Like many people, I've always had the dream of becoming a YouTuber.
But I failed for years before I saw any shred of success and that's why in this video I want to talk about the best way to grow on social media, even if you have zero followers, simply because I feel like a lot of people don't know what they're doing.
So we'll talk about that.
But in this video, you're going to learn why I failed and what you can learn, how to start, even if you lack confidence and aren't a 10 out of 10 super model, how to use other people's authority to build your own.
This will lead to the fastest growth and why treating social media like a video game is the key to being a success.
This will lead to sustainable growth.
My dream of becoming a YouTuber started in high school when I would get home from school and just go straight to my computer and start watching the people that I love to watch on YouTube, the creators at the time.
And I was very into fitness because I wanted to get jacked as a kid for vanity reasons.
And I would go home, watch these people and they had no idea that a guy in a completely different location was taking and implementing their advice, soaking in their ideas and changing his identity to become very similar to them because he couldn't find those role models in real life.
Now that's a very big power of social media.
A lot of people think that it's just entertainment and memes and cheap dopamine.
When I don't believe that to be the case, social media has changed my life and the creators on it have changed the way that I view the world.
And I would give a lot of the credit to my success in whatever domain of life, self-improvement, business, anything to those people for at least kickstarting the journey and helping me along the way and teaching me the things that I wasn't taught in school.
It's no wonder why 30% of children and 54% of adults in the US said they wanted to become a YouTuber as a career.
This isn't some delusional aspiration.
This is where evolution has led us.
People want to do what they love and when you peel back the layers and discover what social media actually is, a way for anyone to attract an audience to the work they love to do, you realize that it is a path almost anyone can take to shape the future.
Work is going digital. Education is going digital.
Commerce is going digital.
Society is going digital.
As automation and AI disrupt everything we thought was safe and secure, the second lives we live on social media indicate a transition of something larger.
Communication, education, value, meaning, and what it means to be human have evolved.
The first thing we need to discuss, if you have the ambitions and the dreams of doing what you enjoy, and one thing here, realize that other people are not watching this video too.
I feel like it's very easy to get caught up in the fact that I'm watching this video so everyone knows what I know now.
And that's just not the case.
If you're here, it means you're ambitious.
It means you have an open mind.
It means that you're willing to do more for your life and you're willing to take an unknown and potentially risky path to get there.
But as we know, the greatest risk is no risk at all.
So the first thing we do here with an open mind is to start with writing.
Amoebas sensed information with touch.
Animals sensed information with sight, smell, sound, and memory.
Humans have the ability to shape evolution because we are the first to pass down information with writing.
Writing isn't just a skill.
It's what makes us human.
So why did I fail at my dream of becoming a YouTuber?
It's because I didn't actually know what I was doing.
I saw what other people are doing.
I thought it would be wise to just like pull out a camera, start filming myself and talk to it and expect people to actually find what I have to say interesting.
That's where a lot of people go wrong is that they think they just have interesting things in their mind.
That's not the case. You need to understand persuasion, psychology, copywriting, marketing, sales, all of the skills that make writing a success or turn you into a good writer or creator.
Those are the things that allow you to structure a message to make it interesting.
When you just like spew information out, people probably aren't going to find it interesting.
You have to use a persuasive structure like starting with a problem, making them aware of it, hinting towards a goal that they can achieve with what you're about to tell them and then bridging the gap with your interest to do so is how you do that.
Notice how I'm using writing as a vessel to achieve a goal and you probably didn't think writing was a way to do that or to solve the problem in your life of doing what you love for a living.
If I were to just say learn to write, you're not going to find that very interesting unless you have the context and frame from which you're going to imply it to actually get a desired outcome in life.
You don't understand the benefits of it.
So this is what I did wrong throughout my entire journey actually is I started as a YouTuber seven years ago, went to college, went to high school, like failed at seven different business models from dropshipping to actually commerce brands to SEO, multiple marketing agencies, freelancing, digital art, growing on social media, all of the above simply because I
didn't understand writing and it wasn't that I didn't understand writing.
It's because I didn't understand what I just talked about what makes writing impactful, what makes communication impactful, how you attract people to what you do.
Writing is not just writing in a journal or writing certain things.
It's about attracting people and persuading them, which is how you gain power outside of force and deceit, right?
You're not being deceptive and you're not being forceful through something like slavery or lying to people.
Persuasion is about inspiration.
You're inspiring people to do more and that is the only ethical way to actually get what you want out of life is through persuasion.
I discovered writing when I first logged on to Twitter, which I'd never used before.
Long story short, I saw others building an audience and landing web design clients without manual outreach or ads and I was doing web design freelance at this time.
That was the first business model that I actually saw some kind of success with that allowed me to quit my job and introduce me to this world of social media.
I noticed that they weren't only talking about web design, they were talking about their lifestyle, interests and web design or whatever skill you want to monetize.
I noticed that what made them unique was not their business's value proposition, but their personality, their unique blend of interests and opinions.
I noticed that Twitter was writing based, they weren't spending time on visuals or video editing, they didn't have to show their bodies, they were building a business with their ideas, not looks.
I studied what they were doing and realized I could write the same content, I had very similar knowledge and so what was holding me back from doing what they do.
And the hint, it was my own limiting beliefs.
So I took the leap and just started posting.
That's another mistake that most people make is like, I can't post anything, I don't know, that you get in your head and you never end up posting.
So I just started posting.
Every time I saw a post that I could have written, I took it and wrote it from my own point of view.
That's writing tip number one.
Every time I saw a post I disagreed with, I took it and write my own opinion on the subject.
Writing tip number two.
Every time I saw a post that was well structured with bullet points, hooks, line breaks and flow, I would experiment with that structure by plugging one of my own ideas into it.
Last writing tip. And along the way, I took a few courses here and there to kind of connect the dots in my head about what I was missing and that helped quite a bit.
I offer to our writer now as a course or digital economics for the same reason where it's like, you technically don't need them, but are they going to accelerate your progress and is that worth the money to you potentially?
In my first year, I gained around 10,000 followers, which is a pretty decent amount.
It's not too high. It's not too low.
I'd say it's about average for people that actually put their time and effort into learning how to do social media.
Then after that, compounding growth kicked in and over the course of four years, I gained 435,000 followers and diversified platforms with my best tweets.
I repurposed them and gained that much more on other platforms like YouTube.
YouTube to me is writing based.
People ask for a YouTube course, write a newsletter, read it to the camera, send the footage to your editor, boom, you're done.
But the secret there is that you need to learn how to write because the writing, the structure of the words in the newsletter transfer over to the structure of the actual YouTube video.
You write a script before you actually read it.
You don't just sit down and film a YouTube video and expect it to be impactful.
Tip number two for growing on social media as a beginner is to control your growth and not rely on the algorithm.
The second reason I failed on YouTube is because I want to talk about what I want to talk about, not what the algorithm wants me to talk about.
And when I discovered the power of writing on Twitter, I realized that that could be a path to YouTube growth.
If you don't understand what I mean, I knew that I could control my growth on social media because Twitter has various features that YouTube doesn't.
YouTube doesn't have DMs or repost button that people actually click.
It's hard to manually control traffic that way or follower growth.
Twitter has DMs, forum style replies, frictionless and encourage reposts and the ability to quote post.
YouTube takes a lot of skill and effort to nail all of the moving parts of video production.
Twitter is as simple as writing a post in two to three minutes and hitting send.
I talk about how to control your growth in the video.
The only way to grow on social media, even if you have zero followers, very similar to this title, but different.
So with writing and not having to learn video editing design and all these other things that take up my time, I could just straight up take my ideas, put them out there, learn how to grow on that platform, control that growth through various strategies that YouTube doesn't allow for.
And then once I have an audience there, I can start to funnel those followers to YouTube to allow me to get initial views and then get seen by the algorithm.
So my end goal was still becoming a YouTuber, but I just had to take a different path to get there that most people weren't taking and that's how I outperformed them.
And of course it took more time.
It took one to two years to be able to do this, but personally I had very difficult time growing on YouTube at the start.
Maybe I could go back and do it better this time, but I just saw that as a more better long-term option.
And instead of just one YouTube audience, I get two audiences, another one being Twitter.
Now that YouTube is one of my largest audiences, people think that I started out here because that's where they find me first, but I will tell you for a fact that I would not be here without Twitter and I would not be growing if it weren't for Twitter.
Twitter is a testing ground for my ideas that turn into every other piece of content that I put out.
Twitter is like the house of it all.
Not only that, but writing 50 tweets rather than just posting one video, because you can write 50 tweets and probably the amount of time it takes you to write and film and record one video, you're able to test those 50 tweets for how well they're going to do.
So if one out of those 50 tweets does well, that's awesome.
You can turn that into a YouTube video, but if you just put out one YouTube video and it doesn't do well, you don't have much data there.
You're going to have to spend so much more time creating videos every single week or however often you want to create them in order to get any form of data to see whether or not you're going to improve.
It's going to take much, much, much more time on YouTube alone to reach that point where you can just send out bangers on demand, which is what most big accounts do.
Tip number three for growing on social media as a beginner is to become a DJ with ideas.
Nobody can replicate your mind, your worldview, your story, your identity, your goals, values, beliefs, traits, interests, drives, skills, experiences and problems.
The most profitable, unique and irreplaceable niche is you.
Writers are DJs with ideas.
So DJs, they take sounds and music from other people and combine them into one mix or song or whatever it is that they create.
They're synthesizers of ideas, not ideas of sounds.
Writers take ideas from multiple sources and match them together into their own.
Your social media account is your Spotify profile and your job is to put out music worth listening to.
Now, the beautiful thing about digital music or digital writing is that there are no limits.
There's 8 billion different genres of EDM or electronic dance music.
There's infinite styles and sounds and ideas to use in the digital world because you have so much information and ideas at your fingertips.
This part is very important.
An artist, DJ or producer has their own sound.
We all have certain artists because of that sound.
In EDM, excision is very similar to resurrect but they have slight differences that make them unique.
Now, if excision made a country song, I find it hard to believe that much of his fan base would listen to that.
They want to hear excision.
As a writer, your sound is your worldview.
Your sound is how your ideas are articulated through the lens of your goals, problems and experiences.
This is why you are the niche.
All of the ideas you collect and synthesize should be written from your worldview or your point of view.
You're a perspective vessel.
You are taking ideas, you're putting them in your mind and then you're spitting them out in the way that you make sense of them.
In short, just write. Don't think, oh, I need to write like this guy.
I need to write like this guy.
Just take the idea and write it.
Because two people can take the same idea and will come up with something completely new for it.
Someone with an emotional management problem will write about personal responsibility to solve that problem.
Someone with a business goal will write about personal responsibility to reach that goal.
So both are writing about personal responsibility, but they're both writing it towards two different goals or to solve two different problems or from their worldview, from what they're trying to achieve in life or what problems they have in their life that they're trying to solve.
That's what all content is filtered through is your experience.
And that's how you turn ideas into your own.
You don't copy, you remix.
Tip number four is to leverage authority.
Because how do you grow on social media if you don't have any authority or experience, you have to curate, then create.
So you don't start by creating all of this original stuff.
You start by curating others' ideas that you can leverage to bank off of their authority as your own.
Another thing with this is that the only way to sustainably grow on social media is to attract people to your audience from where they already are.
So where are potential followers?
They're in other people's audiences, right?
You follow a bunch of people.
Everyone on social media is following someone, meaning that audience is where the followers are.
It's not on the algorithm, it's under the creators.
It's in their audiences.
So you need to get in front of those audiences in order to get those people to follow you.
That is the only way, literally the only way to grow.
Do you know why people make YouTube videos on other popular YouTubers so that video gets recommended to that audience and they watch?
Do you know why most YouTube titles sound the same?
Because they're trying to show up in the recommended video section of the popular videos with that title.
Do you know why people tell you to comment so much on other people's posts?
Because they have an audience that goes into the replies and see you're hopefully good and not boring reply, then follow you.
You need to get your posts in front of other people's audiences rather than relying on the algorithm to spread them.
And there are a few ways to do this.
Write about their ideas and tag them.
People like it when you quote them and will want to share your post with their audience.
In short, just tag more people.
Read their ideas, write about them in your own words, reference them, tag them, become friends with them, reply to them, get your name in their mouth.
Create a thread with multiple ideas from other people and tag them all.
Some will repost you and most will engage.
What I mean by a thread, if you don't know what that is on Twitter, it's like a carousel on Instagram where it has multiple slides.
A thread on Twitter is something that has multiple posts under the first.
So it's like a blog article but sectioned off into multiple posts.
If you include references in your thread on the topics that you're writing about and tag the people, they're more likely to see it and they're more likely to share it because they know that if they're tagged, people that read that thread are going to follow it too.
So it's a win-win situation.
If they retweet it and make that thread go viral for you, then they're going to get more followers and they know that.
Create a post on one authoritative person and use their best ideas to create a high-performing post.
Here's an example from Jack Moses where he says, I'm 22.
Two years ago, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life.
Then I found Naval Ravikant on the Joe Rogan podcast and created a life of freedom and meaning via the internet.
Here are his 10 most powerful teachings that will change your life too.
Then he went into each post giving some of the lessons from the post.
So if you want to recreate something like this, watch a popular podcast or YouTube video, take notes on their ideas and turn those ideas into content.
The thing with this is, is that if these people are way too mega popular, they're probably not going to see the thread and they're probably not going to repost it.
So you need to watch the other video that I mentioned about the only way to grow on social media to understand how to manipulate traffic sources in a sense so you can get it in other people's eyes.
Because if you just write this post, when you're at zero followers, nobody's going to see it.
You have to get it in front of other people's audiences through DMing them, making friends, etc.
And of course, I teach about that into our writer as well.
Shameless plug yet again.
Tip number five is to master hooks and topics.
This one is important. Your writing sucks because you only think about yourself.
People don't want clever.
They want clear. People don't want a lecture.
They want emotion. People don't care about you.
They care about themselves.
Write with this in mind and watch your readers pay attention.
Aside from hooks and topics is just a very good thing too.
When you write an idea and you're about to post it, read back over it outside of your perspective.
Read from the reader's lens.
How are they going to think of it?
What are they going to question?
What are they going to object?
If I say the best way to grow on social media is this and I read it, then people are like, well, that's not the best way to grow on social media.
Okay, I have a way to refine the post and actually make it more impactful and make more sense to those people.
So tip for just writing in general, read over your writing from the perspective of your reader, poke holes in it and make it more impactful.
Growing on social media is not as simple as just writing about whatever you want.
95% of your growth will stem from two things.
One is choosing the right topic to write about.
Two is perfecting the hook to get people to read more.
It doesn't matter how valuable your YouTube video newsletter or thread is.
If people don't click to read more, it won't get read.
If people don't care about what you're talking about, they won't click.
If people don't see how it benefits their lives, they won't click.
Social media growth is not linear.
Sometimes you see zero growth in a week and sometimes you see 50,000 followers in a month.
And sometimes you see little growth for a few weeks to a few months.
But then, once you hit the holy trifecta of topic, hook, and traffic, getting that in front of other people, you double your followers in a day.
Social media growth is random.
You aren't paying for ads that place your writing in front of the specific demographic of your choice.
So you need to choose a topic that is broadly applicable.
You need to assume that 95% of people reading your content are beginners.
Even if you have a specific target audience, this still works.
Rather than writing about how to lead a team of 50 people as a founder, write about the skill that will take you from 100k to 5 million, then use leading a team of 50 people as a way to frame the lesson you are teaching.
It's the same idea, just reposition to reach and educate more people.
You will still attract your target audience, but you will also attract a larger audience that can spread your work to more of your target audience.
Getting too specific may hinder more than help.
I'd rather have a 100,000 follower audience with 10,000 of those being my target audience than only a 10,000 follower audience of my target.
More leverage, reach, and opportunity.
So when you choose the right topic, the hook becomes pretty simple to write.
And if the hook is difficult to write, you may want to go back and actually refine the topic that you're trying to talk about.
So how do you write a good hook?
Look over your writing for the most impactful parts and take note.
Imply a transformation with pain points and benefits to open a curiosity loop and information gap.
Use concepts, big ideas, and processes like the Eisenhower matrix or the one person business to create the effect of a unique mechanism.
Try to create a timeframe to achieve the result like two hours, 30 days, or six months.
And an important one is study other hooks and program your mind to think in that structure.
Now use these as a checklist to refine your hook.
Relevance. How relevant is it to their everyday life?
Resolve pains or potential benefits?
What's in it for the reader?
Awareness. Is it simple or complex enough for the level of awareness you are targeting?
Will they understand what you are about to show them?
Effort. How fast will they receive the result?
Education, entertainment, or inspiration?
And is it easy to get? So run through this the next time you create a YouTube title or a thread hook or a tweet or anything.
Tip number six is to treat social media as a global video game because social media is a multiplayer game with single player missions.
As a single player, you must constantly add to your skill set.
You should have at least a general understanding of every single skill that goes into building a business.
Marketing, sales, web design, graphic design, video editing, writing, marketing, product, etc.
Benj watching 75 plus hours of YouTube is a requirement.
Everything else is multiplayer.
You need others audiences to grow.
You need people to hold you accountable.
You need a tribe that people can associate you with in digital society or social media.
You need to recreate your team's voice chat to identify where enemies are, share strategies, and help your team win.
In other words, you need a mastermind, which is multiple minds working toward the same goal.
And that allows you to achieve the goal faster.
In practical terms, you need to DM people you want to team up with, comment on people's posts you want to be associated with, form group chats with people to share strategies and share each other's best posts to get more traffic to them.
This should be viewed as one of the few ways to control your growth without relying on the algorithm.
This creates a tribe. And I'm not talking about engagement groups here or like engagement pods where you're just thrown into a group with a bunch of random people that don't care about you.
This is about making friends and building together because that's what you're going to do anyways, right?
This isn't an engagement group.
This is just you texting your friend about a goal that you're both working towards and you're helping each other.
It's like helping someone on their homework.
The tribe aspect of this is important because when you go on social media and you see someone, you can usually associate them with like four to five more people within that little tribe.
That's important. People will follow that tribe and the people within it because they want to be a part of it.
They want to work toward the goal as well.
So those are the tips. If you want to our writer, digital economics, build a brand, learn to write, check out Cortex second brain app for creators and like, subscribe, do all that stuff.
Till the next one. Peace.
