Early this year, when I quit my job and began my journey with Hive and pushed myself to create a replica of the success my brother had created, I had the best laid out plan for my life and content creation over a period of time.

For a couple of months, I was able to keep it up. However, from June, things began to take a different turn. I began my French course in May and since then my mind has been divided between school, after school studies and trying to keep up with an active presence here. Everything has been suffering.

Recently, I can't exactly put a finger on my creative process honestly. I'm really just shooting blanks ad hoping I hit a goal post with an amazing post every day. Some days, I get it, other days I don't but I get up and try again.

Where do I get content?

Most times, when I try to introduce Hive to people, the first thing they ask me is "where do I get content from?" I guess this is one of the challenging aspects of being here. There's nothing written on stone for you and really, there's no right or wrong answer to anything.

I've always had my fear of not knowing what to write or where to get information so I had these ideas of creating a Nigerian news blog at some point and then a financial news blog just to be able to get content from somewhere that would be post-able every day. Along the way, I learnt and I created a means of getting content for myself and I'll share it.

I'm a storyteller. I hardly ever get straight to the point and even if I do, I'll tell a story along the way. So, I might have had a 2 minutes conversation with a stranger and remembered only a tiny bit of what that stranger said but then when I write about it, I could create a post of 4 or 5 minutes just by narrating the events, my thoughts, the conversation and then my opinion.

The conversation could have been inconsequential, but my takebacks from it would be plenty. This has happened in many situations and it has worked wonders for me.

Another way to get quality ideas for content is through engagement. I can't tell you how many times I've been inspired to take a different angle from someone's post I read and create something entirely different and that person would have absolutely no idea I was inspired by them.

This has absolutely nothing to do with plagiarism. I've seen a lot of content on different communities that are similar yet very different. They don't contradict each other, they are just unique in their own way.

I also used to gain inspiration through my freelance gigs. It's amazing the things you learn when you do research for a client. I once wrote an article for a client and through that article, I was able to create 3 posts for myself here.

Finally, community contests. Thanks to the different communities I follow up with, I could get 1 content for every day of the week if I remained consistent enough to follow through.

How often do I post and how do I save my content?

At the beginning of my consistency frenzy, I tried to push myself to push at least twice a day. Some days, I would make up to 3 posts if I could. 3 happens to be my maximum. Then I would spend the rest of my day engaging with as many posts as I could. I was on fire. Now, not so much.

These days, I focus my energy on posting at least once a day, twice if the spirit is upon me. Then engagement is so low I feel ashamed of myself.

Since I gain inspiration along the way, I have a single group chat on WhatsApp where I save all my content once it comes to mind. Sometimes, I also save them as drafts here on Hive. I almost always have a bunch of posts that I start but don't finish due to a lack of inspiration along the way or just fatigue or burn-out.

I'm not exactly in my most creative space. I haven't been in the last 5 months. However, I'll be getting back in shape by the end of this year once I get French off my concentration list. Until then, I'll be doing the best I can with the most I can.

Thanks for reading!