February 1, 2022

Welcome to The Tilt, a twice-weekly newsletter for content entrepreneurs. Each edition is packed with the latest news, strategies, and tactics, plus inspiring creator stories and exclusive education, all to help you create, grow, and monetize better.

Features in this issue (view online):

Full Tilt: Content Strategy Informed by Data
Entrepreneur: Nonsense & Nostalgia Pivot
Stan: The Ruslan KD Experience

full tilt

Creators Should Use Data to Drive Your Content Strategy

Whether you’re just starting a content business or are deep into it, knowing what is working with your content and what isn’t is critical in order to know where to put your efforts. Data can help you find those insights to ensure that your time is being used most effectively.

The endgame with your data is to track metrics that let you know how your content is performing against your strategic objectives.

Where do I start? Sometimes referred to as “vanity metrics,” the obvious elements are the easiest places to start. In Google Analytics, these include page views, time on site, bounce rate, etc. In social media, these are followers, impressions, likes, etc. In newsletters, it’s open rates, click rates, etc. It’s really all the easy-to-find metrics on the platform where your content lives.

However, it’s not enough to just look at those metrics. You need to document them. Start a spreadsheet and add those metrics each week. If you have historical data in your analytics accounts, add the data from a few weeks or months earlier.

Where do I find insights in my data? Your data-informed insights will come from looking for trends and anomalies. Look for patterns or extreme highs or lows. Scrutinize potentially related metrics or delve deeper into the causes of the anomaly.

How do I start a deep dive into my analytics? Once you start tracking and analyzing your data, you’ll see other pieces of information that would be helpful. The exact data that lead to your biggest insights will depend on your goals, your channels, and your ability to look at several factors at once. You may need to use other analytics tools to track the metrics you want.

What analytics do I track in Web3? The Web3 landscape is developing and evolving every day. As creators looking to grow the creator economy, we need to track growth and performance across our content channels. We also need to track community growth since our community is the key to our success. You need to know what actions create a larger community, which channels drive converts a visitor to a community member, and which conversations create the most engagement.

Whether you’re blogging, tweeting, podcasting, or building a community, consistently looking at your data will help you figure out the best place to spend your time to ensure the greatest results from your efforts.

– Brian Piper

To get examples and more advice, read the longer story.

content entrepreneur spotlight

From Radio Host to Podcast Host With Thousands of Downloads Per Episode

Entrepreneur: Loren Raye

Biz: Nonsense & Nostalgia podcast and Loren Raye

Tilt: Unfiltered motherhood

Primary Channel: Podcast (thousands of downloads per episode) and Instagram (15.2K)

Other Channels: Twitter (25.4K)

Time to First Dollar: Few months

Rev Streams: Voiceovers, sponsored podcast content, sponsored Instagram content, IG Reels bonus program

Our Favorite Actionable Advice:

Do what you know: By drawing on her strengths gained from her radio work, Loren is building a content career with a podcast and a social account sharing her life.
Have a hosting plan: Podcasts or videos with two (or more) hosts can be problematic if one person isn’t in control. Loren and her podcast partner assign hosting duties for each episode.
Implement a friends-and-family sponsor plan: Finding sponsors can be challenging. Start with people who are familiar with you and/or what you are creating.

– Bonnie Azoulay Elmann

All the Story: To hear more from Loren and her content evolution, check out the longer story.

Know a content creator who’s going full tilt? DM us. Or email [email protected].

quick talk

Caught on … Twitter

“Small steps taken daily, lead to incredible results over time.” – Pranav

things to know

Money

Striping podcasts: Stripe is the new payment infrastructure for Spotify podcasters. They will help creators accept payments, launch recurring revenue streams, convert global currencies, and more. (Stripe)
Tilt Take: Stripe’s involvement in the creator industry seems much bigger than Spotify. That knowledge should be helpful to podcasters on the audio platform.
Take the time: “Success as a professional creator requires a level of patience and fortitude that only a tiny percent at the top of the power-law distribution have. This is good. There is a clear path to creator success built on a very simple idea: Don’t give up.” (Idea Economy)
Tilt Take: That’s one of the secret ingredients to building a profitable content business.

Audiences

Social business: Every social media account should have a target audience (that operates on that platform), strategy, goal, and clear metric of success. (Inc.)
Tilt Take: Newbies and experienced creators should follow this advice for every initiative, social or not.
Popular advice: To decide on video topics, understand demand using Google Trends, audience polls, YouTube Analytics. Create an audience profile detailing who they are and what they love to watch, using the audience tab in YouTube Analytics. (Search Engine Journal)
Tilt Take: Great advice from YouTube’s Creator Studio that can work for non-video creators, too.

Tech and Tools

Thread up: Alex Garcia has treated his Twitter account as if it was his blog, crafting 60+ topical threads. This year, he takes the next step, turning those threads into blog posts optimized for search. (Marketing Examined)
Tilt Take: Don’t stick to only publishing Twitter threads for too long. You may get followers, but you’ll miss SEO and conversion opportunities.
Mashed up: A graphic design trend for ’22? Anti-design: an anything-goes style of clashing colors, types, irregular shapes, and jarring collages. (Creative Bloq)
Tilt Take: If this trend is popular, we hope it doesn’t last long.

And Finally

Shinier apple: Spotify honored Neil Young’s request to remove his music on the platform that allows Joe Rogan and COVID misinformation. Now, Apple is taking a shine to the news, promoting itself as “The home of Neil Young.” (The Verge)
Tilt Take: Being a creator on a platform means you are in the company of creators who may promote or advocate that which you do not believe or tolerate. That won’t happen on a platform you own and control.
What’s in a name?: Influencers and digital creators are not synonymous. The job of influencers is to get their followers to do or buy something based on what the influencer does or buys. Professional creators create and distribute content to engage their audience. (Sprout Social; h/t Two Rivers Marketing)
Tilt Take: Creators can have more revenue streams, such as subscriptions, than influencers because they don’t view their audience relationship as transactional.

we’re a stan for Ruslan

Spoken-word expert, debt-free entrepreneur, and hip-hop artist are all words used to describe creator Ruslan Karaoglanov. The CEO of Kings Dream Entertainment uses his platform on YouTube to empower content creators to grow their craft and improve their lives.

Ruslan incorporates a lot of faith-based ideology onto his YouTube channel (119K) and podcast, The Ruslan KD Experience. The creator also made a content expansion, uploading clips of him detailing the path to financial freedom, and YouTube subscriber growth for younger men.

Why we’re a Stan: Ruslan has a clearly identified content tilt – speaking to men on how they can improve their lives from a Christian lens. That clear vision helps his target audience see how his content is relevant to them.

– Shameyka McCalman

the business of content

5 Mistakes Businesses Make with Content (Content Inc.)
Influencer or Content Creator? Survey says … (This Old Marketing)
SBA Partners To Launch Small Business Digital Alliance (Small Business Trends)
Ways To Negotiate The First Stage of Small Business Growth (Forbes)
Google Cloud Is Making Changes To Help Startups Grow (Tech Radar)

the tilt team

Your team for this issue: Joe Pulizzi, Ann Gynn, Laura Kozak, Marc Maxhimer, and Dave Anthony, with an assist from Angelina Kaminski, Brian Piper, Bonnie Azoulay Elmann, Shameyka McCalman, and Don Borger.

Data Game – February 1, 2022