Content Creation – The Work/Life Balance

Around the world, a number of companies are starting to offer their employees trials for four-day working weeks.

There is recognition that people may be more productive if they are able to have an extra day off, or at the very least they will be happier – which can keep them at the company instead of sending them looking for a new job.

But a lot of people seek even more control over their working time, which is one of the reasons people turn to a career as a content creator – it’s the freedom to work when they want, instead of being forced into a 9-5.

However, while content creation is a lot more flexible than many other jobs, you can’t get away with being lazy. In this article, we’ll explore the work-life balance of a content creator in more detail, so that if you’re thinking about it as a career option, you fully understand what it entails and how much time you’ll have to yourself.

What does a content creator do?

In order to understand the sort of lifestyle that a content creator leads, you need to start with just how much work is involved.

Because trust us, it’s not as simple as snapping a photo, pressing upload, and then raking in the cash.

Being a content creator involves a lot of different jobs, some of which you might not even consider.

Creating content

Obviously, one of the biggest parts of the job as a content creator is going to be the actual shooting of content – making your photos and videos.

But think about everything that goes into it – you’re going to need to decide on a shooting location, and if it’s somewhere in your home, you’ll probably want to do some prep work to tidy up or just make sure the area is free from any personal information you don’t want to be shared.

You then need to set up any lighting you have, set up the camera, and begin shooting, before reviewing the images or videos to make sure you’re happy with it.

Even if you’re just using your smartphone, you still need time to check that you’re getting your angles right and that you’re happy with what you’ve shot. It’s not something that just takes a few minutes when you have spare time.

Editing content

Once you’ve shot your content, you’re going to need to edit it.

Creators who are just starting out might not do much work editing, preferring the natural look of their content, especially photos. But over time you’re going to want to start making your work look more professional, including correcting colors, editing out unwanted elements, and more.

And with video editing, you can get a lot more creative once you start putting together a video with multiple shots instead of just relying on one constant shot. And even when you are, you might want to trim the start and end of your video – even if those are just the moments when you’re getting into position on your ‘set’.

Uploading and scheduling content

With the content ready to go, you need to make your plan for uploading it to your profile.

You don’t have to upload it when you want it to go live – you can do this in advance with scheduled posts. But you’ll still need to set aside time to upload the content and then write the captions and hashtags to go with it.

Replying to emails, DMs, and comments

Content creators don’t just upload their pictures and videos into a void and make money from subscribers viewing them. A lot of the real work is based on interacting with your audience, and replying to their messages and comments on your work so that they feel valued.

You’ll also have emails that you may need to reply to – from your platform, or from other creators looking to collaborate.

This ‘admin’ side of engaging with fans, platforms, and other creators can eat up a decent chunk of your day, especially if you’re new to the industry and you’re unsure of what you should be saying.

Shooting custom content

As well as your scheduled content, you may offer services for custom content shoots as well. And normally, the people paying for them expect a reasonable turnaround time (although you can dictate this).

This may mean having to factor in off-the-cuff custom content shoots into your schedule. You might need to be more reactive, which can mess with your plans if you’ve been thinking of taking more time for yourself or working on other things.

Social media promotion

Nobody is successful on OnlyFans or any other fan platform with a sizeable presence on social media. It’s one of the best ways to promote your profile and your own personal brand, interacting with fans outside of your subscribers and raising awareness of the kind of content you make.

You have to factor in the work you’ll need to do to find relevant conversations, post your own content, and reply to messages and DMs away from your main profile so that you can build a rapport with people and encourage them to check out the content you’re making.

Live streaming

This won’t apply to everyone, but some creators like to turn to live streaming as another stream of revenue or even just as a way to promote their fan page.

Live streams are rarely short – you’ll typically be streaming for at least an hour, but likely more, and you’ll need time to set up all your equipment too.

Analytics

If you want to be a really successful creator, you’ll have to set aside some ‘thinking’ time where you use the analytics provided by your chosen platform to see what’s working, and what isn’t.

The data you get will depend on which platform you’ve joined, but you should be able to figure out – with a bit of your own research too – which of your content shoots is more popular with fans, where your fans are primarily based in the world, and what time of the day they are usually browsing your profile.

This is valuable data when you’re looking at how to make your content more appealing to your fans, so it’s a worthy time investment.

Financial admin

One of the most overlooked aspects of running your own content creation business is the financial admin side of things.

Yes, payments will be made to your online account automatically by subscribers. You don’t have to produce invoices and chase payments.

But you do need to make sure your platform is paying you the right amounts, and that you’re withdrawing it once it becomes available.

You’ll also need to keep records, in case you’re audited in the future, and set aside time to file your taxes.

As long as you stay on top of your record-keeping it should be easy, but if you let it slip, then finding all the information can become quite the project.

How long does everything take?

There’s no simple answer to how long everything on this list takes. It will vary from creator to creator, depending on the type of content you’re making, the kind of audience you’re trying to win over, who your competition is, and so on.

The point of this guide is not to tell you “you will spend exactly X hours per week on this type of career” because it really varies and the whole point of freelance-style work, or working for yourself, is that you define the hours you decide to do.

The point of this guide is to make it clear just how much you need to think about. Because it is not a simple job.

The best content creators don’t just work 5-10 hours per week. Celebrity creators might only dedicate a few hours of their week to their fan profile, but that’s because they have people doing the other work for them, and they have a head start by being a celebrity in the first place.

But the people whose careers are based on their actual content creator page will definitely put a lot of time into making it a success.

Now, you don’t have to do that. Your content could be a side hustle, and so you might only be committing to a few hours a week and that’s fine.

Just so long as you aren’t expecting to make the same amount of money as someone who is willing to treat their creator career as a proper job. You have to have realistic expectations – the more you put into this, the more you’ll get out of it.

Setting boundaries

One other thing that is important with any kind of online job is setting some personal boundaries for yourself.

We don’t mean the kind of boundaries that you’ll be setting for your subscribers and fans, although those are important too – it’s important to make sure your fans send you comments and messages that are appropriate, after all.

But these are the kind of boundaries that dictate your relationship with your work, and how much you let it take over your life.

A really important point to make is that this also varies from person to person, but based on your personality and how much you enjoy work.

If you love everything about your job, then it’s not so big an issue when you let it consume more of your life. More power to you.

But if you’re reading this guide about the work/life balance of a content creator, there’s a good chance that a work/life balance is important to you.

Now, consider how you are working on an online profile, where your main jobs are interacting with people on social media, replying to messages, and shooting photos and videos.

You can do any of those on a smartphone, but especially the first two. And so that means it is very, very easy to be ‘constantly working’ even if you aren’t actually doing any work.

If you use your personal smartphone to do all of these jobs, you are putting yourself in a position where you don’t have separation from your fans at all. They can always reach you.

Depending on your personality, this might mean you’re checking messages at all hours and replying to people immediately. You can get a sort of addiction to your job, or to social media, and it may not be healthy for you.

There are benefits – you may prefer it this way because it means your fans get a response really quickly. You might have a lot of fun sending cheeky messages to subscribers. Just be careful.

For some people, it is better to set aside a period of time to work and draw a hard boundary. You may prefer a second smartphone for work, or just to leave all your work for your laptop or PC. That way, your smartphone stays purely personal.

This is something you have to figure out for yourself, but don’t neglect the chance that your content career could take over your life.

Working hours

One thing we’ve already touched on is how your fanbase will be online and active at different times of the day, and how you can be clever and lean into that to best engage with them.

But this also means you can be flexible with your working hours.

One of the biggest elements of a work/life balance is deciding the number of hours you work, but also when those hours are. You aren’t limited to a 9-5 role.

If you’re an early riser, you could get started on your working day at 5 am, and wrap up by midday. You then have the afternoon and evening to yourself, maybe with just a half-hour set aside to reply to messages when your fans are online.

Or if you love being lazy in the morning and find it hard to crawl out from the duvet to meet the typical start of the working day, just shift your hours later. You could reply to a few messages from bed, and then get up to properly start your day in the early afternoon and work through to the evening.

Or you could split your time, and work a little in the morning, and a little at night. This could be handy if you’re working around other commitments, such as childcare.

This is one of the best aspects of a career in content creation. Very few elements are time-limited, and you can work whatever hours you want to. Just try to avoid working too many hours if you want a break.

How to work smarter, not harder

So, with all of that being said, how do you make sure you have a healthy work/life balance as a content creator?

You do so by working smart.

Shooting content in bulk

One of the smartest ways to improve your time management is to shoot content in bulk.

Rather than setting up your lighting and camera, shooting one video or one collection of photos, and then taking it all down again, you can easily create content that you can use for weeks if you’re organized.

All you need to do is:

• Think of a few different themes for your video
• Prepare a selection of outfits/underwear sets to wear to freshen things up
• Have a range of items to use as set dressing, and swap them in and out between shoots
• Consider moving the camera, if it’s in a fixed position so that each shoot is showing a different angle

Using a combination of these techniques, you could spend maybe a single afternoon or day just shooting and that could result in enough material to last for many posts.

You could even just set up a day a month for content, and map out everything you’ll need for that month. Suddenly you’ve condensed maybe 200 posts into just 12 days of shooting time.

Scheduling posts

Scheduling your posts is the only way to be adding content to your profile. You don’t want to have to rely on being able to go online at a specific time to upload a post. So again, if you’re shooting content in advance, you can set up at least a couple of weeks of posts in advance, condensing your work into a manageable session.

The key here is to not rely on scheduling too far in advance. Or if you do, make sure you’re still proactively checking what you have upcoming, and cancelling any posts that you have to based on what’s happening in the world.

Because you can do real damage to your personal brand if you post content that ends up being insensitive due to what’s happening in the world.

The examples could be pretty dark, so forgive us, but this just paints a picture – imagine if you had scheduled a sex video with a caption along the lines of “I can be your queen” and it ended up coinciding with the day that the British monarch had passed away. How insensitive would that have looked?

So absolutely schedule your posts, but stay in control so you can pull anything you need to based on what’s happening in the wider world.

Replying to messages at a set time

While it can be nice for your fans if you’re at their beck and call, it can also be counterproductive since it is easy to get distracted from the task at hand if you end up in a real-time conversation with someone.

So, consider setting times of the day when you’ll reply to messages, and sticking only to those hours. You might schedule a half hour in the morning and a half hour in the evening, and only reply to people during those times.

You’ll be much more efficient with your work, and you’ll help to set healthy boundaries with yourself and your fans so that they know they have to wait for a reply every now and then – but never too long, so they’re still tempted to pay to send you a message.

Using a promo service

OK, so we’re getting into a little bit of self-promotion now, but with good reason.

The fastest way to help grow your brand and save yourself some time on social media promotion is to pay for a service that can get you off the ground. And that’s what our Follower Promote service can do.

When you’re trying to get going, you may struggle to find people who are actively looking for the kind of content you create, and who want to pay for it. But with us, we’ll post your profile on our website which is used by thousands of people who actively want to find adult content creators in various niches.

This means that you can save yourself some of the grind in the early days by potentially building up the starting point of a fanbase by reaching out to a targeted audience, and then that audience can become the backbone of your social media following too.

Most social media sites use algorithms that reward people who get high engagement, so by using a paid service to build interest, you can earn more fans, which will mean the websites show your profiles to more people interested in the kind of social content you’re producing.

Make sure to check out the different tiers of our Promote service.

Getting help with editing

One other thing we can also help with is our professional editing service. We can edit your photos and videos for you, which means:

• You get professional-quality results, even if you don’t know how to edit yourself
• You save a lot of time which you can either put towards other tasks, or you can use for yourself

Most content creators, when they’re first starting out, are quite slow at editing because they’re learning as they go. And while it’s still important to pick up these skills eventually, we can give your early content a boost while you still get to grips with the tools.

Learn more about our editing services here.

Flexible working locations

Another potential reason for people to look for more flexible working arrangements is to allow themselves more time for vacations.

After all, we’re always told that travel and relaxation are better for the soul than spending money on material things, aren’t we?

However, it’s worth remembering that content creation work allows you to combine the two. You can vacation and work at the same time, meaning you get more opportunities to see the world.

Of course, you don’t want to be ‘working’ hard on a vacation, so you just need to be sensible in your approach.

a vacation can actually be good for your work – you can shoot some great content in new locations, and help to freshen up your profile

This means scheduling as much as you can in advance and minimizing the number of hours you do spend working when you’re supposed to be relaxing.

Also, you’ll want to make sure that you have a reliable WiFi connection if you’re heading abroad, or somewhere remote where your phone data signal is weak.

Otherwise, you could leave fans disappointed if you unexpectedly go silent on them for a few days.

But a vacation can actually be good for your work – you can shoot some great content in new locations, and help to freshen up your profile. Plus your fans might even treat you since they think you deserve the chance to relax as much as possible if they know you’re vacationing.

Just remember to be careful with your data though. If you become a popular creator, don’t advertise where you are when you travel. That’s because fans might think it’s an opportunity to come and find you.

The best thing to do when shooting vacation content that is identifiable is to post it once you’ve returned home. That way you don’t risk having fans show up to try to get to know you in person, which can be a tricky situation to manage when you just want to stay safe.

In summary

So, what is the work/life balance of a content creator really like?

It’s hard to put a definitive answer there, but the main conclusions to draw are:

• You broadly have the freedom to set your own hours
• You can decide when those hours will be worked
• The best creators don’t shirk the work and will work a typical full-time amount
• It’s important to create a definition between your personal and work life
• There are ways you can work smarter to cut down on the hours needed

Ultimately, working as a content creator does give you a lot more freedom and control over your time, and you can definitely find ways to make it work around any commitments you have, or just reduce the hours you’re working every week.

You can also be more flexible with vacations too.

But don’t mistake content creation for being an ‘easy’ role. If you want to do well, you need to put the effort in – and it makes sense to get a few helping hands from services like our Promote feature too.