Please make an effort to promote the work of creators you like

A couple months ago, I decided to stop writing about hockey, which I had done for five years at Winging it in Motown, the Detroit Red Wings site for SB Nation. There are many reasons I made that decision, but one of them was that it felt like the time and energy I spent on it was a waste of time. I want to explain why, but my larger goal is to explain why it matters that you support content creators you like.

I’ve spent a lot of time going over things in my head to figure out the best way to tell this story. I felt a lot of resentment at the time, and I hoped that would go away, but it hasn’t. I’m hoping that by sharing this, I can help process some of these feelings. But at the same time, I don’t want this to sound like a “woe is me” post, and that seems like a hard needle to thread, but I’m going to try.

So, what I’ve decided to do is to tell you up front that while the first section might sound like me venting, and it probably is, my overall goal is to try to help other people by sharing those feelings. I have a strong feeling that many of the friends I made in the hockey writing community feel this way sometimes (or maybe more often).

During my time at WIIM, I worked under JJ. Whenever I had an idea, he supported me. When I wanted to start a podcast, he helped me any way he could. People at WIIM like JJ, Jay, Sara, and Prashanth always made me feel good about what I was doing. I don’t know if I would have been able to get into analytics like I did without the help of Prashanth.

I could always count on the official WIIM twitter account amplifying any articles I wrote or podcast episodes I was a part of. But after that, it began to feel like most of the time, there was little to no amplification outside of my colleagues at WIIM.

It’s unrealistic to expect that you are going to get feedback and amplification on everything you do. But it increasingly felt like I was writing or talking into the void, and I had achieved the same overall effect as if I’d done nothing.

I made a concerted effort to not only target guests for our podcast that were household names, and I’m very happy with the varied guest list that we were able to create. But I would be lying if it didn’t hurt that I was almost never the person being invited on podcasts. I certainly didn’t expect people to invite me on their podcast because I had them as a guest on mine, but it felt like with my writing and podcasting output that I would occasionally be invited on podcasts.

I think all of this made me feel terrible most of all because my natural instinct is to promote the work of my friends and people who I think do great work. So it really hurt when it felt like almost nobody cared about what I was doing enough to do the same.

I said up top that I didn’t want to make this a “woe is me” article. But I feel like I can’t really emphasize the importance of the next part if I’m not brutally honest about how it made me feel. Because I’m sure others feel the same way. I felt like nothing I did mattered and I was wasting my time. It was particularly hard to see other people launch similar projects and see much higher levels of support from the same people I thought would be supporting me.

I honestly don’t know if I would have continued with what I was doing if the work I was doing felt more like it was appreciated. I do know that it would have made the decision to stop a lot harder than it was.

So I guess I decided to open up about how I feel because I don’t want the same thing to happen to other people.

It may not feel like it to you, but you can make a huge impact on your favorite content creators. It’s so easy to retweet something on Twitter and share it with your followers. If you like something enough to click that like button, it’s almost no additional work to also retweet it. And for an additional minute of your time, you could quote retweet it and tell your followers why you like it.

Imagine if people put the same effort in promoting work they appreciate that they do dunking on the Twitter Main Character of the Day.

If you really enjoy listening to a podcast, or reading articles from a website, or reading books by a specific author, or whatever it is, it’s not hard to promote their work to your friends and followers every now and then.

Lastly, it’s typically easy to contact people and tell you that you really enjoy their work. In the five years I wrote for WIIM, I think I received about five emails. Each time, it meant a great deal to me. But it doesn’t have to be an email. Depending on the medium, it’s almost always easy to send a message to the person creating the content you like.

At the end of the day, I have no idea how many people will read this. But I feel at least a little better having written it, and I hope that my sharing my experience with help others going forward.