Should you become a content creator?
I have been a content creator for a almost a year now and I want to discuss everything I've learnt and how my life has changed.
We have had a lull in Illuvium content and the overall crypto markets look incredibly bearish. As we have busier months ahead towards the end of the year I have started to step up my content creation pipeline and want to discuss all the mistakes I made early on and how you can avoid them.
Today will be relatively distilled but at the end you will see a sneak peek of a project I am excited to share that has become very close to my heart.
How was Aus Crypto Con? And how was my first playtest of PB2? Does it live up to the hype.
My content creator journey and if content creation is the right path for YOU.
I have started looking at a handful of other Web 3.0 video games? Is the space catching up to Illuvium?
I have always used apps and guides to help me progress through video games, I will reveal my plans to provide this same utility to Illuvium gamers.
We will cover all of that here and more so please keep reading. I am excited to share this journey with you.
Does Illuvium live up to the hype?
Was Aus Crypto Con overrated? Read below to find out just how good the convention was and why Illuvium was the star of the show.
Aus Crypto Con was held on the 17th and 18th of September on the Gold Coast in Queensland, Australia. Now for context I hadn’t been on a holiday or on a plane in over 6 years and I had also never visited Queensland so I jumped at the opportunity. I also took my girlfriend along with me for an amazing 10 day holiday full of fun and amazing experiences. But here we want to focus on Illuvium and the buzz inside the convention.
When I first entered Aus Crypto Con it was no surprise that Illuvium was the main event. With bias aside TCG Worlds had the biggest booth however it felt quite empty in comparison to the Illuvium display. Illuvium had 4-5 playable systems, several large screens showing off the game as people play and other large screens that were showing off things like Illuvidex V2 and Illuvitars. There wasn’t a lot of alpha besides playing PB2 which is mostly public knowledge at this point and some snapshots of the Illuvidex V2.
My experience with PB2 was scattered given I also explored the rest of the convention (which was surprisingly small). However the biggest takeaways for me were the addition of the new Augments as well as the reduction in BS. Augments change the game a lot but I will cover that next. A huge thing that is rarely talked about is how much smoother the gameplay is, you don’t have Illuvials stopping halfway through their Omega cast, everything retargets INSTANTLY and no Illuvials felt too ridiculously unbalanced.
The augments also drastically change how the game feels and plays since every single Illuvial can have their time in the sun. I personally didn’t have Scoriox available but stacked my Phyri with augments to increase its attack speed off the charts. Things like this and creating unkillable Lynxes were memorable moments of PB2 that make me particularly excited to try as many combinations as possible.
My favourite part about playing Pokémon was always to find underrated Pokémon and go out of my way to make them viable. This will be no different with Illuvium as I attempt every single anti-meta deck I can possibly think of. There’s no better feeling than creating something genuinely viable that your opponent has no chance to play around. And then once it gets figured out you do it all over again.
I did see several other interesting projects at Aus Crypto Con and you can watch a short video of me hanging out at the convention on TSG’s channel here:
Unfortunately most of the other projects were mostly exchanges, trading tools and a handful of other Defi projects some of which were actually quite cool. I will be covering some of these on the channel down the track as I organise new partnerships and AMA’s.
Is it too late to become a content creator?
Many of you might not know how my journey began yet and I want to tell you all a harsh lesson I learnt early on. One of my first REAL videos was this one below:
The content of it I don’t quite remember but by complete fluke I managed to nail every single aspect of a good title/thumbnail and I also created content around a highly searchable topic with absolutely no competition. The facts and figures behind Illuvium land. It was the perfect storm considering metaverse land was a hot topic in the entire crypto-sphere. However this came with a cost, harsh criticism from every member of the community. Because the information I provided in the video was wildly wrong by a factor of about 8. The more views I got, the more criticism and attacks even though I was just another person trying to find their voice.
This might seem like a non-issue but it really impacted me, however one stroke of luck seemed to follow another, I already had a support network of other content creators whom I could ask for advice thanks to some Shiny Shards and OMI OG’s such as Kyle Willson, Daniel Lee and Taps Trades. With their advice and kind words of wisdom I was able to overcome my tragedy of a video and quickly upload content that was accurate. Ironically getting attacked for misinformation forced me to get properly informed and ensure I didn’t make the same mistake twice by fact checking and asking other community members questions before posting content.
That was my first real taste of what being a content creator was like and I was lucky enough to be taught dozens of valuable lessons that some content creators only learn after they have had a YouTube channel for over a year. Most importantly having others around you that can help teach you these valuable lessons and help you improve on your journey is truly the only thing you need to start producing content. And as many of you already know, you have that network right in the Illuvium discord. You can call upon myself or 20+ others to help you along your content creation journey so I recommend you just begin.
You may not know what sort of content you want to create, you may not know if u want to edit videos or even if you want to produce content about gaming but you can only figure this out after you begin. Sometimes creating content is less about views or money and more about an outlet for your inner thoughts and a conversation you want to have with your audience, even if its only one person. It is also worth considering that content takes many forms. YouTube is just one avenue amongst things like podcasts, vlogs, short form content and writing articles much like I am doing right now.
For those of you that are interested in YouTube I want to break down 3 core concepts that will help you on your journey to become the next Mr. Beast.
The right title for your video
An eye catching thumbnail
What should the subject of your content be?
Many of you are probably interested in Illuvium content if anything so I am going to use an example of one of my videos to help teach you mostly everything I have learnt about attracting an audience.
This video was one of the best titles/thumbnail combinations I ever created and although it wasn’t particularly honest, it never lied to my audience and the algorithm clearly rewarded it. Based on its merit and statistics we are going to analyse just what created one of my most watched videos on my channel at a point in time where crypto views are being crushed across the board.
The easiest way to attract someone to click a video or any piece of content is to garner an emotional response. It’s why you see headlines like, ‘You won’t believe why you are gaining weight’ or ‘What your man is hiding from you’. They evoke feelings of anger, sadness or more rarely, happiness. When you are scrolling on your feed and you see a thumbnail of someone that is clearly distressed you wonder why, psychologically this normally falls into two categories. Either you want to know why so you don’t feel that way, or you want to see because the sadness of others makes you feel less sad yourself given you are better off than them. I am no psychologist but have easily spent hundreds of hours researching the psychology of thumbnails to learn about this very topic.
Now thumbnails need to be eye catching and all mine here really does is garner emotion from the audience. The other half of the equation is the title. As a combo they need to achieve one very simple thing, a reason to click. If you answer the question for your audience in the title (e.g. Eggs make you lose weight) then they have no reason left to click the video. But you still need to find an audience that’s interested so leaving too little information can be equally as bad.
In the case of this video the title and thumbnail combination told the audience I made a mistake but not what the mistake was. This doesn’t necessarily target people new to Illuvium, or does it?
In this analytics breakdown for the video you can actually see that most people found my video by searching for Illuvium. Ultimately what this means is that in the list of videos they found, my title and thumbnail grabbed their attention relatively more than other people’s content. Why? Because they felt like they could get an honest explanation on Illuvium and see a perspective they probably haven’t seen yet. They wanted to see something brand new.
This is ultimately what a lot of content boils down to. There are billions of people searching for something NEW to watch, you might make 100 videos before you figure out exactly what that is, but eventually you will.
It is never too late to become a content creator and everyone in this world has something to say. There will always be someone out there looking for something new to watch and there’s no reason that it cannot be you. A smart phone already has every tool you need to begin creating content, I say take the leap.