I started my online writing journey around 3 years back with my own blog and on Medium. I was writing stories, interesting experiences or incidents, or some funny things. Slowly I realized that writing anything is not working. I was confusing my audiences. They were not getting any value from my writing. It is all about how people think about you. Recently I was seeing some creator’s podcast where he mentioned three types of content creators. As a creator, you can play any one of the three roles. A friend, an entertainer, or a teacher. You will confuse your audience by mixing these roles.
The Three 3 Cs – Friend, Entertainer, Teacher
- Friend – Creator as a friend, you will be a peer to your audience. You will grow along with your audience, experiencing life and sharing your experiences with them. Over the years, your content, learnings, and experiences may change. You will do experiments and share your learnings and experiences. Overall think about how a friend will behave, share, and learn together with you, the same role you would be playing here. An example can be a creator who is sharing their vlogs of someplace, or occasion or creating content about some specific topic they have experienced.
- Entertainer – An entertainer’s whole purpose is to entertain you, not to be your friend or teach you something. Just to entertain you. An example may be a singer or guitarist creating their performance videos and sharing them on YouTube. You as an audience watching this video purely for fun or entertainment. Similarly lot of people sharing funny videos, memes, reels, and shorts are part of entertainment.
- Teacher – As a teacher, you will try to teach something. You may have expertise in some subject. You will share your knowledge, and expertise on a particular subject. You have gained some expertise by working in some field for a long time and now you are sharing your learning. I have been working as a process coach in the IT industry for a long time. I have a blog where I share my learnings and experiences related to process implementation. This blog is a way for me teach to people who are new to this field and can get some understanding and implement it in work place.
Currently, you may be playing any one of above mentioned three roles as content creator. If you are mixing roles, try to avoid that. It is all about the image you are creating in front of your audience. They will think of you as you would portray yourself. You are the expert in whatever content you present to them. They will consume your content based on where they are in their journey. Sometimes they would need a friend, an entertainer, and sometimes a teacher. You can not become all three. If you try, you will not be able to give quality. So pick one role, be consistent in that role, and deliver relevant and quality content and audiences will come to you for similar content regularly.