These 5 tiny habits made content creation easy

0:00So, most beginner content creators assume that working harder will make you grow [music] faster. They think if you post 10 times a day or spend hours engaging in the comment section or send dozens and dozens of pitches to the brands that you want to work with, that that will turn you into a full-time content creator. I am very pleased to inform you that those strategies are not essential to you growing an audience on social media and actually, it can be a lot easier than that. Look, creating content and growing a community online is always going to take work. I would never try to convince you otherwise no hack that can make you

0:30a full-time creator overnight. However, there are several habits that I have learned over the years of being a full-time creator that can help make content creation [music] easier for you. Starting with number one, film before you have ideas. Instead of waiting for your next perfect content idea to come along, start capturing [music] the daily moments of your life first. Otherwise known as building your own B-roll library. I've had my own personal stock footage/B-roll library for years now. I actually have a horizontal version of it that I use in my YouTube videos and then I have a separate vertical B-roll library for my short-form content and Instagram

1:04stories. You can start creating your own simply by filming little moments of your day-to-day life. Maybe you're [music] out at a coffee shop and you're working on your laptop or you're just doing your daily workout. Just set up your tripod and grab a quick 10-second [music] clip. That's all you need. If you are out here capturing like one or two-minute long clips for their B-roll library, not only are you spending more time filming than you need to be, but you're also going to spend more time editing later when you have to go through that clip and just pick out the 10 seconds you actually need. these clips don't have to be

1:31perfectly lit or expertly framed. [music] At this point in the journey, it's just about building that muscle of filming yourself. Plus, it's good to have like authentic, real, and raw clips to use in your content anyway. [music] And the more often you do this, the better you'll get at capturing more cinematic clips. Before you know it, you'll have a ton of clips just sitting in your camera roll waiting to be turned [music] into a viral reel. Like for example, you could just import a B-roll clip like this into edits and then add some text over top. This is kind of a

1:59format that I've seen trending lately. [music] Type in your text, add a trending audio, and you're good to go. Or, my preferred method, you can use the B-roll library that you've built [music] to be extra visuals that you add to your talking head content to make it more engaging, kind of like I've been doing throughout this video so far. If you don't know where to start or you need a little inspiration, I actually put together a free B-roll checklist full of dozens of ideas of B-roll clips that you could film just in your daily life, literally around your house, to start building up your own B-roll library and turning it

2:32into content. So, you can check that out. It's linked in the description below. Habit number two, automatically frame all your photos for Instagram stories. [music] Okay, this is a very quick and easy hack, and I honestly wish I knew it sooner. So, what you're going to do is open up your camera app on your iPhone. You'll see by default there's these black bars at the top and bottom of the screen, and that's showing you the framing of the final image. This is fine, right? But, I feel like we've all taken a photo like this, and later on you're like, "Oh, let me post that selfie to my Instagram story." So, you

3:03load it into Instagram, and then you're like, "Okay, well, I want this to fill the full size of the phone screen, right?" So, then you zoom it in, and then you're like, "This is like awkward. It's way too close to my face, or you know, something's cut off." Because you're taking a, you know, 4x5 aspect ratio image and trying to turn it [music] into a full phone screen image. So, stuff is

3:24going to be like awkwardly cropped. Okay, so to avoid this, what you're going to do is look for those six dots [music] in the top corner of the screen. Tap that to bring up your camera settings. Then, you're going to look for the little circle that says aspect, and at this point it's going to say 4x5, [music] cuz that's the default. When you click on that little circle, it's going to cycle through other aspect ratio options, and the one that you're looking for is going to be 9x16, because that is going to make your image fill the full phone screen. Now, when you're taking your photo in the camera

3:56app, you can preview as you're taking it what it will look like filling [music] the full frame, so you know what it'll look like on Instagram stories. I find this really helpful because every single photo you take, you know that it's going to be framed nicely to fill the full screen. But, it gets better. Okay, if you want to use these images in an Instagram carousel later, so you do want that 4 by 5 or 3 by 4 aspect ratio, all you have to do is go to that photo that you just took in your camera roll, tap on the little edit button, then tap on

4:24the little like rectangle icon in the top right-hand corner to open up your aspect ratio options. And if you scroll along the bottom, you can switch it back to 4 by 5 or 3 by 4, and whoa, magically, the rest of the frame was still there all along. That's because basically what your phone is doing is still capturing that full-size image in the 3 by 4 aspect ratio, but you're seeing a cropped preview when you're taking the photo. So, I find this super helpful because I know the image is going to look good in 9 by 16 when I post it on stories later, but I still

4:57have that 3 by 4 [music] backup hidden in my camera roll that I can grab at any time to use for carousels or other purposes. Speaking of carousels, habit number three is to make carousels out of your camera roll. Now, I'm not just talking about photo dumps here, okay? Those can be fun if you want to show a few snaps from a trip or a great weekend, but let's be honest, they're

5:16not going to be growing your audience. If you want to reach new followers, you need to be creating carousels that provide value in some way, whether that's like educational, maybe you're sharing a hot take or an opinion, or just making something that's like funny or relatable that people would want share to their story. I have often used Canva to do this. Though, side note, I have a bone to pick with Instagram lately. I'm very annoyed because the other day I posted a carousel that I made completely with my own human brain and hands inside Canva, and it had the AI label on it. And I'm pretty sure it's

5:47because I made it [music] in Canva. I feel like we've all heard about how that AI label gets added to any Canva content that you upload to Instagram where you've [music] used any of the like magic tools. So, if you use the background remover or like generate any images with it, it would have that AI label. However, in the case of this carousel, I literally didn't even use the background remover tool. All I did was bring my image in and add text to it. So, I just find that so bizarre. So, possibly, if you want to stay away from the false AI allegations, you might want

6:15to use a different photo editor than Canva. Another one that I like is Templefy. And apparently, the Edits app now lets you do carousels, too. Nonetheless, whatever editor you use, just take your camera roll images, maybe that you've converted back into the 3x4 aspect ratio, add your text over top. think the simpler design, the better. What I like to do is I just airdrop my images from my iPhone [music] to my Mac, and then inside Canva, I have a folder of like stock [music] images, basically, that are just photos that I've taken of myself or of a coffee or whatever, and I can reuse them across various [music]

6:50carousels. I think it's okay if you use the same picture more than once, just make sure that you're bringing other fresh content, [music] maybe it's like mixed up with new photos. Having this all set up makes it so easy to take just a few sentences and turn it into a viral carousel. Habit number four, repost your short-form content [music] across all platforms. Look, this is the hill that I will die on. You do not need separate strategies for Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube Shorts. I actually did a deep-dive study into my own analytics last summer, where I looked at the performance of the same video across Shorts, Reels, [music] and TikTok, and I

7:24found that in general, the same stuff that goes viral on Instagram goes viral on TikTok and Shorts, and the same stuff that underperforms tends to underperform across platforms with a few kind of minor exceptions. If you want to watch that video, I'll link it up here. But the point is, I don't want you stressing yourself out thinking that you need to make [music] separate edits for every single app. You can do this manually, like I do. So, I write all of my captions in Notion, which means I can type them out on my computer, which I prefer, and [music] then easily just copy them from inside the Notion app on

7:55my phone. Then I airdrop all of the videos that I've edited on my computer to my phone. And I individually upload the same video as [music] a draft to Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube Shorts. And then what I personally like to do is go into my drafts each day, pick out the video that I plan to post, and just rewatch it one last time to make sure there's not any errors, and then hit publish. And then I do that in all three of the apps. If you want to do this more efficiently, you could use a platform like repurpose.io, which automatically [music] downloads the full quality of, say, your

8:27Instagram Reel with no watermarks, and then uploads it to TikTok and Shorts for you. I do find that super helpful. You just get a little bit less like granular choice with how things are uploaded. Like, for example, the YouTube Short is just going to automatically grab your caption from Instagram and turn that into the title of your Short. And if you're wanting to use trending audio, like it's just going to download the whole video, and then it'll be uploaded as like original audio on TikTok and Shorts or whatever. So, it all depends on how picky you want to be, but

8:56repurpose.io might be helpful to you. Either way, I think you should take advantage of the fact that you're already creating this content and [music] get the most bang for your buck by posting it to the other platforms as well, and you don't need to stress out about changing it too much. This last habit is also about repurposing your content, but probably not in the way that you would think. Habit number five, turn your long-form content into

9:17short-form content without clipping. Creators usually assume that the best way to turn your long-form content into short-form content is grabbing 60-second segments from your YouTube video, and then simply cropping them in to be vertical, and, you know, uploading them to Instagram. Now, I do think if you have a particularly [music] clippable moment, this can work for you. It's definitely really popular among podcasters, but generally I don't find this to be as effective as the method that I want to share with you. Instead of working with your long-form final product, so let's say your like actual YouTube video, for example, you're going to work with your long-form raw

9:53material. So, I want you to go back to your script, open it up, and read through to find [music] a segment that you think could translate well into a short. Maybe it's a condensed opinion, or maybe it's a quick tutorial. Whatever it is, you're going to grab that content, and you're going to write a hook for it [music] and write a short call to action. Then you're going to set up your phone or your camera or whatever and you're going to actually film that specific segment vertically. I promise you this is going to translate better to the short form platforms than simply a cropped and clipped version of your long

10:26form video because people can feel that it wasn't [music] made for them. It feels like it's been ripped off of YouTube and yeah, it's just not going to hit the same way as if it feels [music] like it was filmed to be a Tik Tok or filmed to be a reel. If you implement all of these habits, I'm sure you'll find that content creation feels a lot easier than it did before. If you're seriously thinking about pursuing content [music] creation full time, I actually made a full road map video earlier this year walking you through the four quarters of the year and what steps I think you should take at each

10:57point [music] to work towards making this your full time job. So click here if you want to watch that next and if you have any questions about what it looks like to become a full time creator in 2027, let me know in the comments cuz I'm planning to make a refreshed version [music] of this video for the new year, too. As

11:10always, thank you so much for watching. I hope you're having adventures and following your dreams and I'll see you in the next video. Bye.