Episode 389

Where to Invest Your Time and Money as a Creator

Which end of the spectrum do you fall?

There’s a sliding scale of investing your time and money as a creator. You can either go all in with thousands of dollars upfront to get the perfect experience you’re looking for or you can invest the time and energy to do it yourself.

Either way, we need to talk about some of the most important areas of your content journey to invest your time and money as a creator so you’re making the most out of your resources.

Let’s dive into the skills that are important to look at as a creator.

Creator Skills to Invest Your Time and Money

There a are many skills you need as a content creator and business owner, but there are four specific ones we need to cover today and you should invest your time and money.

1. Editing

Whether you’re a DIY’er or outsourcing to someone else, editing your content is significant to your overall success. That doesn’t mean that you have to have the BEST editing skills out there. However, you do need to invest time into learning new tricks of the trade or hire someone that’ll make this part of content creation easy for you.

The time and money I’ve invested in learning how to edit and purchasing better software for my podcast and YouTube channel has paid off 10X. Editing is a breeze and doesn’t take me nearly as long as it did in the beginning.

2. Customer Journey

Understanding the overall customer (or audience) journey for your content is vital! You don’t want to assume that things will “work themself out” or  tell yourself “My audience isn’t big enough to think about all the fancy things bigger creator are doing.”

On the contrary, bigger creators likely grew their audience(s) thinking about the customer journey.

Here’s what I mean by the “customer journey”…

• Copywriting for your website and/or content descriptions
• Sales or Marketing Funnels
• Customer Support 
• Platforms Managing Content

After scratching the surface on customer journey in this episode, I realized I need to dedicate an entire episode to this topic. Stay tuned for a nitty-gritty version soon.

3. Practice Getting Better

“Practice makes perfect.” We all hate to hear it — probably we know it’s true. It’s annoying to hear “just practice and you’ll get better.” But, it’s true.

One of the areas most people underestimate in their content journey is just practicing. The sheer art of showing up week after week even when you’re terrible and have no idea what you’re doing.

One of the best investments of my time and money has been creating weekly episodes of The Poddy Report. Without it, I wouldn’t be able to say I’ve created more than 700+ podcast episodes for one podcast. (That’s over 1,100 podcast episodes between my two podcasts!)

4. Get Out of Your Comfort Zone

Yes, getting out of your comfort zone is a skill. The more you did it, the easier it becomes to say “yes” more than “no” in new situations.

For example, how are you going to grow your content if you stay in the same comfortable bubble? Are you never going to put yourself out there and ask to be featured in someone else’s content? Or grab the mic to guest on someone’s podcast? Or even say “yes” to speaking on stage for an industry event?

Those are all scary new things to the person who lives in their wonderfully curated little comfort zone.

To grow, you have to step out of your comfort zone.

Again, this is a place you can invest your time and money to feel more comfortable getting uncomfortable as a creator. But if you just keep doing the same thing forever, you’ll keep getting the same results.

Delegate, Outsource, or Learn

The final topic we need to cover is whether you — as the creator — need to be the one to do these particular skills. When we spoke earlier about investing, I didn’t mean you had to learn every skill a creator could ever need.

You need to decide which skills you’ll…

• Delegate to someone on your team.
• Outsource to a professional – a contractor or software.
• Learn yourself.

It’s that simple. 

You can’t (and shouldn’t) expect to do it all yourself. I rely heavily on apps and software that are much smarter than me and get the job done faster. I’ve invested my time and money in places where I don’t want to waste time and money long term. 

Every creator journey is different and, like we talked about in the beginning, there’s a sliding scale of how much time and money you can invest. But, at the end of the day, you have to make the commitment to what is most important for you and your content.

Resources to Explore

Check out these podcast episodes to help you identify opportunities for you to allocate your most precious resources, time and money:

• How to Invest in Your Podcast, “What if I gave you $1,000?”
• 4 Content Time Wasters You Can’t Afford
• How to Save Time and Money Creating Content

Video Recap of Today’s Episode: