In this week’s Monday Meditation, I am going to share with you a hard lesson that I learned about content creation. I try not to write from the point of view of “don’t do what I did”, and only be proactive, but an innocent tweet got me thinking about the importance of creating content.

NEVER STOP PUMPING OUT CONTENT

Here is a tweet sent out last Friday by one of my favorite Twitter peeps, Scott Stratten of un-marketing.com - @unmarketing on Twitter:

“Community, sponsor, content. Content builds community, sponsors want ur community”

Gary Vaynerchuk, author of Crush It, also stresses the importance of content creation as the foundation of building community online.

When I first started my career as an artist, I instinctively knew that content is king. With no education and no money, I knew that I would have the edge if I was more prolific than the other guy. I pumped out photocopied comic books like crazy, and quickly developed a style, an audience, and a modest business.

DON’T REST ON YOUR LAURELS

But then my first taste of real success came. I signed a development deal with a production company for a TV show, entered into a publication agreement with a comic book publisher, and went to work for a late night TV show helping them launch a spin-off comic book and rebranding the show for the web.

Surprisingly, all of these deals brought my content creation and being prolific to a halt, costing me time and ruining my momentum.

The comic book publisher delayed and delayed and delayed and then went out of business before anything by me got published. The network wanted to see another edition of my underground cinema event, but the production company spent a year writing Word documents. Working on the late night TV show, a lethargic and complacent corporate culture meant that I only got to do about a quarter of what I was hired to do.

For the two years that all of this was going on, I wasn’t sharing my vision, nor creating content around my passion. I was caught up in other people’s schedules, other people’s priorities, and other people’s goals, instead of continuing to do what attracted those opportunities to me in the first place. I was sacrificing my momentum and the community I had built, putting my success in other people’s hands. I treated my business like the game was over and I had won.

I learned the hard way that it never gets easy.

In fact, the demands on your creativity and problem-solving increase with the scope of your challenges.

This is why it’s so important to create content around what you’re passionate about – you need that high level of passion to get you through when it gets really tough. Lucky for me that I’m so stubborn and single-minded about being an artist.

Tags: advice, blog, content, creative process, creativity, me, rant