I have taught you everything you need to know.
If you wanted to, you could take all of this information and see immense success in life.
The 80/20 Of Branding, Audience Building, & Content Creation Your brand and content are a composition of:
YOUR vision for your future — this is your brand mission, what are you leading your followers towards?
2-3 broad topics that you love reading and talking about — you will consume information relating to these for idea generation and mention them in your bio to show what you talk about. These broad topics become niche topics when you break them down into sub-categories and target a specific problem within that category.
Your expertise — what skills do you have (or skills that you are learning) and how are they helping you actualize your vision for the future? How do they resolve the pains of others and help them reach that vision?
Again, remember levels of awareness, persuasion, the eternal markets, and the evergreen markets. How can you craft a brand message and content relating to all of those?
You are starting a project here.
Make it a habit to get inspiration from those you aspire to be like.
How is there bio worded? What awareness level is it targeting? What does their content look like? Why does it make people engage?
Be hyper-conscious of yourself when looking at accounts you look to emulate.
At the very beginning, you do not have a following. Your account will not grow from content alone. You need to deconstruct the platform and understand what makes people GROW.
Here are the levers you should be moving regarding building an audience:
Engaging with big accounts — respond to accounts with a large following 10-20 times per day with your personal experience relating to the topic they posted about. Do not reply by rewording what they said. Remember — pains, benefits, and transformations for a specific awareness level — that is what will make people follow you.
Networking with people you want to work with — send 3-5 DMs per day complimenting someone you want to work with on a recent post of theirs. Follow up with them in a few days with content that you wrote using theirs as inspiration. DM it to them and tell them that they inspired what you wrote (many times they will engage with it, boosting the amount of impressions it gets).
Writing beginner-level educational content — we need a balance of growth and authority. Target a very beginner level (and low level of awareness) problem and educated people on how to overcome it. List style posts (bullet point steps) work the best in this scenario. Then turn each of the bullet points into their own post.
Leveraging traffic through curation — write a thread or a post and mention large accounts in it (they may engage with it). If you write a thread about fitness and go over a talking point that a large account talks about, recommend people to follow that account.
Immerse yourself in a conducive growth environment — for the next 30 days, follow the people you aspire to be like and comment on their posts. Watch YouTube videos and only expose yourself to an echo chamber of content that you would want to create. Listen to audiobooks and podcasts on the topics you want to talk about. Read 1 book this month on something that you may want to be known for. This alone will fill your mind with ideas on how to grow and write.
These are only a few strategies out of many.
My question for you — how can you get more EYES on your profile? Where are the people that you want to follow you hang out and how can you make yourself well known in that space?
Consistency and repetition is key here.
The Highest Leverage Play The ABSOLUTE most important thing to building an audience is connections.
Let me paint you a picture.
I met Joey Justice when we each had ~500 followers.
Now we are far ahead of that. We built cohorts together. We did podcasts that changed people’s lives. We’ve met each other in person multiple times.
(Hell, I LIVED with Dakota Robertson for 6 months. We met each other after he paid me $8000 for consulting.)
We brought together people we had DMd previously into a group chat called the “Dream Team.”
We helped each other out, shared strategies, got on calls, shared each others posts, and helped each other with out expertise in exchange for testimonials.
Almost everyone in that group is one of my good friends. We all have audiences of 50K to 200K.
I bet you know all of them and look up to them.
We all started from zero around 2 years ago.
We were “nobodies” 2 years ago.
Even after 6 months we had created such massive leverage for ourselves that we knew we would never have to work a day in our life again. We had created freedom through the internet.
The contents in this course contain everything we did to get to where we are now, nothing held back.
The testimonials we gave each other have increased in perceived value and help us make more sales (because they are a well known name! The testimonials alone that I worked for back then have easily made me over 6 figures by themselves.
Getting on calls with other people and helping them without expecting a thing in return is the highest ROI thing you can do in this space.
DM anyone that catches your eye
Compliment them on their work
Ask them what their goals are and what they are working on
Treat it as a normal conversation, like you were meeting someone at a party or texting a good friend — don’t be robotic or needy — play it cool
Share strategies you have learned and ask if they want to help each other grow
Engage with accounts with insightful and introspective replies
Make yourself known by getting your ideas out there
Let everyone know what you do so they can pass your name along
Offer whatever value you can to everybody you cross
If you can do that, you will win. You have my promise.
(IF — and only if — you have all other areas of The One-Person Business locked down. People won’t follow consumer-looking accounts or those that don’t put out value).
It’s time to start taking your work — and yourself — seriously.
If You Haven’t Already…
- Create A Twitter & Newsletter Platform
If you already have a Twitter account and an email marketing software (for long form posts that ALL of our content will stem from — and builds a deeper connection that Twitter) then disregard this part. If not:
Create a Twitter account or use your current one — do not start over from scratch, you need all of the initial followers (social proof) you can get. Clean up your profile picture, bio, and who you are following.
Create a Beehiiv or Substack account and walk through all of the settings — Do not worry about subscriber count or anything really. Just set it up and make sure you are ready to create your first long-form article.
Why Beehiiv or Substack? It allows you to link people to previous newsletters you have created. The newsletters are saved as blog posts. This is crucial for the content ecosystem we will build out in 2 Hour Writer.
ConvertKit is another worthy option if you want to write email sequences, but if you are an absolute beginner, Beehiiv works. ConvertKit now offers a creator profile so you can link to your personal blog of newsletters.
All of the newsletter software work.
Down the road, you can transfer your emails to another platform, build a personal site for yourself, and upload previous newsletters to the blog (this is what I do on my personal site if you want to see).
If you are on a different social media platform, still, start a Twitter account. That is such low hanging fruit. You don’t need visuals. You just need to write. You can transfer any short-form content you’ve already written over to it. All I do with my content is cross-post my writing to other platforms. It’s quick and efficient.
Learning how to write 280 character Twitter posts is what led to most of my writing success. If you start on LinkedIn or another platform, you are given too much room to write. You need to train your mind to be quick and impactful.
- Make Your First Post
Write your first Tweet while keeping everything we’ve talked about in The One Person Business in mind.
Pay attention to how other people post. Start making connections on why it does well. Use it as inspiration for your own posts. Keep it problem and benefit focused.
Get in the habit of posting once a day minimum.
If you have to stay up until 2am trying to think of a post, do it. I did that many times. If I didn’t have a post ready for the next day (and didn’t get one written) I considered myself a failure. I could not lose any momentum.
- DM One Person You Want To Connect With
This is more about overcoming the fear of people being “so far ahead of you.”
Remember, likability.
If you can compliment someone on their work, be interested in them, and offer the value you can (even if its just a resource you came across relating to what they are working on) — they will like you.
Start small.