DECEMBER 7, 2021

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Welcome to The Tilt, a twice-weekly newsletter for content entrepreneurs. Each edition is packed with the latest news, strategies, and tactics, plus inspiring creator stories and exclusive education, all to help you create, grow, and monetize better.

Features in this issue (view online):

• Full Tilt: Online Courses 101​
• Entrepreneur: Gaming and Makeup on Twitch​
• Stan: Discrimination in the Arts Fueled YouTuber

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Online learning is big business, a multi-billion-dollar industry. In fact, between 2020 and 2026, the professional and industry e-learning segment is estimated to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 32%.

Creators often evolve their business to get a piece of that pie. But it’s not as simple as creating explanatory videos with a few quizzes. Done well, online courses take your students into a virtual classroom where they show up regularly to learn, ask questions, do some homework, and test their knowledge.

But how do you capture all that to create a helpful and inspiring experience? We turned to Marc Maxhimer, director of online education at The Tilt, who spent 16 years in the classroom.

Tilt Advice

Marc earned his bachelor’s degree in English and math for middle childhood education and his master’s degree in educational administration. He spent 16 years teaching math and English.

“Educating people has the same foundational tenets whether you are educating adults or children. As an educator, your job is to predict what questions people will have and then answer them before they even have them or know they have them,” Marc says.

He says creators should lay out the course in the simplest way possible – creating a scaffolding for learning so the student can use what they’ve learned earlier and gain new knowledge and skills.

“Doing lessons via a video, you need to make sure you have explained everything very well and provide lots of examples for the student,” Marc explains.

Doing that takes more than a few weeks. Marc says to estimate three to four months to create a course, carving out time from planning to testing to publishing. “If you give it adequate time and focus, it will be obvious to the students,” he says.

Marc shares the sequence for his recently developed new Content Entrepreneurship 101 course on The Tilt:

• Outline the material to present.
• Identify the complementary worksheets and other downloadable material.
• Write each lesson and turn them into scripts.
• Create all the worksheets and other material.
• Record the videos.
• Complete post-production.

A philosophy of education that Marc believes strongly in is the “I do; we do; you do” method. The teacher presents the material as a lesson while the students listen and learn. Then the teacher and the students work together to practice the skill or knowledge from the lesson and finally, the student works on the new skill or knowledge on their own.

“This is why we chose to include explainer videos for the worksheets. These informal videos allowed others on our team to explain the worksheets and show how to complete them and explain the subtleties of the learning,” Marc says.

– Ann Gynn

Read the full story to get Marc’s learning management system advice, what you should do before you ever launch a course, how you can connect with students, and his best advice.

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The Tilt Launches First Online Course

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The Tilt is excited to announce the launch of Content Entrepreneurship 101 - a business model for content creators.

This course is designed for those creators out there who want to build a business and become successful entrepreneurs. CE 101 includes 75 lesson videos, worksheets, and explainer videos to help you on every step of building your business from finding your sweet spot and content tilt to building your audience and generating revenue, with a never-before-seen lesson on selling your content business!

​Sign up today to begin your journey as a content entrepreneur!

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Entrepreneur: Morgan Nixon

Biz: Bettynixx​

Tilt: Twitch gamer and makeup artist

Primary Channel: Twitch (9.3K)

Other Channels: Instagram (2.4K), TikTok (1.6K), YouTube (467), website​

Time to First Dollar: Few months; earned Twitch Partner status 2 years later

Rev Streams: Twitch subs and sponsored streams (plus a full-time corporate gig)

Our Favorite Actionable Advice:

• Don’t let perfect be your enemy: Start sharing your content creations. As Morgan says, if it doesn’t come out right the first time, you can do it again.
• Find your people: Search for relevant networking groups or browse tags to discover like-minded creators.
• Cut yourself a break: Morgan recognized she needed to slow down and took a break from streaming. That’s smart, so you don’t get burned out. Just let your audience know in advance. Otherwise, they may wonder what happened.

– Sarah Lindenfeld Hall

To learn more about Morgan Nixon and her Twitch alter ego Bettynixx, check out the longer story.

Know a content creator who’s going full tilt? DM us or reply to this email.

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Caught on ... Twitter​

“Behind every newsletter is an author who’s cringing when hitting send.”

– Brianne Fleming

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YouTube’s cool, fun 29-year-old aunty Khadija Mbowe gives their take on various pop culture events from the comfort of their bedroom. Ever since the Gambian-Canadian-American artist uploaded their first video to the platform, questioning how to spend their time during the pandemic, their channel has taken off, gaining thousands of views.

As their channel evolved, the video essays began to brush on topics such as race, gender, sexuality, and other aspects related to personal identities. Khadija’s 456K subscribers and other frequent watchers have helped a handful of videos garner over 1M views, namely the reign of the slim-thick influencer, an overview of how the slender yet curvaceous body type gained popularity, and race-baiting, queer-baiting, colorism, featurism, and performative diversity, which explores issues with the popular Netflix series Bridgerton.

Why we’re a Stan: Khadija’s history dealing with hardship in the arts gave them the bandwidth all to proudly speak against anything they deemed unjust on their YouTube channel.

– Shameyka McCalman

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• ​NETs - An NFT Roadmap for Content Creators (Content Inc. podcast)
• ​Special Episode 300: From Apple to Disney and Why We Still Hate Facebook (This Old Marketing podcast)
• ​Why the Word “Fearless” Is Actually Keeping You From Achieving Your Goals (Entrepreneur)
• ​In 1 Sentence, GoFundMe's CEO Reveals the Biggest Problem with Hybrid Work (Inc.)
• ​Planning a Career Pivot? Here’s How To Create a Backup Plan (Fast Company)

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Your team for this issue: Joe Pulizzi, Ann Gynn, Laura Kozak, Marc Maxhimer, and Dave Anthony, with an assist from Sarah Lindenfeld Hall, Shameyka McCalman, and Don Borger.

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