the thing that has kept me in a very strong position from the earliest wine videos i made to what i'm gonna do tomorrow is i have never talked about something i don't know ever first of all it's a real pleasure um you know i think content creation and all of you are in it so a lot of this stuff will make sense but i think the first thing that i think about always is self-awareness i think the biggest issue for content creators is them being inspired by someone else and then them subconsciously not even consciously subconsciously trying to be like that person which is an incredibly difficult task because every one of us in this room me included have strength and weaknesses in their ability to create content so i think there's a couple things to think about one your own self-awareness of what you're good at for example i'll give you one i think the concept of writing content is like forgotten in a visual world yet i can tell you that some of my written content on linkedin is dramatically more profound and does well than my clips on tiktok or instagram and there may be people in this room whose strongest method of communication is actually in written form yet the push towards short form video or images make them work on that when they're deviating from a strength so i think first and foremost what i think about is a couple things and they're all in the form of transparency and self-awareness one what are you best at communicating is it audio video written form two the thing that has kept me in a very strong position from the earliest wine videos i made to what i'm gonna do tomorrow is i have never talked about something i don't know ever i think when you're a content creator you feel pressure to output and when you feel pressure to output you can get very caught to start talking or creating around something you may not fully understand a lot of people come and go and there's some very clear truths to having success and i think it's one understanding your format while still trying to challenge yourself you may be better at writing it's still good to try to be better at video but it's not crippling yourself and thinking you can only be successful if you do video two do not deviate from your knowledge now that doesn't mean going like look at me i'm talking about nfts i spent 100 hours of research before i made my first video but putting in the work to be able to talk about something new is very important the quickest way i've seen people lose is by being too quick to talk about things they don't know very important number three a very big thing for everybody to keep in mind here do not fall in love with the platform that got you there a very big thing that i've seen consistent in the last 15 years is twitter was your strong platform here came instagram and you didn't want instagram to become big because you didn't want to start over and build up your following count so many and this is going to make sense for all of you so many leaders on instagram made a huge mistake by not adopting tick tock right they didn't want to because they had all their followers constant mistake being too romantic about platform and not adjusting to where the attention is actually going those are some themes that i would give a lot of thought [Music] you know the way you do it is a couple different ways one i think that a lot of people get hurt by the ideology of perfection so i think one of the reasons long before i had drock or a team i was able to buy myself while running businesses be active on every platform is because i didn't ideologically think about every single piece of content i think when you're trying to make every piece perfect for yourself perfection is usually just another word for insecurity you know everyone's overthinking it and so one it's to feel comfortable with that number two is to be okay with not being on six platforms you know i think sometimes we feel too much pressure to be everywhere i talk about it like be everywhere post a lot a lot of people can't manage that and that's okay i believe it has to do with insecurity of success of the piece of content the biggest reason people didn't go to tick tock when they were winning on instagram was they didn't have the humility and the self-confidence to not be successful on tick-tock immediately so i think the biggest reason people don't produce is more of a mental game then it's not hard to produce content for six platforms it's really not you can do it it's that people fear lack of success in numbers from a vanity standpoint which stopped them from actually doing it so i think humility humility is one of the true superpowers of a scaled influencer or content creator being okay with starting at zero or being okay if the content's not doing great i'll give you another i mean for example with me on tick tock even though i know it's the most important platform i don't have the time to produce original tick tocks so i know my post produced content doesn't maximize my ability to win on tick tock but i'd rather still put out stuff and get what i can than be insecure that i'm only getting 50 000 views on a tick tock when i have 13 million followers that doesn't register to me as a negative for too many people it does register as a negative the case globally it's a huge mistake it tick-tock is eating up the attention of the consumer by the second to to be a content creator like like to be in this room and to not be producing content for tick tock is virtually unacceptable i mean if you're a content producer that's just a cr especially all the different ways that tik tok now makes it easy to make content voice-overs image like there's it's you're you're also making a very important mistake if you're not doing it tick-tock is based on the interest graph not on the social graph what i mean by that is as many of you know tick tock puts content in front of you based on what you're interested in not who you follow this is a very important insight for everybody here as ai and algorithms continue to increase that is a much stickier way of doing content than following people by not making tick tocks right now you're not getting the practice of understanding the interest craft which would 100 going to be the way the next platform is built and so you're not getting accustomed to that format which is almost like not running on a treadmill before you have to run a marathon so another reason tic tocs incredibly important is it's prepping you for the next iteration and by not doing it you're getting even further behind as a content creator because your brain starts going into interest graph creation which is very important so when tick tock was first popping and i was making content because i was making content when it was musically before even the tick tock acquisition a lot of people were like what are you doing this is for 13 year old girls dancing and i'm like it's not it is now but facebook was only for college kids and instagram was just for photographers platforms evolve i think that yes it's important to be contextual to the platform but not at the expense of your authenticity so i'd rather you deliver the way you would deliver on twitter and linkedin on tiktok and let the chips fall where they may than for you to not be who you are at the same token there is very much creative ways to deliver serious information on tick tock and i think there are countless examples of that um and so i i think that yes i think you should be contextual to a platform but not at the expense of the content you don't have to dumb it down you have to make it contextual to tik-tok to do it diversifying your income streams is always a good strategy is always a good stress yeah of course now having the capacity or back to some of the subjects that you just mentioned some individuals here content is more conducive to other revenue streams if you've got a health and wellness platform it's easier for you to sell a health and wellness product than let's say being a doctor like but subscription products of premium content is always in play for people that i think a lot of people don't think about instantaneously but yeah i mean creating as many revenue streams as possible is always a good idea the problem is it's back to content and platform you have to actually be decent at it like if you're going to sell a product the product needs to be good or you're not going to have repeat business and that's not a viable business so i think you know we started with this and i'll bring it up again with revenue uh self-awareness is very important you know if you don't have any passion for creating a product well then it's probably a bad idea to create a product and so i think um but but yes i mean i think relying on brand deals is fine because there's so many businesses and they'll potentially always be opportunities but the more you can control it the more interesting it is which is why i think so many creators eventually go to their own product one of the things as creators we think about is how do we sustain for a long period of time because people may get bored there's many different ways to talk about this first of all i once took a two and a half year gap of producing any content two and a half years so for five years i did wine content from 2006 to 2011 and then it and then in 2014 i started the askgaryvee show that's a long gap so i think a lot of times we beat each other up you beat yourself up for not producing content i'm potentially one of the most prolific content creators of the last decade and i once took almost three years where i made almost no content so i hope that gives everyone a sense of relief that if you have a bad week or even a bad month it doesn't mean the end of your content career that's number one number two notice what i came back and did after five years of doing wine content and not doing content for three years the content pillar that i decided to do was a q a format why did i do that because i needed the audience to be a contributor to the content creation i think one of the great mistakes that a lot of people make is they don't incorporate their audience as a potential starter to creative it is an amazing training wheels setup chess move putting you halfway home incorporating your audience to being a starting point to more content is something more people need to do q and a's answering questions interactions [Music] and then finally i'm a very big believer in what i do with drock like filming your day-to-day is an incredible way to scale content the other thing i did was i did a ton of podcasts and shows that had very small audiences just to be on the receiving end of questions so that i would have content so literally dming small podcasts and saying hey you know if you'd like to interview me and you know as you're evolving through your careers that's a good get for a small podcast so it's good for them but it's also good for you because you can post produce the creative and q what's amazing about q a is the questions take you to places you won't take yourself so those are some things to think about i view that content is the oxygen that creates awareness around what you're doing so to your point if you stop creating to do something you in essence are turning off the oxygen of what you're doing so the reason i have continuously content created even though i've gotten remarkably busier in my time is because i agree with that i think once you stop creating you become less vulnerable oprah winfrey businesses are not as impactful today as they were a decade ago because she doesn't have a show that's just real life and so yeah i'm i'm a believer that at all costs as a matter of fact one of my biggest anxiety points professionally is that because now befriends is so successful in taking up my time while i still have to run vayner vaynerx the thing that you know we only have so much time in the day the biggest casualty to the huge success that i have in nft land is my content i am definitely in a different output place i mean i went seven eight years without putting out four pieces of content on my instagram every day and now i get two a day and that's like a big day and that adds up and so i'm i'm conscious of that i think about that [Music]