You Own the Website

Owning your website is, in my opinion, is consistently overlooked. Do you have complete control to do whatever you see fit and whatever you want on your site? You're free to express how you see fit and create various styles and imagery that reflect your brand.

You don't have to fall within a framework that doesn't reflect your values. You don't have to appease anyone other than your audience and yourself.

We are constantly changing in some shape or form; I mean, we are humans. It's a natural trait. The one constant, however, is you.

Documenting your past experiences and development is a unique way to showcase the breadth of skill sets. Having these moments on your website lets you share some of these experiences with future people you meet, especially if you're trying to communicate specific skills.

Newsletter

No one wants to join another newsletter. This is an essential fact because this should be a driver to make sure that you're packing your newsletter with value. Today we're oversaturated with emails; most of us ignore a range of emails that we receive; however, there's an opportunity in that.

If you can send out relevant information to a niche group of people, your newsletter will be successful. The success will lead to you effectively engaging an audience and developing a relationship that will allow you to potentially communicate products or services or update them on different aspects of your experiences.

As a content creator, we're all in some shape or form developing audiences And having a newsletter is a foundational piece in creating this audience.

I'm on the same Path

I am on a similar path as a lot of you, where I have undervalued newsletters. I'm in the process of creating an audience that I can engage around the type of concentration but, more importantly, help drive their value on producing more meaningful digital information so they can better communicate with the people around them.

I have come across countless pieces of information that share that creating a newsletter and creating people to subscribe to it is an essential piece of the puzzle. Building your audience solely on social media is a very high risk if those platforms decide to take it away from you one day.

Social Media Presence

Social media is important, but not as important as you think. Yes, have a social media presence on channels relevant to your audience. I know many businesses that want to engage specific demographics and certain people but do not participate in conversations where these people are congregating.

More than ever, it's overwhelming to maintain so many different media channels more than ever. Still, if you have goals aligned to different engaging sets of people around your products and services, you have to figure out how systems and routines play in these areas.

It's funny to think that a decade ago how expensive and challenging it would be to own your own websites, newsletter or be able to engage with tens of thousands of people across the world, but today it's relatively cheap. Essentially you could almost do it for free through trials and baseline subscription.

It is vital to get back down to the basics and start to build a foundation that you own so that your brand can begin to get roots and build momentum over time.

A few weeks ago, I started a video series on the new Instagram feature Rooms called Making it Work. I create this series for the following reasons:

1. To learn from the people around me.
2. Share solutions and stories about how people are persevering during these times.
3. Test out this new Instagram Rooms feature with my audience.

I thought it would be cool to share discussions about how people were making the best out of their situations.

At the time, I did not understand my program's name, concept, or brand, but I knew I just wanted to learn by doing.

I immediately contacted my go-to content creators in my city to help with my experiment with Instagram Rooms from Bad Films Moh and Mazen. I this experiment to better understand Instagram Rooms video and the dynamics around it. I highly recommend that anyone looking to get more experience with social media features just try them out with friends.

How I came up with the concept name "Make it Work"?

During the Instagram Live session, a good friend from Vancouver named Jonathan decided to join our call. Rolling with the flow, I decided to let him in, and we began to chat about the show's concept and shared a story about a small bakery he was walking past on his street.

That story really resonated with me. After reflecting on Jonathan's story about how the bakery, I immediately knew the show's title would be Making it Work.

Five episodes later, I'm super excited to continue this journey and have more conversations with people to learn how they're making it work. Over the past few weeks, I've been able to have conversations with the good people at Return on Colour, the Black Teachers Association, business operators like Bad Films, and iconic businessmen like Shawn Kanungo.

This is just a start of a new process, a new story, and a new source of inspiration for my creative journey. 

If you are interested in checking out the series, be sure to follow me on Instagram here and to check below for all the episodes so far.

This 90 content creation challenge is an attempt to publish multiple series of work to close the gap between my work and taste. The rules broken into phases

• Phase 1, publish 30 content pieces in 30 days
• Phase 2, publish 10 content pieces in 30 days
• Phase 3, publish 4 content pieces in 30 days

The goal is to produce content while limiting my time (max four hours) to work my way into creating memorable experiences.

Every day, I'm hearing a new idea or concept from a black entrepreneur coming to fruition, that likely would have never been supported six months ago now being embraced. I think it's vital for black people trying to bring ideas to reality to consider the two following points: