How Smart Creators Will Grow An Audience From Zero In 2025

The World Of The Internet Is Changing

00:03Follower count doesn't matter anymore and there is a new way to build an audience. Well, it's not really a new way, but it's a way that smart people are building audiences. This is what intelligent creators are going to do in the future. So we're going to talk about the ins and outs of that throughout this video.

00:15But we really need to preface this with a part of my story. First, and how in the past, I absolutely hated social media. I didn't want to be a part of it at all. And now it's one of the most meaningful and fulfilling things in my life, when most people still think it's toxic.

00:32And it was the key to my freedom in many aspects, got me out of freelance work and allowed me to do what I want full time. I got a lot of my time back, so let's just get into it. I started writing on social media because I wanted to do what I want.

00:46I feel like that's why most people are here watching this video. But writing wasn't my first attempt at freedom, and before then, I didn't realize that writing the skill for English majors and academics and technical writers was the ticket to doing what I wanted with my life.

00:59My first real job was as a web designer at a marketing agency for retailers. So think furniture or appliance retailers and building e-commerce sites for them so people can go online, see their inventory, shop, buy. It was like plug and play.

01:17We just designed the sites for them and plugged it into our back end. That job as a web designer came after working at a print shop part time, while living with seven other dudes in college. In this frat house. We were living in the frat house because it had six rooms.

01:34We turned it into seven somehow, and we just didn't want to pay that much for rent. We wanted to pay 250 to $400 each, depending on the room that we got because we were broke college kids. And while living there, I did everything in my power to do what I want to practice these creative skills that would eventually allow me to do my own thing.

01:55And ever since I was a kid, I'd always wanted to do something creative. So during my time in this house and prior, it wasn't just all in this one. The two years that I lived in this house, it was all over the place. But I tried everything from photography to digital art to dropshipping stores to full blown e-commerce stores, like selling minimalist leather wallets and blue light glasses for developers.

02:18Because I was studying programing at the time and I knew that they stared at screens all day. So I'm like, I should create some blue light glasses and sell it to them and marketed to them specifically. Because when you first get into marketing or online business, you're told, pick a niche, get very specific about your customer avatar, and then create something specifically for them.

02:37So blue light glasses were being marketed to everyone. I wanted to market to developers, and I thought I could pull that off, but I couldn't just because I was unskilled. And of course, I did other things like freelance web development, freelance SEO.

02:46I tried pulling off this like drop servicing thing with a two hour agency. That's where I got the name for two hour a writer. But in short, you pick a skill and then you create an offer and then you, attract clients. You focus on getting the clients and you outsource everything to Fiverr.

03:02And of course, for obvious reasons, that didn't work. I tried doing like, animated explainer videos as an agency. All of these failed. But as we know, failure is a very good thing. You don't learn anything from praise and success that can actually make you go blind.

03:15You learn everything from negativity, feedback, and failure. If you can not drown in it and you can pick apart and notice the signal in those things. Because again, most of the negative feedback is just people that are angry at you because your worldviews don't match your goals down the line.

03:29The reason I got the web design job, after all of those failures, is because I was in my fifth year of university. I still had maybe two years left just because I switched majors so many different times. I went from business to marketing to graphic design to filmmaking.

03:50I spent a semester and like each of these things, and I switched to these weird majors. Eventually I landed on coding. And then the one thing that I realized here is I actually enjoyed coding, so much so that I was just learning in my free time, I'd go to the library after class and I'd learn on my own, and then I'd go home and I'd take tutorials, and I ended up learning the entire course curriculum that I was taking in college in like 2 to 3 weeks through self-study.

04:14I stopped going to classes, and I still aced all the tests. So that showed me the power of self-education. If you have if you actually have a goal and curiosity, you can learn so much more, so much faster than most people are, and that's how you get ahead of everyone else.

04:23The thing here is that once I got the job, I knew that the clock would start ticking down toward my demise because getting a job was the bane of my existence. I was in my fifth year of college because I was trying to take out loans and push back how long I would have until I had to get the job, just so I could practice and try to make one of these businesses work.

04:47I was frantic, like trying all of these different business models just for one to work before I had to get a job, because once I get a job, I knew from just my prior observation and experience that it was a downhill battle. From there, responsibilities would start to stack up.

05:00I'd fall into the conventional life path. All of these things would happen to me that I didn't want in my life. But luckily, thanks to all the experimentation and curiosity

The Key To My Freedom

05:13and trying all of these different business models, I found my way. I spent most of my time at the job just procrastinating on my work, pushing that off until the last minute so I could focus on freelance web design because I had learned so much that I knew I was on the verge of something working.

05:28And so freelance web design. I ended up making work pretty well. After a few pivots, I started out just selling typical websites that worked. I landed some clients from referrals and then I got more specific with the system that I was offering, similar to how I teach now, and started targeting someone more specific with a specific system based on the skills that I meshed together.

05:49But the thing here is that at this time, I was still working full time as a freelancer. I still hated working on projects that aren't my own. So that's when I finally came around to social media. What we're talking about today, it was the key to my freedom.

06:01So after a few months of scrolling Twitter in early 2019, I realized something people were just writing. No images, no designs, no time consuming video editing like sending text to a huge public group chat. People were talking about things I already knew.

06:18I often thought I could write that tweet. People were using their profiles as a way to attract clients. A few did so with web design and it's like, hey, I could do that too. And finally, the people were actually cool. I felt like I was in a place that didn't have business speak or the professionalism I despised, but they were still cashing out big, and that's when it clicked for me.

06:40It's like, wait, these people aren't sending cold emails, these people aren't doing omnichannel outreach with LinkedIn and all these other things that I grew to despise with freelancing that just took up so much time. And it's like, I don't want to spend two, three, four hours a day doing that meaningless shit.

06:56And at this point in time, I was just I was young, I wasn't making that much money. I couldn't outsource it to a team. I didn't want a team. I wanted one thing. I knew it was possible with the internet. So the thing with people on Twitter is that they were just building an audience.

07:10It's like, that's when it all clicked. Oh my God, people can actually attract a following and land clients or have customers from the audience that they attract. And I'm like, Holy crap, all of these musicians chasing record labels and other things aren't paying attention to the opportunity right under their nose.

07:22It's like you can just build an audience based around your interests, and then your music becomes your product, and that's how you promote it. The same thing goes for writers or authors. If you want to sell a book, you don't have to go to a big publisher anymore.

07:34You just build your own audience. The same thing goes with any kind of independent work you want to do. You build an audience around you. The thing here is that building an audience isn't that people don't realize it's a skill. It's something that you can learn.

07:51It's something that you can study in practice and get better at. It's not something you just get on the social media and think, oh, these people are just catching on to their algorithm. They're all lucky you don't understand it because you haven't studied it.

08:00You haven't practiced it. You don't know that it's a skill, just like programing or web design or anything else growing on social media, attracting attention to you. Marketing is a skill. So this is when I realized that writing of all things is something I never thought I'd become.

08:19A writer was the key to my success. Because on social media, what do you do? You write even if you don't think you write. You're writing when you're outlining YouTube scripts. It's writing when you're writing on Twitter and not having to show your face.

08:32It's writing. When you cross post those two Instagram, like a lot of people do that. Still writing. You're just putting it in image format. Real scripts, tick tock scripts. You write the script beforehand so you can actually articulate your thoughts, and you're

The Future Of Audience Building

08:44not going into the video blindly and wondering like why you're not a good speaker. It's because you didn't write it out first. You're a writer. This is everything that we're going to teach in the Writer's Bootcamp that starts very soon. Enrollment closes very soon, depending on when this video goes out.

08:58But I teach you my entire content ecosystem. I help you build it out. That goes from writing posts to threads to newsletters, then turning the post into all platform posts and real short scripts if that's what you want to do. Turning the newsletter or thread into YouTube video scripts or solo podcast scripts.

09:15So it's this entire you do all content with just writing for 1 to 2 hours a day, and this is the first time that I actually am teaching part of my YouTube strategy as a part of that link is in the description to that, but we'll get into the importance of all of this later in the video, we need to talk about the future of audience building because social media has switched to an interest graph, right?

09:34Twitter and other things. They used to be chronological based on who you follow. Those are the posts that you would be shown. But now interest graph, TikTok, Instagram Reels. Other things have gained popularity even YouTube algorithm and now Twitter or the For You page has changed everything.

09:50Because now what you see, or the things that you share and engage with more often, or the things that you give more attention. So this is a blessing and a curse. It's a blessing because follower count doesn't really matter anymore. You can post something and if it's good, and if you actually have the skill of content, writing and engagement and social media like we talked about earlier, you know how to make it work, then you can consistently go viral of course, that's not what we want to be bank on as we'll talk about, but it's possible your follower count doesn't really matter

10:27because now you can write a viral post, have it go viral, and then funnel that traffic to an email list. Before we go further, I want to share a quote that Navarro posted recently because it will frame a lot. Shorts, reels, and tweets are naturally shallow because there's no time to go deep.

10:39That's important because if you want to survive as a creator going into the future, then all of these short form platforms, they're not going to be as relevant as you think they are in the future, and you're not going to get all the results that you want out of them.

10:53Banking on YouTube advertisements to pay you, or now X advertisements like the payouts for creators that have been increasing. That's not a good way to control your income. You need a way to consistently sell products and services that help other people, and that you can charge more for.

11:15I can make like 300 bucks a week or a month on Instagram Reels. I can make like a thousand here and there on Twitter. I can make 10,000 here and there on YouTube. Now that's life changing money for a lot of people, but with the same amount of traffic, me creating the same exact videos, I can make 3 to 4 million a year selling my own products or services.

11:36The other point here, with tweets, shorts, reels being shallow, is that to stay relevant on social media, you can't go as deep as you used to. You have to stay rather shallow and this isn't a bad thing because you're forced to meet people where they are beginner level and actually change their lives to the point of understanding your depth.

11:51If you understand the stages of psychological development or ego development, you understand that people are operating at different stages of those development and most people are lower on those stages, and those are the ones on social media not really focused on a goal.

12:02They're very distracted. And so your job, if you're trying to raise consciousness or you're trying to help people develop towards what they're meant to do, then you're going to have to start rather shallow. This is what a lot of the spirituality people get mixed up is.

12:18They're trying to target people in this unit of stage or even this transcendent stage, and they don't realize that that's like 1% of the population. You can still talk about your interest, but you have to frame them for the people lower and raise them up the ladder to where you are.

Newsletters Are The New Audience

12:33So people think that writing clickbait hooks and other things are all bad, which that just isn't the case. One stock can be down while the index fund is up. It's not only one thing that makes something bad. If the hook is rather shallow and clickbait, but the entire content of the video expands someone's mind and takes them beyond that, then I would say the overarching narrative of that specific thing that you're trying to label as good or bad is good.

13:00Now, the last thing here before we move on is that if you want to build and keep your audience, newsletters are more important than ever. Social media becomes a first layer for followers to be introduced to you, not a place to be nurtured or educated.

13:13Again, this is mostly so if follower count doesn't really matter anymore and anyone can go viral, what do we do? I'm going to read a tweet by Alex Lieberman, because I feel like it frames things pretty well. I'm long term bullish on newsletters.

13:28Audience is more important than ever before. As social. I'll go switch to interest. Graph podcast is just as crowded as email and audience growth is way harder. The unit economics are beautiful at scale 80% plus margins. There are tons of new newsletter, but most of them are shit.

13:43Care more about short term monetization versus long term reader loyalty. What have I been talking about for the past 2 to 3 years? In my videos, there's a group of people that get great success when they learn from me about writing in newsletters and other things like that.

13:56They really enjoy it because it allows them to express their interest. And then there's a other, more marketing direct response marketing crowd that absolutely fricking hates that I write super long newsletters. It's actually kind of funny to see them whine online occasionally, but the thing here is they're sending emails out every day.

14:09It's very short term, very shallow. They're not really helping anyone. It's see my last video on the death of the personal brand, where they are the definition of like the cliche personal brand, where they aren't focused on audience, they don't care as long as you join their email list and you get funneled into their product and they make 50 bucks off of you, they're good to go.

14:30That's it. So they're incentivized to focus on these very, very shallow topics that target and potentially exploit problems in your life that don't really need to be solved just yet, or they're solving the wrong problems, they're solving the problems that are going to squeeze the most money out of you as possible, rather than the problems that they deem important or the problems that they value.

14:52But they don't have very many values. So for trust, authority, and leverage, long form matters more for traffic, virality, and attention. Short form matters more. The point is that both matter. If you rely on one, you limit your long term success.

15:04Yes, you can talk about shallow topics on social media all day and make some quick cash, but you aren't building something that will last years from now, both in terms of digital and mental real estate. If you don't write long form, not only will you be forgotten in people's minds, but your business can be shut down by social platforms at the snap of a finger.

15:20If you don't write short, you don't build your audience. If you don't write long, you don't keep your audience. Your follower count doesn't represent your audience size anymore because the For You pages exist where everyone goes viral. An email list is the only true representative of your audience size.

15:40An email list is the new status symbol. Nobody can take away an email list from you, so let's piece this all together really quick. First is write short form to attract people, because we're talking about newsletters and email lists and having an owned audience, your actual audience.

15:54But how do you fuel that thing? You need a traffic source. Still, you can't just write off social media and, expect your newsletter list to grow. It's like those authors, those new authors that just think that Amazon, of all things, is going to send a ton of traffic to their books that they post on Amazon, they post something on Amazon and just expect to be millionaires from their books.

16:10You have to market yourself. You need an audience of your own. Nowadays, if you're not going the traditional route of having a publisher or record label or other thing like that, where it's more a centralized traffic source that you can sign up for as a creative or an independent person and have them give you some form of business because they believe in the product.

16:30So short form is your base in today's social media environment. Write about your opinions. Give short, actionable advice, but don't fill in the blanks. Let people ask questions for more engagement. Make polarizing statements that are true from your perspective.

16:44Let people filter themselves out if they can't see both sides. So in the simplest of explanations, pick an idea. Any idea? Even one from this video? If you want to write it from your own perspective, don't worry about the first draft. Edit it.

16:56Make it attention grabbing and impactful. Reference others content structures, not ideas to enhance your own. If you want a swipe file that will be giving out in the Writers Bootcamp, you can find that via a link in the description. It takes you to cortex, which is the second brain app for writers and creators.

17:18And then last, iterate with feedback based on engagement. The problem people have with short form is that they don't want to be shallow. They don't want to play the short form game. They feel like they're too good for beginners who actually care about the topics, the shallow topics that you're going to write about because they help them at their level of development.

17:32You need to think of all of your content as one unit. Your post threads and newsletters are all one organism. Short form is for attracting a broad and somewhat shallow audience. Medium form, like threads or shorter YouTube videos, is about going a bit deeper and letting the right people choose to join your newsletter, watch your videos, or read your books, guides or courses.

17:54Long form like newsletters and long videos or podcasts is for the dedicated fans. They are aligned with your goals and want to learn as much from you as they can. Now the second thing we first write short form to attract people and then we write medium form to educate people.

18:08So in my eyes, the role of medium form content is to display competence. We're talking about threads. We're talking about carousels. We're talking about shorter YouTube videos. And we're also talking about threads on the Instagram app threads.

18:21Those have been doing pretty well for me. And we're talking about LinkedIn posts. What you need to understand here is that my most popular video on this channel, on going monk mode and getting ahead of 99% of people. Then everyone took that title and now it's just overblown, was exactly from a thread that I wrote about six months prior to that.

18:37I just read the thread to the camera, and that thread came from a post from a few years ago. How to get ahead of 99% of people was an idea that I posted on Twitter. I think like in 2020 or even 2019. So we'll talk about that little progression in the last section of this video.

19:01Threads, carousels and short videos are great at building authority and trust, giving people enough information to instant follow you and leading a lot more people to the bottom of your thread where you can promote your newsletter, opt in or even product.

19:08So the thing here is that you can build in a high quality audience with threads alone and become very authoritative. But the problem here still remains is that your follower count doesn't matter anymore. You can't guarantee that one you're going to go viral every single day, and two, that your content will even be seen by the people that follow you.

19:28It could be all new people who know nothing about you. So in order to stay, cultivate an audience of people and make sure that they see your stuff time and time again, because that's more important than people just seeing your stuff once and then disappearing and never seeing stuff again.

19:45It's extremely important for people to see your content over and over again. That's why you're creating it. So step three after writing short form to attract people, medium form to display competence, we're going to write long form to create 1000 true fans.

19:54All of your content should lead people up a hierarchy of trust and value posts lead to readers. Threads lead to fans, newsletters lead to super fans, and if you're familiar with the 1000 true fans concept, an engaged email list is all you need to set yourself up for life now.

20:14I was first introduced to this power after I read the book The Invisible Selling Machine by Ryan Dice. This is one of the few business books that I've actually read, because I get most of my business advice from psychology, metaphysics, and philosophy.

20:26And now, while I don't use his tactics any more from the book, it taught me one specific thing in the book I don't have it with me, so don't quote me on this or the numbers. But in the first part of the book, he talks about a story where he was just in a very bad place.

20:39He wasn't going to make it. He had to come up with a lot of money fast. And so what he did, he went to his computer, he typed up an email, he sent it, and boom, overnight he had over $100,000 in his bank account. And so at the time, my naive little mind was like, what?

20:51You can just make an email and magically $100,000 appears in your bank account. But then once I actually got into it and understood business more, it's like, no, he has a list full of people that want to buy from him. He creates an offer, he pitches it to them.

21:06It's valuable to the audience that he's giving it to. They buy and he cashes out big because he has good rapport with that list and probably doesn't promote too much. So when he does, it's like a flood. And people who haven't experienced this power of a newsletter before don't really care to build one until they actually start building one, and then they realize that power.

21:25The problem with all of this is that people that have only worked jobs their entire life, which there's nothing wrong with that.

How To Build An Audience In 2025

21:35Of course, as always, I have to always mention that I'm not one of those guys that's like, quit your 9 to 5 job. And maybe it sounds like that sometimes, but that's not my actual viewpoint. The thing is, is if you've been in a job all of your life, you only understand the labor theory of value, where it's like, I do this much work, I get this much in my bank account every week or two weeks.

21:54It's not asymmetric. It's not actually how the world works. You're not getting paid in accordance with the value that you provide. And once you start doing that, it takes some time for your mind to shift over. Like, hey, I can send one email out.

22:06And depending on how long I've been doing this, I can make 500,000 to $1 million that depending on what my skill level is and how good the product is. And those are very big numbers. I probably shouldn't have said 502 million. I can make $10,000 in an email.

22:19So let's talk about how to build an audience in 2025. I've talked about these a few times, so this video is best complemented with my other how to build an audience. Even if you have zero followers or videos like that, videos in the one person business playlist will complement this well, and it will fill in knowledge gaps that me, you may be missing.

22:37In this video, audience building comes down to six things. One is testing ideas and structures on social media. And when I say structures here, I'm talking about the structure of a post. Go and look on social media. Scroll for ten, 20, 30 posts and notice how things are structure go scroll through my timeline and you can see, okay, there's just blocks of sentences.

22:57There's paragraphs, there's line breaks between them. There's long tweets. They're short tweets. There's ones with bullet points. There's threads. There's other things. So you're testing different structures and ideas within those structures too.

23:12Is having a catalyst strategy for new posts. Three is turning best ideas into threads and newsletters. Four is repurposing. You're writing to other platforms. Five is taking advantage of exponential events, and six is sending everyone to your newsletter.

1) Social Media Posts Are The New MVP

23:26These are the only things you need to focus on every morning. When done well, it should take no longer than 1 to 2 hours a day. Again, this can be done part time. First thing we need to understand is that social media posts are the new MVP Minimum Viable product.

23:40So if you have an audience, you don't really have to do much market research. You're doing market research every day just by posting content. So social media becomes this testing ground for ideas and angles and hooks. You can take the angles and hooks and pop them into, paid ads if you want.

23:56And you already know that they're going to do better than most and you don't have to spend money to test them. So in short, you post on social media, turn your best posts into threads, and newsletters, turn your best threads and newsletters into free downloads, turn your free downloads into an information, product or service.

24:11Turn your information product or service into a software physical product. Book or other scalable business. So what we're doing here is we're testing ideas on social media, distributing those to other platforms, depending on the ones that do really well, you know, that's what your audience wants.

24:25So you turn that into a free download and an information product for cash flow, because it costs like $0. To do that. We're going to talk about information in education products. In the next video, I believe, and the importance of them, because most people don't understand that education is arguably the most important product that you can sell, not only for human behavior change in the value that you can provide for someone else, because education determines how you see the world and everything you can do in your life.

24:51But it's also extremely high profit margins. It's profitable. The economy favors the profitable, so they're only going to become more and more of a thing.

2) You Need An Idea Catalyst

24:58And then once you have that cash flow and you have a validated idea in the form of an information product, you can turn that information product the basis of it, like I have with to our writer into cortex. You can do that because you have the money to do so.

25:09You're not taking out loans or getting VC money for a startup anymore. You're doing this now. The second thing you need is an idea catalyst, because while social media is different right now, not all of your posts are going to go viral and there's still such a thing as beginner hell.

25:22You have to get over a certain hump of followers and you need a way to test whether your ideas are good or not. So there's a few ways to do this. We're going to first start with the most controversial, which is pay to play, and I want to frame it this way.

25:37Ads allow you to pay a platform like Facebook or Google to show your posts to more of their audience, but ads aren't the only way to reach a larger audience. In fact, I'd rather not pay the platform for it, like Facebook or Google. I'd rather pay an individual with whom I want to build a relationship and who has a highly engaged audience already.

25:55Almost anyone who has a social media audience also has a service where they help you grow, or they advertise spots to get in front of that audience, being shared on social media by a larger account, and paying them for that is on par with paid ads and paid sponsorships.

26:10When you pay a podcast for a sponsorship spot, you're paying them to get in front of their audience. The same thing goes with a newsletter sponsorship. This is just like, hey, I'm going to pay you and you share my post, and I'm not even asking them to buy anything.

26:24I'm just wanting to see if my content does well and I can attract some followers from that. The best way to do this, in my eyes, is to just DM accounts that have over 20,000 ish followers and ask if they can help you with growth, or if they offer some kind of promotion.

26:34The thing with big brands and going after large accounts with this is that one. Most of them just don't have the time to check their DMs. They have multiple different platforms, they have businesses to run. They're not going to spend 8 to 12 hours a day managing 300 DMs across different platforms, and they charge a lot because audiences are extremely valuable.

26:52I know people that actually charge $10,000 for ten shares on social media right now. So even if you grow on social media and aren't able to sell a product or service, you could just you have an audience that's as valuable as anything. Now, if you don't want to invest in growth one, that's fine, but two, I'd question whether you're serious about building your life's work.

27:15You'll spend $40 on a nice, pleasurable dinner, but you won't spend that much on business traffic that could make you ten x more. If you have a product and understand the concept of ROI, a lot of people don't see the value in this, or they screen that it's inauthentic and you should just grow organically, which you can, that's perfectly fine.

27:31But if you have a product or service and you get a lot of traffic to that by paying for an audience like you would for paid ads and you get an ROI from it, then not only do you keep part of the audience because they follow you and go into your newsletter, that doesn't really happen with paid ads that much unless you're smart, but you're also generating traffic to your product or service and probably making money.

27:50And no, I don't agree with the people who think investing money in your business growth in a smart way and not fueling these corporate platforms with paid ads money, I'd rather go straight to the individual and help them out and they help me out.

27:59Now, most of you don't care about this, but if you're in the social media space and people that talk about it on social media, people are in two different camps. It's like, oh, I grew without paid retweets or this and that. It's like, good job.

28:14That's actually really good. That's awesome. But to write it off as a strategy that doesn't work or something that isn't extremely valuable is just stupid. And if you are supposed to be this person that teaches audience building and social media, you're writing off one of the things that's actually going to accelerate growth the most.

28:29You're pretty dumb. And if they don't work for you, it's because you don't know what you're doing. Now, I haven't done this in three years, and I actually try to stay away from teaching it because I don't do it currently. But when I was just starting out and getting a 9 to 5 was the bane of my existence.

28:44And I hated freelancing and wanted to get out of it as soon as possible. You bet that I'm going to do everything in my power to do that. And only good things have come from that. I'm. I'm only here because of it. But the thing here is, you don't need to do that.

28:57So the second option is just building a tribe. You should do this either way, whether you decide to pay or not. And it's not like you have to pay a ton to begin with. I'm going to stop talking about this topic. If you're smart, you'll make it work.

29:10So what you do here is people will think of this as like an engagement group or an engagement pod. That's not what it is at all. This isn't something that you're just tossed into and expected to like, work with people that you don't care about.

29:24You're trying to inject yourself into a social media tribe so you find accounts around your size, add them to a list or bookmark their profiles and reply to their content every day. Then eventually you take the conversation from the replies to the DM, so you're starting conversations in the replies.

29:39You're giving your own insights, in your own stories, in your own anecdotes. For the posts that they write. You're not just regurgitating what they say. You're not just replying with oh great post or this or that. You're starting an actual conversation.

29:50And if you aren't naturally skilled or extroverted in talking to other people, then this is also a time where you should probably research social dynamics and how to hold conversations. You're just doing it online, and then once you're in the DMs and you're talking, you're having the conversation.

30:02You just ask them if they're doing anything to grow, like what strategies they're doing. It's like, hey, dude, I'm trying to grow just the same as you. If you come across anything interesting that's actually helped you, and then if they have, they're probably going to share it with you because you're a friend, or then that's when you can position yourself to be like, hey, do you want to like, share my post?

30:24Like, if I send you a thread, you can send me one back and then we'll both share it. How does that sound? And then once you do this with four or 5 or 6 people, then you have this group where when you want to test an idea, you just send it to them, they share it.

30:33And then one, it has more potential to go viral. Two you generate more traffic, you generate more followers, and the more consistent you are with that you realize you have these levers that you can pull for audience growth. Now, the third way you can do this and remember that we're creating an idea catalyst here.

30:46We're trying to find a way to get our posts in front of other audiences. So we there's a way to pay to do that. There's building a tribe to get in front of your audience's tribe. And then there's another way to exchange value, which isn't in the form of money.

31:01So if you have a large audience on Instagram and I have one on Twitter, then you can reach out and be like, hey, I'll share you on Instagram if you share me on Twitter, and then you're good to go there. Or if you have a service or a product or something that you can offer people.

31:19Like if you want to reach out to a larger account and be like, hey, I will create this land, I'll create a landing page for you or I'll write an email for you. If you give me 5 to 10 retweets or shares on whatever platform you're doing this on, so you can get creative as you want with this.

31:34Because social capital and trading goods is just as valuable as trading money for these things.

3) Turn Your Best Posts Into Newsletters

31:40So that's step one. And two, you have these short posts that you're posting and testing, and then you have a way of catalyzing those ideas so you can see which ones do the best. Now step three is to turn your best posts into newsletters. So when one post stands out as an anomaly like you see, okay, these posts have this certain level of engagement.

31:57Okay, this one has more. These ones have the same. You take that and you turn it into more content. If you want to write a newsletter using this, I would use the Bpas framework. We've talked about the PaaS framework in my four frameworks for writing follow worthy social media content.

32:13Video. But the Bpas is big idea problem amplify solution. So starting with the big idea so you can get to the point faster. So it's big idea step the idea in the post problem illustrated relatable problem based on the big idea amplify. Give examples of how that problem impacts people's lives and solution.

32:28Give steps, lessons, and insights that help solve the problem. So that's a short and sweet way to write a newsletter. What I would do is just one sentence big idea, a few sentences problem, a few sentences amplify the problem and how it impacts someone's life.

32:42That's the intro. And then you have a headline that states whatever it is that you're talking about. And then you go into step by step solution. So you add step one, two, three, 4 or 5, however many, and then you fill in the context within those.

32:58So you have sub headlines of step one, step two, step three. And you have paragraphs within those that give context and teach people how to actually do it. That's it. That's how you write a newsletter. Of course. Pick a topic. Well, you're turning your best social post into that newsletter now.

4) Take Advantage Of Exponential Events

33:12Step four. And this one is extremely important, is take advantage of exponential events because audience growth is non linear. You flatline and make a little bit of progress here and there. Or when you're growing on social media, you usually flatline and make a little bit of progress for an extended period of time.

33:26And then something works and you see a bunch of viral growth all at once. So there are a select few posts on Twitter that did really well for me, maybe like one out of ten or maybe one out of 20. That would bring in a lot more followers and engagement than usual.

33:40And once I have those, I can start to repurpose those and incorporate them more so I can grow consistently. The other thing with YouTube is that my growth was pretty slow until I had one video do extremely well, which was the Justin Welch podcast on the one person business.

33:59And so I started talking about the one person business. More and more videos started to do well, started to go viral. All of those viewers flooded into their videos because they were recommended to them. All of my videos saw this exponential jump, and I gained 203 hundred and 400,000 followers in a relatively short amount of time.

34:13And the same thing happened with my Instagram growth, where there were two times where I kind of just fell into a trend because I was experimenting. If you don't experiment, you're never going to find out what works. So I was experimenting with carousels and they seem to do really well.

34:28And then I had my tribe share individual posts from those carousels to their stories, and they shared different carousels on different days. So it's like I send them the post. They share the first post of the carousel one day, and then two days later I send a middle post of the carousel.

34:47They send that and it would almost guarantee that it always ended up on the explore page. And that got me up to 200 something thousand followers. And then when I started doing the animated reels, the first few of those, the first, like ten, did extremely well.

34:59Then I went to 1.2 million followers in like the course of 1 or 2 months. So social media growth is kind of like you're growing very slowly or not at all. And then you see that big jump and then that repeats until you take what works and you start to integrate that into your brand.

35:17And so those things come up more and you start to slowly sustain growth. You hit this baseline level of followers that you gain every single month. And then if you continue experimenting, this is why if you are the niche, this isn't I mean, if you choose a niche and you aren't the niche and you go too narrow, this isn't going to happen to you.

35:34Or at least it's very less likely that it will. Now step five here is to send everyone to your newsletter.

5) Send Everyone To Your Newsletter

35:41Put it in your YouTube descriptions, plug it on Twitter once a day. Plug it. If you cross post your tweets to different platforms, just go through for 15 minutes every morning and promote your newsletter. Whether it's a backlog version or not.

35:53This is what I've taught in to our writer for the longest time, but you're sending everyone to your newsletter. That's just where you're sending people every single day, so that you have one central place for the people that actually want to hear from you.

36:05So that, in a nutshell, is how you build an audience in 2025, with an email list repurposed across all different platforms. That is it for this video. I appreciate you watching. Check the links in the description for courses, free writing app cortex and other things of that nature.

36:19Thanks again. Bye.