What Being a Content Creator Actually Looks Like

Why talk about creating content for an audience of homeschool moms? Partly because I think there’s a lot of crossover: homeschooling is an entrepreneurial pursuit. And I think a lot of homeschool families do start their own businesses, or were already on more independent career paths prior to homeschooling.

It just makes sense: earning an income from home makes homeschooling easier in many ways, but then also the personality traits required for one will apply to the other:

• willing to take risks

• unafraid of going against the main stream (or willing to push through the discomfort)

• creative and independent thinkers

It just checks out. So I do think content creation is a good topic to cover on here. I’m going to add it to a category called “Creating” which can encompass different discussions around business, art, money, etc. You’ll be able to find this kind of stuff there from my Substack home page :)

Anyway, content creation is like the DREAM JOB that didn’t exist when I was a little girl. It encompasses all of the things I thought I would be at one point in time during my childhood: a writer, a graphic designer, an actress, an artist, a web designer, a news reporter. . . I get to do it all. And on top of that, I get to do it at home, with my kids, being the one thing I always wanted to be most: a mom.

So how does it work? What does my schedule look like? How do I plan content, come up with ideas, and then how do I turn it all into money? Here’s what it looks like for me:

But first, how I don’t make money. One of the biggest misconceptions is that influencers just make money from existing. I have no idea why people think that, but they do. However, no one pays you for having a certain amount of followers and no one pays you for how many likes you get on a post. The apps themselves pay hardly anything. I may get $10 a month from Meta, tops. There was like this string of months a few years back where IG was testing out their rewards system and I made $800, but it was as if they said “whoa that’s too much, that’s enough of that” and they shut down the program. So, there’s that. Would have been nice, though!