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Right now, many people are likely to be facing the same dilemma.  On the one hand, they want to keep side hustles as a safety net. 

On the other hand, they now have limited time to devote to them outside of work and other responsibilities.  One potential solution is to side-hustle as a content creator to earn semi-passive income.

The realities of content creation

To be a success at content creation, you need to be able to inform, entertain and/or inspire.  It’s great if you can hit two (or even three) out of three.  You can, however, do perfectly well as long as you can hit one.  One key point to remember, however, is that you need to be able to hit it consistently as most content creation is semi-passive income rather than truly passive income.

What that means in practice is that you can create a piece of content once and potentially earn an income from it over an extended period.  In general, however, you are unlikely to earn a meaningful, long-term income from just one piece of content.  You will therefore need to keep producing fresh content to keep topping up your income streams.

Choosing the right platform

There are four basic formats you can use for content creation.  These are text, audio, images and video.  You can and probably will “mix and match” these to some extent.  For example, you may put images and/or video clips in a blog post.  In general, however, you’ll typically have one “core” format and top it up with other formats as appropriate.

One point to keep in mind is that video can be used to deliver audio content.  This is often done on YouTube as YouTube has a relatively easy route to monetization.  That said, there are downsides to this approach.  Firstly, it requires much more bandwidth to stream video as compared to audio.  This can be a turn-off for some potential customers.

Secondly, and arguably more importantly, working on sites like YouTube means that you’re basing your income on a platform you don’t control.  This is very risky.  The safer option is to have your own community platform and your own choice of monetization strategies.  For example, you can generate revenue by selling member subscriptions.

Choosing the right topic

There are really only two requirements for a topic.  Firstly, you have to be genuinely interested in it.  Secondly, you have to be knowledgeable about it and/or be prepared to learn about it.  Of course, you’re a lot more likely to commit to learning about a topic if you’re actually interested in it to begin with.

Having a genuine passion for a topic is far more important than finding a topic with a high volume of traffic.  In fact, looking for high-volume topics can actually create more problems than it solves.  The reason for this is that high-volume topics, by definition, have a lot of content.  This makes it a lot harder to stand out from the crowd.

If you’re sincerely interested in a high-volume topic then generally the best approach is to niche down.  For example, if you’re enthusiastic about CBD, don’t just create content about CBD in general.  Pick a specific use of CBD and create content about that.  Once you’ve established your credentials, then you can expand and grow.

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