So you want to become a better blogger, marketer, or have more influence?  Stop consuming content and start producing content!  It’s as simple as that.  The principles of success work in all industries, all professions, and all aspects of life.  When you produce more you become better than when you consume more. 

Producing Beats Consuming…it’s Proven

In our financial lives, if we spend (consume) more money than we earn (produce), we live in debt and financial bondage.  In our relationships, if we take (consume) more than we give (produce), the relationship dies.  With our physical condition, If we consume more calories than we burn (we’ll consider this producing) then we gain weight.  In business, business owners have more income than their employees because the owners have created (produced) jobs, while the employees worked (consumed) the jobs the owner created.  The same holds true in our quests to become influential online.

Too Much Consumption is Wasteful

This lesson hits home with me as I am in the phase of shifting from a content consumer to a content producer.  Yes, I am guilty!  It felt like a ton of bricks hit me one day as I was frantically searching for content to share after not posting any status updates, tweets, or anything for several days.  I sifted through my RSS feed, read tweets, checked Facebook updates, and anything else that I thought would have content worthy of sharing.  In doing so, I spent a lot of time reading content (consuming) only to not find anything I wanted to share.  I won’t say how much time I spent doing that, but it was entirely too much.

Knowing Better = Doing Better

That realization of the time I wasted made me think of an image on a blog that I subscribe to, www.ProBlogService.com.  The home page has the following image:

Although I’m sure meetings and other things take place, the point is that blogging (producing content) dominates this schedule!  Erik Deckers the mastermind behind ProBlogService is a major social media, blogging, and branding influencer.  My thoughts were if his schedule looks like that, then maybe my schedule isn’t going to bring the results I’m looking for!  So the change began!

The time I devoted in the past to consuming content has been shifted to producing content like writing blog posts, creating social media marketing campaigns, and documenting ways digital media can be used to inform people about great products and services.

Do Unto Others…

I do want to clarify that producing more of my own content, does not mean that my sharing of the content I’ve consumed will decrease.  Social media is a relational tool so just like the example I used earlier about taking more from a relationship than we receive, sharing only content I produce will result in my social media relationships dying.  In order to grow better online relationships and become more influential we have to give more.  We give more in social media by sharing the content of those we are in relationship with (friends, followers, fans, etc), more than we share our own content.

Now is the Time

So if you have been consuming more content than you produce, whether you’ve known it for some time or it hit you all of sudden like it did me.  I encourage you to make the decision to shift and become more of a producer of content.  Just make sure you produce quality content!  Now quality content…that opens a whole new can of worms, which I’ll tackle in a future post. 🙂

How much time do you spend on a daily or weekly basis producing content?  Do you think a change is needed, or is it providing the results you want?

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This post was written by Jackie Bledsoe, Jr. (@jbledsoejr). Jackie is a co-founder of @sayitinshirts, a very different Social Media Marketing company that he founded with his wife Stephana Bledsoe (@stephanabledsoe).  SayitinShirts.com is a true family business, owned and operated by Jackie and Stephana, with help from their three children (all 10 years and younger).  The goal of SayitinShirts.com is to create a thriving family business that creates more, not less family time, while providing valuable services to the market.