My favorite recent quote on how to approach today’s world of social media, technology, and content in general, came from a two-time guest on my podcast, Liza Huber:
“Stop just being a consumer of everyone else’s content and start creating your own”
Liza is the founder of Sage Spoonfuls, a mother of 4, author, actor, and someone whos story in her first appearance on my podcast (Episode 113 here) received feedback like “this show literally brought tears to my eyes and inspired me in ways I never thought possible”.
Inspired to Create
I’ve been lucky enough to work with amazing content creators over the years. It ramped up quite a bit after my first time asking Angelo Luciani, leader of the Toronto VMUG at the time, whether he needed help. The response was “absolutely!” and that turned into a lifelong friendship and also a chance to meet and become close friends with Mike Preston, a fellow blogger who also began helping out with the VMUG.
Seeing our content being referenced in meetings and hearing feedback that it was helping people out in their day-to-day work inspired me to go from just idly generating content when the mood struck me to approaching it as a real career opportunity and a chance to help more people through content creation.
With a new focus on content creation, I’m no longer just a consumer of information – now I’m also creating something valuable that’s helping others out. This also led to exciting ways to meet new people and grow my community of people to include so many people that I almost can’t believe what an impact it’s had on my life.
It turns out that all this community content creation would become what we call “Content Marketing” now and resulted in many of my peers (myself included) making the jump to technology vendors as technical marketers and content creators as part of a career.
#30in30 – The Beginning
My wife has always been such a fantastic supporter, inspiration, and a content creator herself. She introduced me to this program called NaNoWriMo that turns the month of November into a content marathon but also inspires incredible outcomes as a result.
We started what we called #30in30 in 2015 which was a “30 blogs in 30 days” program also run in November as a throwback to the NaNoWriMo community. We’ve since inspired dozens of others to join in and this became a real challenge and an inspiration of what we can do to help others become creators rather than just consumers of content.
#100DaysOfContent
Today I’m starting what I call #100DaysOfContent. The source comes from #100DaysOfCode which is a program to have people code every day for 100 days and to log the results. It’s a great way to learn.
But what about non-coders like me who want to still create something?
This is a way to create something for 100 days and see what happens. I hope you’ll join me, share your content on social media with the hashtag #100DaysOfContent, and let’s put ourselves out there every day in order to be creators.
Just like coding has become an important skill as our lives race forward, being creators is a way to push ourselves to new heights, learn new skills, and connect with a broader and more supportive community to inspire others as well as ourselves.
Rules of #100DaysOfContent
There really aren’t rules. Think of these as guidelines to work within:
- Any content counts (e.g. blog, novel content, documentation, GitHub README, website content, email newsletter, whitepaper, datasheet, video blog, podcast)
- Create something, every day, for 100 days and share your results (if you have public links especially) using the hashtag #100DaysOfContent
- Share your journey with others and if you miss some days, just start back up when you can – it’s a journey, not a race
Tim Ferriss once wrote a fantastic blog about his writing process which was about his wriiting process and included part of an interview with Neil Strauss where Neil shared his simple process of writing “Two crappy pages a day” at a minimum to kick start his creative mind.
Much like the great Tim Ferriss, you don’t have to be a content genius from day one. You can just write two crappy pages per day and build up your discipline over time with consistent practice. All it takes is small steps in the right direction each day.
I hope this helps! Let’s find the creator in all of us together!
p.s. I’ll be setting up some Twitter amplification for the content you share using #100DaysOfContent as the hashtag, so be sure to share out what you can.