Everyone online is telling you how to create content. Check the search insights. Use trending audio. Here’s a list of forty hooks. Use hashtags, no wait, don’t use hashtags, use SEO instead. Post this, then post a story about it. Use my exact strategy and gain 10k followers in 30 days.
Just. Stop ✋
Don’t get me wrong, I love creating content. I love it as a creative outlet, I love it when people make it as a side hustle, I love it for people who made a full time career from it. But trying to keep up with social media, the shifting algorithms, the trending audio, the ‘new strategy’ that appears every other week? That is what’s draining to me.
I could only keep up with posting on social media consistently for 60 days
A while back I ran an art account. I posted something at least once a day, and slowly built momentum. My main goal of the account was to start building an audience for my art and hopefully getting some freelance projects from it.
I don’t know how I kept up with the schedule. I was creating new art, posting it, repurposing whatever I could, and trying to make more new art. The cycle was endless…until I burned out at day 60.
I know that’s not a long time in the grand scheme of things, but I knew something was wrong when I started resenting the thing I used to love, which was being creative and making new art.
I genuinely don’t know how people sustain it for a year, let alone longer. While I was in the middle of it, I kept wondering what their secret was. What did these successful creators know that I didn’t?
Eventually I realized the answer wasn’t a secret at all. It wasn’t a strategy, a batching system, a specific hook formula, or a particular kind of visual. The thing that kept people going for years was much simpler: they genuinely loved the process of creating content in that specific format, which was on social media. And I didn’t.
That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should.
The many hats of a solo creator
When you’re first trying to build an audience on social media, you are a team of one.
You plan according to whatever the “best strategy” you just learned online on how to grow on social media. You prepare, which in my case meant spending up to 8 hours making the actual art piece. You film, hoping you’re in focus, taking ten shots of the same five seconds. You edit through dozens of clips. Then oh crap you remember that the video editing software subscription is due again. Then, you spend an unreasonable amount of time writing the perfect caption and picking the trending song that somehow would make you go viral. And then you post that 20-second video people either watch once or swipe past in 5 seconds.
You gain some validation through a couple of likes, and yay! someone followed me! Then you repeat. Video after video.
And maybe this is the part where you also starting to ask yourself… why are you putting yourself through this.
This whole process truly wasn’t for me. But here’s the part that confused me for a while: I still loved creating content. Every day since I stepped off the hamster wheel, new ideas have kept popping up in my head. It’s a stark contrast to before, when I felt like my creativity was at absolute zero. It was like an itch I couldn’t stop scratching, even though I’d quit the platform.
When the spark and creativity came back
A few weeks before writing this, I saw a YouTube video on blogging, and something clicked. The same instinct and creative side of me came alive.
To be honest, I’d actually tried blogging once before, about six years ago. Back then, I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t know how to code, I didn’t understand WordPress, and the whole thing felt clunky and unapproachable. I never figured out how to truly start, let alone keep going, so yes, I did give up.
This time was different, mostly because I’m different. I’ve not only know more about writing and content creation, but I also became a web designer by day, so I know my way around website builders. After researching through all the platforms to blog on, I settled on Showit, which is what this website you’re reading is built on!
If I had to describe Showit in one sentence: it designs like Canva. You just drag and drop, design your site exactly how you want. But what sold me was the backend power of WordPress and its plugins if you go for the higher tiers.
It’s been the smoothest website building process I’ve had. Some parts are still complex, like connecting things to WordPress on the backend, or figuring out the technical pieces behind a specific design I want.
Sometimes, creating a blog feels like a complex puzzle, but unlike social media, nothing beats the satisfaction of putting these pieces together. On the social media algorithm, the rules and trends change every week; here, once the puzzle is solved, it stays solved. I’m still learning as I go, but the resources available from Showit themselves are current and the support has genuinely been helpful.
🧚🏻♀️ Side note: I genuinely love Showit. If you’re feeling the need to test out creating a website and blogging yourself, you can use my referral link to start your first month completely free. No pressure at all, I just wanted to pass this along as I also started with this perk hehe!
I set up the blog a week ago, and now I’m challenging myself to post every day. I am also still wearing a lot of hats, from designing and building the website, to drafting and editing the blog articles. But compared to how social media felt, this feels like the kind of content creation that’s actually mine.
So what kind of creator are you?
Here’s what I’ve learned. Content creation didn’t burn me out. Chasing a format that didn’t fit me did.
If you’ve tried to build a presence on social media and felt the joy drain out of it, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re not cut out for content creation. It might mean you’re creating in a format where your motivation and creativity can’t thrive.
To run a quick self-audit, ask yourself these questions:
- Do you enjoy the planning and writing more than filming or talking to the camera?
- Would you rather spend a few hours a day to get one blog article right, than reshoot something for the tenth time to get the perfect shot?
- Are you after something that can be revisited months and years down the line, rather than something built for trends and the viral moment?
If that sounds like you, creating written content like blogging might be for you, even if you’ve never written one before.
That’s not to say blogging is the easy way out. It comes with its own learning curve, its own technical headaches, its own version of “why won’t this work the way I pictured it.” It’s just a different kind of hard, one that happens to match how I want to spend my time and energy on.
All in all, there is no one “right platform” to be consistent on. The goal should never be to create for the sake of creating and consistency. It is to find the format that makes you want to keep showing up. That’s the only strategy that actually lasts.
