Sharing is caring. I care about you. So I would like to share with you my first taste of blogging and online marketing. One month of experience is not a lot, but trust me, if you are to a be content creator of any sort in the future, I will tell you this: It's not easy, especially if this is not your profession.
But I am intrinsically happy about the experience for that I know that I have made my first step on the path of content creation. I really haven't been active on social media for the past couple of years. Frankly speaking, it could have been much worse.
Turns out people do show genuine interests in what you have to offer... until you disappoint them with meaningless, recycled ideas.
Before I share with you what I have learned in the past 4 weeks, I would love to take this opportunity to THANK YOU for the your patience with my general clumsiness on social platforms. Haha (Chuckle nervously).
The last thing I want to announce before I give away my insights is this.
My goal is to find a niche and stick to it. Give me some ideas! Maybe I will come up with a number of themed series. The general idea is to make my blog more relevant and easier for you to navigate through. I am in need of your suggestions and advice.
Alright, enough me.
A promise is a promise. It's sharing time.
In the past, I always reinforced my learnings and beliefs with the insights I gained from my personal experience. It was done through intuition and discussion amongst peers. Well, I would say that there is nothing wrong with that since most people do that (not a very good argument, but well).
But it is different this time. I know that I know through the insights - numbers I gained from website analytics and it is a completely different level of knowledge. I am genuinely surprised by how much I can learn from blogging.
The following are the five validated assumptions which I think are important to anyone who is thinking about starting an online business or simply having a better personal branding online.
1. People are tuned to react to new things;
In the era of never-ending scrolling, people are used to seeing an abundance of new ideas. If your post or copy or content does not look like it is new, people simply are not interested, because deep down they know that the dopamine-triggering post of the day is probably just 10 scrolls away anyway. It is no wonder why my blog post titled 'The Power of Cathedral Thinking' gained the most views over time. No one really knew what it was. Being new is the quality needed to attract eyeballs online. New is the new interesting.
2. What's outside is as important as, if not more important than what's inside;
I hear people debating on this all the time. The truth is that any sustained online success will have to come from both strong marketing (outside) and solid content (inside). The optimum result often comes from a solution which takes the best of several extremes, in this case, the importance of outward-facing and inward-facing qualities. Just observe and you will see. The competition for your attention is growing fiercely, because your attention is becoming more valuable financially. If you cannot outcompete others in marketing, you have no chance of outcompeting them in content quality.
3. People behave differently on different social platforms;
Don't mind me if this sounds silly to you, but this is probably the most surprising fact to me. For far too long I have focussed on solving thermodynamics problems.
When I used better graphics, it seemed like the views increased more on Facebook than on Instagram. I cannot tell you how different people behave precisely, but it definitely feels like they are more attracted to nice-looking covers on Facebook than on Instagram, which is kind of counter-intuitive given that Instagram is more visual. My theory is that Instagram users are inherently more engaging than Facebook users because visual content is easier to consume than words, which means it is less incentivised to produce nice graphics on Instagram than on Facebook.
On the other hand, LinkedIn is something special. It is normally caption-focussed and its users normally jump on hard truths and demonstrated boldness. Talk about reverse psychology huh.
4. Quality feedback is difficult to obtain, and is therefore precious and worth sought after;
Most people will not take the initiative to give you the feedback you need and deserve even after your content has provided something valuable to them. I don't blame them. Online content is marked free for a reason. People choose whether they want to do something or nothing about it.
So that's the more reason why any serious online content creators will have to learn how to collect feedback. Through direct comparisons and built-in data analytics, I am learning the effects of various styles of copies and graphics. A/B testing where two or more variants of a page are shown to random viewers seems like the the next logical step to take. More updates on this will likely be given in the future.
5. It is hard to produce consistently good quality content. Consistency is everything.
Coming up with fresh ideas every week is no easy feat. Quite a lot of thinking and reflections have to be done before you can generate any form of content. Trust me, the effort is no joke. Learning from my past 20 plus years' of experience, the assimilated wisdom is that compound effect does kick in after a long period of sustained effort. So I am happy to discipline myself into writing a blog post every week and what's left to do is to harness the power of believe. I guess you will still see me for quite some time.
In terms of quality, I am very much aware that poor content drives viewers away. In order to improve and maintain the quality of my blog, I am constantly looking for feedback from my connections on social platforms and learning how to be a better copywriter through online course. Again, no easy task.
Regardless of what type of careers you are in, to achieve long-term gain, you have to build your momentum. Consistency is E-VE-RY-THING.
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And that's all I have to share this week. Thanks for checking in.
Don't forget that I need your advice and suggestions on what's next for my blog!
I am looking forward to another week of exciting learning. I hope you are, too.
Peace out.
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