your approach will naturally evolve.
Tailor each tool to your specific needs.
If you’re interested in tutorials for any of these tools, feel free to DM me on my new Instagram and let me know. I’ll start working on them!
1. Knowledge Management System
A personal knowledge database, like Obsidian or Notion, serves as an invaluable tool for any creator navigating the vast amounts of information encountered daily. This system acts as a comprehensive hub where you can keep track of literally everything—from fleeting thoughts to detailed research.
Here is an example of mine if you need inspiration! (You don’t have to publish your notes like I do!)
Key Features of a Personal Knowledge Database:
Note-Taking: At its core, your database allows for sophisticated note-taking. You can jot down ideas as they come, outline articles, or capture insights from books and conversations. These notes can be tagged, categorized, and linked to related concepts, creating a web of information that’s easy to navigate and expand upon.
Every time I explain something technical to a friend in a message/comment on social media, I take the time to paste that into ChatGPT and immediately publish an article so I don’t have to duplicate work in the future.
Daily Logs and Annual Reviews: Implementing daily logs helps you track your progress and reflect on daily learnings. Annual reviews within this system provide a higher-level perspective, allowing you to assess your growth over the year and adjust your goals accordingly.
Brainstorming Space: Your database can include a dedicated space for brainstorming where you can freely explore ideas without constraints. This is particularly useful for creative sessions where you connect disparate ideas, leading to innovative solutions and projects.
Creative Repository: Beyond practical notes, your database is an ideal place to store creative outputs like poetry, sketches, or story ideas. This not only safeguards your creations but also makes them readily available for inspiration or integration into future works.
Personal Wiki: As you dive deeper into specific topics of interest, your database evolves into a personal wiki. Here, you can compile comprehensive entries on subjects you’re learning about or industries you’re involved in. This aspect is especially beneficial for deepening your expertise and staying organized.
Digital Product Development: The true power of maintaining such a database lies in its potential to serve as a foundation for digital product development. As you accumulate and refine content, you can identify themes and gaps in the market, which can be developed into courses, ebooks, or workshops that offer value to your audience.
By maintaining a personal knowledge database, you not only keep your information organized and accessible but also create a dynamic tool that grows and evolves with your career.
This system ensures that no idea is lost and that every piece of knowledge has the potential to be levered for creative and commercial success.
2. Creator Research System with Airtable
This is my real one. I study each piece of content in depth to determine WHY it did well.
Understanding the strategies that work for other creators is crucial if you aim to succeed in the creator economy.
You should use Airtable as a dynamic tool to compile and deeply analyze what successful influencers and content creators are doing right.
Whenever you encounter a particularly effective video within your niche, add it to this specialized database.
This practice allows you to methodically reverse-engineer the elements that contributed to its success.
It’s so easy to passively start doing.
Just transform your mindset to Creator mode and pay attention to the things you like.
Neglecting to maintain this repository from the start, however, could complicate your learning process and prevent you from easily identifying the patterns and tactics that resonate with your audience, ultimately weakening the foundation of your content strategy.
3. Offline Long Form Content System
From the start, you must prioritize collecting email addresses.
This strategy is more crucial than building your presence on social media platforms, where the risk of being banned could erase your audience overnight.
Unlike social media, your email list is a secure asset that you control entirely—no algorithm can dictate your reach.
Email also offers a direct and personal way to connect with your audience, fostering stronger relationships.
Contrary to popular belief, the true monetization power in the digital space doesn’t come from amassing a large following but from selling digital products.
To effectively leverage this, begin by sending out a weekly long-form newsletter.
This consistent engagement does more than keep your audience interested; it forms the foundation of your content strategy, providing rich material that can later be repurposed into various digital products or offers.
This approach not only ensures regular interaction with your audience but also strategically positions you to monetize your expertise effectively.
4. Automated Call-to-Actions with ManyChat
Efficiency is key as you scale and grow your online presence.
ManyChat, a powerful tool for automating engagement, is essential in this process.
It enables you to set up automated Calls to Action (CTAs) that guide your audience toward actions like subscribing to a newsletter, downloading a guide, or watching more content, all without your direct intervention.
Start using ManyChat from the outset of your creator journey.
For example, when you release a new guide, film a short video explaining the topic and use ManyChat to offer the guide as a freebie at the video’s end.
This strategy not only captures your audience’s attention but also directly engages them by providing immediate value.
Offering freebies is strategic; it endears you to followers and doubles as market research, helping you gauge what your audience truly needs and validate your ideas for paid products before heavily investing in them.
Moreover, if your content goes viral, ManyChat ensures you capture this surge in attention.
Think of each piece of content as a lottery ticket—when it ‘wins’ and goes viral, ManyChat helps you capitalize on that success.
It transforms fleeting attention into lasting engagement by offering something valuable that can convert casual viewers into dedicated followers or customers.
Using ManyChat saves you time and enhances audience interaction, laying the groundwork for significant growth.
This system turns every content piece into an opportunity, ensuring viral moments are fully leveraged.
5. Content Management with Readwise and Zotero
As you dive deeper into content creation and research, harnessing the right tools to manage information efficiently is critical.
ManyChat automates engagement, but equally important are tools like Readwise and Zotero, which help you manage the vast amount of content and research you encounter.
Readwise: This tool is indispensable for capturing and interacting with digital content. As you browse articles online, Readwise allows you to save them directly to your library. More than just storing articles, it enables you to highlight key passages and add personal notes or comments to these highlights. This feature enhances your ability to recall and interact with important information later.
Use Readwise to organize your saved articles systematically, making it simple to review them when you need to reference or extract ideas for your content.
Additionally, Readwise offers a seamless connection with Obsidian, your digital “second brain.” This integration means that all your highlights and notes can be imported directly into Obsidian automatically, without the need for manual syncing. This added bonus ensures that your collected insights are readily accessible and organized within your primary knowledge management system.
syncing articles
Zotero: While Readwise handles general content, Zotero is tailored specifically for managing academic research. As you gather research papers relevant to your projects, Zotero helps you organize them efficiently. Like Readwise, you can highlight crucial sections of these papers, but Zotero also allows you to create bibliographies and reference lists automatically, streamlining the process of academic writing. It’s particularly useful when you need to cite sources in your work, ensuring accuracy and saving you time during the editing process.
By integrating Readwise and Zotero into your workflow, you protect yourself from the costly risk of losing valuable information.
Without these tools, critical insights could slip through the cracks, potentially derailing your projects and slowing your progress.
6. Community Engagement through Discord
@Michellexcomputer has an amazing example of a discord set up.
A vibrant community is essential to any creator’s success, acting as both a support network and a collaborative space.
Discord, with its extensive customization options, is an ideal platform for building and nurturing such a community.
Through targeted channels and interactive bots, you can share information, engage in real-time discussions, and foster a community around shared interests.
However, the choice of platform is flexible.
If you find Discord too complex, alternatives like Telegram offer a simpler interface while still providing essential features for community engagement.
This step, while optional, is highly recommended once you have a group of people you want to stay in touch with.
Establishing a dedicated space for your audience not only enhances engagement but also strengthens your connection with them, providing direct feedback and fostering a sense of belonging among members.
7. Portfolio System
Your personal website serves as a central hub for all your creative output.
It’s the ideal place to showcase your portfolio, blog posts, and digital products.
As AI technologies, such as ChatGPT, become more integrated into our lives, your website offers a valuable platform to precisely control the information AI shares about you. (it will pull from your About Me)
This makes it an excellent medium for capturing the wide range of content you produce.
Unlike newsletters, which can be a significant commitment and often require consistency in themes, your website offers flexibility.
Here, you can publish everything from mini articles to comprehensive guides.
This setup not only enhances your visibility but also gives you the freedom to explore and present a diverse array of topics, ensuring that your audience always has something new and engaging to discover.
Strategic Tips for Growth and Engagement
There are other things you will need to know if you want to become a content creator.
- Focus on One Primary Platform: While maintaining a presence on multiple platforms is beneficial, concentrate your growth efforts on one to build a strong, engaged audience.
- LinkedIn has the best odds due to the tiny ratio of people on the platform actually posting.
- Determine Your Maximum Post Rate: Find out how many posts you can manage weekly without burnout. Consistency vs yourself is more crucial than frequency.
- Be Audience-Centric: For the first few months, focus on writing for an audience rather than about yourself. Imagine you’re the “internet big sister” for your followers.
- Interactive Content Series: Start a series like “Learning to Hack in 100 Days” and invite your audience to learn alongside you. This approach not only educates but also builds community.
- Leverage Every Content Piece: Treat each short and long-form content piece as a potential “lottery ticket” that could attract new followers or clients.
- Continuous Research and Documentation: The backbone of content creation is thorough research. Document your learning process, and use tools like ChatGPT to transform your insights into valuable guides with minimal extra effort.
- Test and Learn: Experiment with various growth strategies and document the outcomes. This not only helps refine your methods but also provides genuine insights to share with your audience.
- Get Ideas from Conversations: Whenever I break down a technical concept for someone on reddit or social media, I make it a point to copy that explanation into ChatGPT. I then promptly turn it into an article, ensuring I don’t repeat the same work in the future.
- This approach allows me to effortlessly maintain and expand my knowledge base. I can then easily share these ready-made articles with newcomers, bringing them up to speed more quickly and efficiently.
Conclusion
Remember, when one teaches, two learn.
By documenting your journey and sharing your knowledge, you’re not just building an audience—you’re also refining your skills and understanding.
You’re also preserving all the knowledge contained within your legacy.
This journey into the creator economy is as much about personal fulfillment and growth as it is about financial success.
Stay curious, keep learning, and most importantly, enjoy the process.
Let me know if there’s interest in a “done-for-you” service for setting up these systems.
It’s an intricate setup, but the payoff in terms of efficiency and scalability can be immense.
Stay Curious,
Addie LaMar
