If you want to take content creation seriously this year, the honest answer is that most people are approaching it completely wrong. Whether you're trying to grow a YouTube channel, build a presence on LinkedIn, or drive leads to your business through Instagram, the gap between creators who grow and those who stall almost always comes down to five specific mistakes. After nine years of creating content — more than 1,000 YouTube videos, countless Instagram posts, and a journey from broke medical student to bestselling author — here are the five tips that actually move the needle.
How Do You Take Content Creation Seriously?
The first thing to understand is that there's a fundamental difference between doing content as a hobby and doing it as a strategy. If you're posting just for fun with no growth goals, you can ignore everything here. But if you want content to generate leads, build an audience, or make money, your approach needs to be deliberate. That means treating your content like a compounding asset — something that builds trust and authority over months and years, not days. The five tips below are the framework for doing exactly that.
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Ali explains how his team monitors competitor channels to identify trending titles and formats
Watch at 01:45 →
Why Competitor Analysis Is a Cheat Code for Creators
Competitor analysis is unreasonably effective, and almost every beginner underuses it. Every major creator you follow has a team spending significant time studying what other big creators are doing. That's not plagiarism — it's reading the market.
Here's how it works in practice: if a video called "How to Change Your Life" performs exceptionally well on one channel, other smart creators will notice and produce their own version. They're not stealing the content — they're recognizing that a particular framing, title, or format is resonating with audiences right now. You can do the same thing.
What to Look For in a Competitor Audit
- Outlier videos or posts: If something dramatically outperformed the creator's average, the title or hook was exceptional. Study it.
- Hooks and opening lines: On LinkedIn, if the first two lines don't grab attention, no one clicks "read more." On Reels or TikTok, the first five seconds are everything.
- Formats, not just ideas: You're not copying the idea — you're borrowing the format and making it your own.
One useful tactic: avoid actually watching competitor videos if you're worried about accidentally absorbing their content. Just study the titles, thumbnails, and hooks. See a viral reel with the hook "Three lessons I wish I'd learned in my 20s"? You don't need to watch it. Write your own three lessons using that proven format.
The meta of any platform is constantly evolving, and the only reliable way to track what's working is to watch what's working — not read a listicle about it six months later.
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Ali filming casually at a Hong Kong restaurant — an example of experimental, low-production content
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Is Using AI for Content Creation a Mistake?
This one is controversial, but important: over-relying on AI early in your content journey is a serious mistake. When you're a beginner and struggling to post consistently, the temptation to dump everything into ChatGPT is real. But when you outsource your content to AI before you've developed your own voice and taste, you're skipping the skill-building entirely.
Here's why this matters more than ever: content is essentially relationships at scale. Before social media, you built professional trust by showing up at networking events, being genuinely helpful, and having real conversations. Content is that process, but multiplied across thousands or millions of people. The trust you build with an audience is fragile — and increasingly, people can immediately tell when something was written by AI.
In a world where AI-generated content is flooding every platform, the creators who win are the ones who sound unmistakably human. Being the voice of authenticity is a genuine competitive advantage right now. Outsourcing your LinkedIn posts to ChatGPT makes you one of millions doing the exact same thing.
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Ali breaks down why AI-written content is increasingly easy to detect and why authenticity wins
Watch at 14:30 →
Use AI as a tool for research, editing, or brainstorming — not as a ghostwriter replacing your actual perspective.
How Do You Stay Consistent With Content for Years?
Content is a compounding asset. Nine years in, the results look exponential — but only because the early years felt like almost nothing was happening. This is the part no one wants to hear: the first three to six months will probably feel like shouting into a void.
The single most important metric to optimize for — especially early on — is enjoying the process enough to keep going. Not views. Not engagement rate. Enjoyment and consistency.
The Tennis Analogy That Changes Everything
Think about learning tennis. When you're a complete beginner, it's genuinely not that fun — the ball hits the net, goes out of bounds, and you feel incompetent. But once you can reliably get the ball over the net and have a real rally, it becomes genuinely enjoyable. Content works the same way. You have to push through the early phase where the skill isn't there yet before the enjoyment kicks in.
That said, once you have a foundation, protecting your enjoyment matters enormously. Experimenting with formats, filming in unexpected places, doing occasional low-stakes videos just because they feel interesting — these things keep you in the game for the long haul. Sometimes doing something slightly underoptimized because it's fun is a completely worthwhile trade-off. The creator who posts for ten years will always outperform the one who burned out after ten months chasing perfect metrics.
The 80/20 rule applies well here: roughly 80% of your content should model what's proven to work, and 20% should be experimental. Most experiments won't land. But the ones that do become the outliers that define your channel — and then others start copying you.
How Do You Stop Feeling Cringe When Posting Content?
Almost everyone who starts creating content goes through an intensely uncomfortable phase of feeling deeply embarrassed by what they're posting. This is completely normal — and it never fully goes away. But it does get much easier over time.
Cringe is essentially a fear of social disapproval. Human brains evolved over millions of years to care deeply about what the tribe thinks. We're wired to avoid standing out in ways that might get us rejected. The problem is that in 2025, standing out is exactly how you grow.
The creators with the largest audiences are often the ones willing to do things that other people would find embarrassing. Approaching strangers on the street to ask about their dreams. Filming in public. Sharing vulnerable opinions. These things feel terrifying from the outside — but the creators who do them have simply built up a higher tolerance through repeated exposure.
The practical takeaway: you don't need to eliminate the cringe feeling. You just need to act despite it. Every time you post something that makes you slightly uncomfortable, the threshold for what feels cringe-worthy rises a little. Over years, you'll look back at content that once felt terrifying and wonder why you were ever nervous about it.
How Do You Stand Out Using Your Unfair Advantages?
The final tip is perhaps the hardest to implement but the most powerful in the long run: lean into what makes you genuinely different. Vanilla content doesn't build audiences. You cannot be a transformational presence for some people without being completely irrelevant or even off-putting to others — and that's fine. That's actually the goal.
Every creator who has built a significant audience has something quirky, specific, or slightly polarizing about their perspective. When you look at fast-growing accounts through the lens of competitor analysis, ask yourself: what are they leaning into that makes them them? It's rarely that they're covering a unique topic. It's usually that they have a distinctive voice, a strong opinion, or a willingness to take positions that most people in the space won't.
How to Find Your Own Unfair Advantages
- Ask your friends: What do people in your social circle associate with you? What do they come to you for? What opinions do you hold that spark friendly debate?
- Notice your strong beliefs: What do you genuinely think that most people in your industry would push back on? Those beliefs are content gold.
- Pay attention to unexpected reactions: If you post something and it gets more engagement — positive or negative — than expected, that's a signal worth paying attention to.
The sharpest edges of your personality and perspective are not liabilities to be smoothed over. They're the raw material of a memorable personal brand. Sherlock Holmes is a compelling character not despite being difficult and obsessive, but because of it. The same principle applies to building an audience online.
Start by figuring out what you actually believe. Post it. See what resonates. Then do more of that — with more confidence, more specificity, and less fear of what the people who aren't your audience think about it.
