What I've learned and what I'm continuing to learn
I'm a long term fan of skillshare.com, it's a tutorial site much like lynda.com but more customizable and geared towards creatives. It's a great source of knowledge if you're already in creative and simply looking to expand. If you haven't guessed where I'm going with this yet, I'll lay it out for you. I'm learning from a Content Marketing Masterclass on skillshare. It's super in-depth; 81 episodes and I'm only on 35!
The course has been super helpful in learning about the field. This blog is basically just going to be my notes on what I've learned and what I'm hoping to learn. To begin with, I started this class with the goal of not just understanding the field more, but also hopefully setting myself up to create my own roadmap to help my stream be more successful.
So far, the course is doing a really great job of informing me about the different types of content. The teacher, Brad Merill, has covered a crazy amount of content types that I've never even thought about. Lists + roundups, interviews, tutorials, news, and more have been covered in the most recent parts of the course. These are all ways of helping drive traffic so it helps to have a place to send your audience to. In my case, its either this website (which houses my portfolio and personal blog) or my twitch stream (which is what I really want to focus on).
We've also covered a few wonderful ways to start generating content. I generally advise people to just dive in and go, but this can be intimidating. I really enjoyed the short video titled "Creation Begins With Consumption". It's something that I continually do as a designer and I'm sure my marketing coworkers will agree, it's important, but it's also a fun part of the job. Some of the sites I look towards include the obvious (facebook, instagram, twitter, pinterest) but also more designer oriented sites including Medium and Designspiration. Awwwards and Behance are also great sites to look for fresh design. If you're more into photography, check out Unsplash.
I'm currently getting into the part of the class that I really want to learn about. "Creating an Endless Stream of Content" or in my case, creating consistently and covering a variety of mediums. Part 1 has been repurposing. This is pretty easy to do for my blog, I can take my already created content and turn it into a video or audio blog. But it's much harder for me to do this with my stream. One of the ways I could possible touch on this would be really heavily utilizing youtube and instagram to show highlights and past streams. Another thing that I could do is quoting myself for facebook or twitter and linking back to the stream. This type of content could quickly and easily drive a lot of people to my channel with minimal effort on my part. It's definitely something I'm going to have to add to my plan.
As I continue to go through the class, slowly but surely, I'll be posting more articles. So be sure to stay tuned by signing up for email updates. If you aren't convinced yet, I'll just say it's a great way to stay up to date and contact me :)