Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Nishant Patel. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Hi Nishant, thanks for joining us today. Earning a full time living from one’s creative career can be incredibly difficult. Have you been able to do so and if so, can you share some of the key parts of your journey and any important advice or lessons that might help creatives who haven’t been able to yet?

Yes, I have been creating content for over 8 years, and it took a long time before I switched to it. Currently, there are so many influencers and creators on all different topics, so it’s difficult to reach your targeted goals, but if we plan it steps-wise, then it’s surely possible.

I often get asked this question: how do you make money and how did you start to be honest I have always kept my blog @Indieopus as a passion project with allowed me to meet new people, experience travel opportunities and create better content every time I go out. I never had the plan to do it full time earlier as it’s not easy to have a constant amount of income from blogging but eventually, with time I learned the multiple opportunities it gave me to earn better money.

I had a full-time job in social media and have always worked in the digital media field and that enabled me to learn a lot more things than just blogging online. That allowed me to build a few important pillars for my revenue sources like – Photography services, Social media management for others, overall digital media consultations, web blogging, website SEO management, public relations, and overall brand-building activities as consultation services became my few main sources of income. Then Instagram started monetizing which credited some money every month as well as when we do a brand collaboration they pay per post. All these things take a lot of time and effort and constant upgrades in knowledge, tools, and certifications to be able to implement quality work for my clients.

It takes multiple years to have constant steady growth, there are many lucky ones whose content becomes viral from the first month itself. However, maintaining the quality and quantity of content to keep the audience engaged and happy gets even more difficult in that journey.

Nishant, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

So currently I am consulting digital media for a few brands in the USA, helping them with content, social, tech, and overall brand development. I have worked in the media industry for over 12 years now working with brands like Netflix, Amazon prime video, Disney+, Mondelez, Monster Drink, and many more.

I run a not-for-profit Animal rescue app startup which is currently operational in India and has helped over 25000 animals in the last 4 years which also gave me a chance to speak at TEDx Mumbai in 2019.

I also run a travel and food blog called @IndieOpus which I have been running for over 8 years now and it has allowed me to learn about food, travel, activities, and overall how to make sure I create content regularly, my Instagram page recently got verified too and yes it’s lovely milestones for every creator out there.

I also started teaching Digital marketing in 2020 and that part is also something I enjoy a lot, overall the focus on learning daily, implementing it at work and personal blog, and sharing the process via teaching helped me streamline the whole system and inspired me to learn even more from the market.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

Well, I am Neurodiverse and have been going through learning disabilities like Dyslexia, Dyscalculia, and Dysgraphia which did affect my childhood and overall learning process since childhood I learned that my journey will always be more difficult than the normal audience. So failure is something I would say as the best opportunity to do something new the next time. I also would say that failure is also an opportunity to learn more than people who don’t fail or make mistakes.

Overall I would say that learning something new should be something everyone should have as a default objective every single day and only that is going to allow people to discover their talents and skills and help people in being a better version of themselves. I also think that focusing on one thing will not make you perfect but make you a monotonous machine and we have only 1 life to live here so why waste that time?

There are so many days when the content doesn’t work, or the timing doesn’t work or the content isn’t that great enough to get it viral, but those days I get back to the process and try making more content, I think every job requires the same focus of going back to the basics and follow the process.

Are there any resources you wish you knew about earlier in your creative journey?

For the new bloggers out there who want to get into full-time content creation – there are many many things you need to focus on but the biggest part is patience. As social media is harsh and it doesn’t always work. Also when starting, if the focus is on money, brand tie-ups, and freebies then please don’t start it in the first place as to earn those gains you need to first build the audience which is actually helping you grow by spreading your content. I have been creating content for 8 years and I moved to the USA a year ago and which dropped my whole account back to zero as the audience, timing, content relevance all completely changed and my followers dropped, my views dropped almost 90% and that hits very very hard so it’s not that once you start then you will always live in a growth chart, it can fall down for simplest reasons and I needed to start over building a fresh audience.

A few things to follow:
– Quality of content has to be the best and better than others to create a difference
– Consistency of uploading content is a bigger problem for people as they reach a stage where they don’t know what to upload next, so planning is more important here.
– Networking: meeting fellow creators, talking to marketing experts, connecting with brands and agencies, and understanding their process of collabs is very important.
– Learning and upgrading yourself daily in terms of how others do content, what tools or equipment we need to buy to upgrade our quality, and always ask questions to others.

There are hundreds of more things to learn and people can contact me for a consulting session

Contact Info:

• Website: https://linkfly.to/NishantPatel
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/indieopus/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/indieopus/
• Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/NishantPatelMedia/
• Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/indieopus/

Image Credits
@IndieOpus