Social media is frustrating.
6 years ago, I left Google to pursue my Paperdemon business full time. Various forms of social media including videos, image posts, live streams, and tweets have been a part of my regular day to day work. But I’ve often felt like Sisyphus trying to move a boulder up a mountain. Spending hours and hours every week creating content and posting to far too many social media accounts only to have little to no material results. Exoduces happen from older platforms, and new platforms keep popping up. When I’m finally starting to grow on one channel, an algorithm changes, and I struggle to regain momentum.
Even when I had a couple of videos go viral and get 1 million views, it didn’t actually produce meaningful results.
10K target audience views > 1 million viral views
But for the first time I actually have fucking hope.
For the first time since I started promoting the PaperDemon Art RPG and Art Community on social media, I’m finally starting to see results. And it’s not just on one platform.
In the past 3 weeks I’ve gained over 300 followers on Tiktok and 250 subscribers on Youtube. 🎉🎉🎉
To put this in perspective, it took me 6 years to get my first 1000 Youtube subscribers. It took me 3 weeks to get the next 250 subscribers.
That’s fucking nuts.
It was not luck. I had two videos in this time period get more than 10K views. Interestingly, the video that did well on Tiktok was not the same video that did well on Youtube. I’ve also had several other videos getting more than 1K views. These views have indeed translated into more signups on PaperDemon.com. I went from an average of 3 signups a day to 9 a day.
So what changed? Why am I suddenly doing better? What is it I learned or started doing differently?
I hired an expert
The first right choice I made was hiring a social media coach.
I’ve tried throughout these past several years to create quality content myself and learn on my own. None of the articles, classes, resources I consumed were enough to help me achieve meaningful results. I also tried to delegate to experts. Over the years I’ve hired four different people at different times to either assist or be responsible for my social media. Unfortunately, none of them could deliver any meaningful impact. And it cost me a lot of money.
But on tiktok I found an expert who actually has hundreds of thousands of followers who specializes in coaching artists who want to grow their businesses on social media. I reached out for my first coaching call and it blew my mind. They were super direct telling me exactly what type of content to make and what NOT to make, how to find trending content, and how to best promote Paperdemon. A lot of it was unexpected and very different from advice I had gotten before and different from what I’d observed others do. Then I got to work and made and posted the content.
I find this model of hiring a coach particularly compelling because it’s very cost effective. I can create the content myself, which is more impactful anyway, while having the right direction to help me achieve results.
I tried Tiktok
I didn’t want to do Tiktok for all the same reasons everyone else doesn’t want to do it. There’s concerns with the ethical origins of the company, addictive design of the platform, etc. And who wants to try and invest in YET ANOTHER social media platform when you’re already investing so much time in the others. Every time my friends told me to try tiktok, I told them no. But one of my friends finally talked me into it and I opened an account around July 2024.
I actually saw growth there quite quickly. I think its a platform that rewards you for quality content even if you have a low followers/subscriber count. I went from 0 – 800 followers in 9 months.
If you find a platform where you actually make progress, then the others don’t matter and you can shift your attention to the ones that work.
You can see what I’ve been making on Tiktok here.
I created mediocre content, then kept improving
“We all have 10,000 bad drawings in us. The sooner we get them out the better.” – Walt Stanchfield.
If you’ve read any resources on social media or content marketing, you’ve probably read “content is king.” I needed to create a lot of mediocre content before I could start to create good content. I have a lot of skills as an artist but I was struggling to convey my wisdom in a way that would work well on social media. And it took me a while to get comfortable being live and in front of a camera.
But also a big struggle I had was figuring out the right type of content to make. I had done long form tutorial videos on YouTube and those tended to do better than other videos but they took a lot longer to make. For short vertical videos I tried to do art reveals and time lapses because that’s what everyone else was doing. But I didn’t have much luck there. I also experimented with other types of videos like lore, featured art from the community, and many other things people suggested to me.
My coach suggested I do tutorials instead and they perform consistently better than anything else I make. I wasn’t making those because for some reason I thought tutorials would only work for long form, not short form. And another creator in a similar space to me said tutorials don’t work as lead gens. But it turns out once again I got bad advice.
And it makes sense why I’d do better with tutorials. I’ve been making digital art for 25 years and I feel very comfortable teaching and have prior experience doing it. I kind of have a natural talent for it. And it’s high value content for my target audience.
Short form videos are the most effective way right now for me to communicate to my audience and provide quality and meaningful content. And the fact I can create and post in one day makes me more likely to finish. I still have a draft for a long form video that I’ve been working on for four months that I haven’t finished yet.
Writing my video hook/title first before writing the script helps a lot with SEO. Having the tools to know what content is trending helped, too.
i think the biggest mistake I made is I was trying to copy the content that I was seeing. I figured these other people are successful with this type of content so I should make the same content. But that didn’t work at all. My coach had a much better idea for an effective content strategy.
another thing different I’m doing is promoting the game much better in every video. Either after the intro hook or at the very end. I’ve also done some videos showing the UI. Those havent done as well but may do better after I make some website upgrades. I still have more types of content I want to experiment with.
The order of operations
- Research trending topics, ideally evergreen, that are relevant to my target audience. TikTok creator insights or Tubebuddy for Youtube
- Choose a topic to target, then write the title or hook stuffed with target topics/keywords
- Write a script
- Record
- Edit (ideally using a good phone app, not a desktop app)
- Post
- Repost older videos that performed poorly but were good quality with tweaks to hook, intro, outro, etc.
I’m no longer doing a content calendar. This was something I used to do but it’s not working for me at the moment.
I find that I often come up with ideas that sound great in the moment and the ideas just pile up in a graveyard and never get executed because another idea came along or my perfectionism got in the way. Currently it works best for me if I act on the idea when I have it and finish it (or mostly finish it) same day or next day and post within 24 hours.
Mental wellness
I’ve read from multiple sources over the years that the key to being successful on social media is to be “my authentic self” but actually executing on that has been a challenge for me.
A big problem was my mindset. I couldn’t show up authentically because I was too anxious and afraid to do so. Self confidence has been a struggle for me for all of my life. And unfortunately, that lack of confidence was showing through in my videos.
Earlier this year I made some big changes in my personal life and I restarted my Miracle Morning self care routine. These changes helped me do a complete 180 on my self confidence and mindset. Visualization through journaling has been the most effective technique I’ve been using. Most days I journal using prompts related to healing, manifesting, self confidence, and visualizing the future.
This primes me to have the confidence to show up in my videos.
Investing the Time
Another huge factor was the time commitment. To do quality short form videos it takes me anywhere from 3 to 8 hours total to do SEO topic research, draft a script, record, edit, and post (and repost to other socials). Art tutorials are on the longer end. And if I recall correctly, this 23K views video took me a whole day. I’m currently posting 3 per week but my goal is to work my way up to one per day per my coach’s recommendations. Realistically I can only do that if I figure out a way to make content faster or effectively reuse old content.
Because of my family responsibilities, I struggled to find the time to dedicate to this alongside my other time sensitive responsibilities. I was providing part time childcare for my son and also had frequent interruptions throughout the day for family obligations. I now have reliable child care Monday through Friday, I’ve recently found myself with a lot more time to work and dedicate to the business and keep up with the demanding social media schedule.
And the more content I create, the faster I can fail and the more I learn.
I’ll keep going and see where this leads.
I have more I could say on the topic but I’ve got to get back to manifesting. If you find this interesting, let me know and I’ll write more.