Using the internet and online connectivity in a useful way is not easy. There are a lot of things to contend with when you’re a content creator:
- Consistency
- Audience engagement
- Improving and staying relevant,
These, among others, come and go throughout the journey.
I’ve faced many of these troubles since first creating online notes and content, starting with YouTube some years ago.
The problems have only magnified since focusing further on a true content creation process and business. This caused me to build effective solutions.
This is where my Online Content Creator’s Tech Stack comes in…
It’s a selection of software that I use, from task managers to music and social media services, to run my business. I’m going to cover them all and justify my choices in this piece.
They’re all available to use for free and I’ve made sure that the free versions are actually good. This is because as a student, I don’t like over-spending on things. I know there are people who are the same as me out there.
Strap in, and we’ll start with the nucleus, the core of the system — the second brain…
Obsidian
I’ll give a short backstory for those who haven’t seen my profile and many of my other posts…
Obsidian has been my note-taking app of choice for the last year. This has been since I realised I required a robust and capable system for taking notes at university.
Until April 2023 I used Obsidian privately, tailoring my system to my evolving university requirements and growing writing habit on Medium.
It was at this point that I decided to post about a side project that I built, integrating AI into the app to generate and edit articles (They were rubbish. Don’t use AI for writing unless you know what you’re doing).
It was a meaningless project that I completed out of interest, but the Medium piece received wild engagement in comparison to the rest of what I was delivering at the time.
This led me to think there might be something in the topic on this platform…
Almost four months later I’ve recently passed 100 articles and 700 followers on Medium, posting primarily about how you can learn to use Obsidian, tapping into my knowledge from my experiences at uni and creating content.
Obsidian’s a superb app, in short.
It’s markdown-based, completely free and vastly extensible with community plugins and themes that bring any complex features that you might require within a note-taking app.
If you want to find out more about how I use Obsidian and how it’s connected to all of my work, you should check out this story which is quite an up-to-date roundup:
Now we’re going to look at the longest-serving app in this stack…
Todoist
Todoist is a popular task manager, as I’m sure most of you reading this are aware.
I’d been using Todoist long before any other app on this list because, for some reason, I’d assured myself that I needed a task management system for all the things that I needed to do whilst revising for my GCSE exams back in secondary school.
Task management became more necessary when I moved to university and started content creation because I had more complicated things to keep track of.
Task managers are perhaps the only breed of productivity software for which I’ve tried even more than I have note-taking apps. Todoist was the first one that I used and has remained a staple — I haven’t come close to a level of consistency with any other task manager in the same way I have with this offering.
I can also integrate my tasks with Obsidian by using the Todoist Plugin, which just means tighter management of tasks across all the apps that I complete projects.
beehiiv
I’ve used beehiiv for the last four months to run my newsletter.
All the rage when I joined Twitter, they’ve done their research — having been part of the team at Morning Brew they know how to build a newsletter app.
The free options are very good, allowing you to manage a very feature-filled newsletter. This is why it appeals so heavily from beginners up to people like Dakota Robertson who have many thousands of social media followers and newsletter subscribers.
ConvertKit
This is the service that I used to run an email list for my product launch (I’m going to do a full article on the tools I used for this).
It’s a very popular application and was very useful in connecting with people who showed interest when I was revealing my product. The free features were more than enough to market PARAZETTEL to a list of more than 150 people.
X/Twitter
X has slowly become the platform of choice for my personal brand. I noticed that many of the creators in the space that I was moving into had Twitter accounts (back then it was Twitter), so I thought about giving it a go myself.
It’s a very fast-paced platform that allows you to share thoughts and content with a wide audience of people.
I managed to plug my product there and people became interested and signed up to the email list. The email list was the number-one thing that helped me drive sales for the product.
Medium
You earn on Medium completely for free, posting and taking earnings from the Partner Program.
This platform will always hold a special place in my heart because it’s where I made my first $1000 on the internet.
Now that I have other projects that I’m working on, like PARAZETTEL, it’s likely that I’m going to be spending less time on the platform, but I’ll always look to share free value here when I can.
Spotify
Spotify is something that’s a bit different to everything else on this list.
I love to listen to music when I work and when I’m relaxing. This isn’t something that I think suits everyone but it’s good for engineering a mood so that you can better perform in the moment, whatever you might be doing. There’s no better service for this than Spotify.
These are the apps and services that I’ve been using to run my creator business for over half a year now. They cost anywhere from being completely free to around $20 per month.
The services that I most recommend paying for are Medium, so you can read stories, Spotify so that you don’t get ads, and X so that you have access to the powerful features that come with the subscription. This comes to about $20 for me, so it’s a very cheap way of running a creator business.
I launched a product over a week ago now that used a couple more tools that I have to pay for. I’ll go over them in another article that I’m going to release soon, but until then I hope you learned something new from this piece and thanks for reading!