Starting Out

The modern landscape of content creation is pretty wackadoo, to use a technical term. Pretty much every major platform where you could start building an audience is working to become the only platform where you have your audience. Meanwhile, other platforms are copying every bit of functionality from each other, leaving you as a single creator trying to figure out where, what, and how to Post Things Online.

And all you wanted to do was make a silly video. Sigh.

Pick a Solid Starter

The first thing you should be doing is focusing on the content itself. Put some thought into the platform you want to dig into first, but focus primarily on just making good stuff.

The goal here is to figure out your process, find a sustainable way to post consistently, and begin building some kind of feedback loop. An audience is something that takes a LONG time to build, so don't focus on "building an audience" first.

By feedback loop, I mean some way to post stuff and see if its working or not. Even just a few more views or likes than usual is noteworthy. When I started posting TikToks, they would get maybe a few dozen or few hundred views. Hell, that still happens sometimes. But do it consistently for days, weeks, months, and you'll start to get a sense of direction.

Don't start on Twitch. Don't do that. Stop it. Knock it off. Or do. I'm not your dad. But if your goal is to grow as a creator, starting on Twitch is a great way to absolutely not do that. Instead, start somewhere else, grow your audience, and start streaming later on.

Don't Sweat Gear

A lot of the gear I've listed in my other guides are more higher level stuff like dedicated camera equipment and high quality mics. The truth is that if you're reading this, the device you're using to do that is probably plenty capable of producing simple content to get started.

If you have a somewhat modern phone (like, past ten years), its primary camera is likely plenty good enough to record stuff.

Meanwhile, fancy lighting rigs and ring lights and such are only really necessary if you can't otherwise get some kind of decent lighting going on. I spent more or less the first year of my content creation just using the light from a window for my light source, and while it meant I had a lot of variation in my light, it still looked fine enough.

But Audio Tho

I genuinely believe that the two best things you can do for retention right now are of course a good hook for your content, but then also just having halfway decent audio in your final edit.

This is something the vast majority of people posting videos online don't even think about. Mostly they don't have to! They're just recording themselves with a selfie cam and hitting "post." That's perfectly fine and good for their use case, but if you want to focus on making quality content, you're gonna want to learn some audio editing basics.

Consider Audio While Recording

Especially if you're just using your phone's camera and build-in mic, you should think about the audio just as much as you think about the visual framing of the video.

Is the room you're in echoey? Are you far from the mic, and therefore kinda quiet? Try to find a space that minimizes echo and reverb. Speak loudly, proudly and clearly. That'll also help a ton with generating captions.

Fix It Up In Post

Not everything can be solved before recording though. If you want to go the extra mile, check out either the audio editor interface of your video editing software, or load up the recorded audio into some free audio editor like Audacity.

There's a ton of great tutorials on YouTube for tweaking audio. The things you'll wanna learn first are just a simple EQ, Compressor, and possibly Limiter.

In short:

• EQ: Tweak the volumes of different frequencies in the audio to emphasize lower, mid, or high tones
• Compressor: Crunch down the variance of loud parts of the recording to make the whole thing a bit more tame
• Limiter: Prevent the volume from spiking too high

You can look up tutorials for simple audio editing with those three parts. I also recommend just loading up an audio editor, importing some recording, and just playing around with all the dials and knobs for EQ, Compression, and Limiters. Listen to how they change the audio. You probably know what a high quality audio recording sounds like, so just keep moving the knobs around until it sounds better to your ear.

It's a learning process, and you'll mess up a lot. I did, and still do plenty. But keep at it.