If you are a creative, or a writer, or a musician, or someone who wants to become a creator, this could be the most important video that you watch this year.
Because of this number, three to six months.
That's how long most creators are trapped in beginner hell.
Beginner hell is that dreadful place where you feel like you don't know what you're doing.
You question whether it's worth it to keep going.
You're thinking of what you're going to try next just to do it all over again, And unfortunately, most people quit before things start to get good.
But understand this.
Most people think the answer is to just be consistent, to keep pushing through even when you aren't making progress.
Zero likes, zero followers, zero sales.
It's one of the most painful things in the world because becoming a creator was supposed to be your ticket into the good life.
Or was it all just a scam?
Was it a pipe dream that was sold to you by marketers and gurus?
Now here's the brutal truth.
You aren't making progress because you aren't doing the right things.
So before you go back to the life that you swore you would leave behind, listen to what I have to say.
You need to reach the point where everything clicks.
You need that aha moment where clarity strikes and you know exactly how to break through to intermediate heaven.
Now, I know you're on the edge right now.
You don't want to keep going.
You don't know how to keep going.
But remember why you started.
You know you want to do something creative.
You know you need an audience to do that outside of a job.
You know you want to be in control of the money you make and the lifestyle you design.
You know that in order to do those things, you need to write or create.
You need to become your own media company that attracts people to your independent work, your self -published books, your music, your ideas, your expertise.
You just need to reach that glorious moment, the click, and you will finally feel in control of your future.
Jeff Bezos said that all overnight success takes about 10 years.
So that's point number one is just stop comparing yourselves to people who have been in the game for 5 to 10 years and you think that you should somehow just match their skill and their results after one month of learning from them.
Because here's the thing is that you have to hammer this into your brain.
This has to be just automatic thought process for you is that there is a series of actions you can take to get the results you want.
There is. There's a series of actions.
They're out there. The ones you're taking right now aren't those series of actions.
So you need to experiment and find them.
Plain and simple. But most creators just follow blindly and mindlessly what they're told to do by myself and by other people who are teaching things like writing and social media.
But that's the problem.
It's not that these people are giving out bad advice.
It's that this isn't a job.
This isn't something with a linear set of tasks that you can just perform every single day.
Shut your mind off.
Don't think. Don't be creative and live like you always have.
This is a one person business.
You are the CEO. You are the CMO.
You are the COO. You are everything.
Please start acting like it.
Now, I know this because I was in beginner hell for almost five years, not just three to six months.
I jumped between dropshipping, three e -commerce stores, digital art and photography, a Facebook ads agency, an SEO content agency, and eventually had to get a job in web design because the loans were piling up and I wasn't willing to drown any longer.
Now, at my job, I procrastinated all my work to make freelance web design work.
When I started writing on social media to land more clients, I didn't experience a beginner hell because I knew how to avoid it.
There was a select few skills that I learned along the way through all of those failures that led to my own click, my own aha moment, my own, oh, I can actually control this.
Oh, it is actually skill and not luck.
I'll tell you what those are.
That's what this entire video is about to give you the mini masterclass of the exact things that actually get results in growth, follower, sales, whatever it may be, brand authority, all of those things.
So here's a brief overview of what we're going to talk about.
First is a different way to think about finding your niche.
Second is the best type of content to bring in followers.
Third is how to monetize without relying on platform ad revenue.
So for those that want to start on YouTube just to get paid by YouTube, we're not here to do that.
And fourth, why you should forget building a funnel because social media has changed and much more in between because it's not as simple as a bullet point list.
If I were to just tell you, build an audience and build a product that that audience wants, nobody would get there.
You already know that.
You're missing the ideas that form a web in your mind.
And once that web is complete or that puzzle is complete or that picture is complete and it's clear, then you know what to do.
But just having like a blurry outline of the picture, you're not going to get anywhere.
In other words, I'm going to tell you how to end up like this guy who I saw on Twitter recently.
Props to you, Sir Jackson, where you can just see the exponential graph.
It's like negative followers, a little bit of followers, and then boom, out of nowhere, just a bunch.
That is what I call an exponential event.
That's what we want to make happen and then replicate over and over again.
Now, I've personally grown to over 3 .8, probably close to 4 million followers across all different platforms now.
And I've also taught this to over 30 ,000 people.
I haven't checked what the last number was, but it's over 30 ,000, which is a lot.
So here are the seven tips, strategies, and insights that will change everything for you.
Number one, extremely important, do what works for beginners.
Because here's the thing, beginner hell can last for three months or 30 years, right?
30 years, that's a starving artist.
You do your art, you never think about the business side, and you're never able to actually sustain that thing.
You're never able to sustain your life's work.
The creators who end up in that spot, who can just never make progress, seem to be trying to do what the advanced creators are doing without realizing that that's not what the advanced creators did.
Beginners start posting philosophical quotes or try to be the next Marcus Aurelius when nobody knows who they are or cares about what they do.
They have no authority.
And I hate to break it to you, but you aren't a Roman emperor.
You aren't respected because nobody knows who you are.
That means if you want to take social media as the path to building your life's work, which is a possibility now, you have to build authority on social media.
You don't just start posting like you're the most important person in the world.
You have to build up to actually being respected by a group of people.
So how do you build authority?
What's the thing that beginners should do?
The first is to just solve more problems.
What I mean by that is 80 % of your content as a beginner should all be focused around a pain point.
They should all start with a pain point.
I've talked about this so many times, but I know this from experience as well.
I'm not just calling you out.
I'm calling myself out.
When I sit down to write, I have an idea and then I'm like, okay, I'm going to write it out.
And I'm like, okay, yeah, that looks good.
That sounds good. I like it.
But then it doesn't perform as well as I thought it would.
What I need you to do and what I need to continue to do with myself, it's a process of programming your mind to think articulately is to, when you have an idea, think of the pain point immediately.
How does it help people?
What's the value? Whenever you're writing content, recording a reel, recording a YouTube video, just start with the pain point, something that people can relate with.
Now, how do you actually start this thing?
I want you, the next time you write content or create content, start with these words or phrases.
First is most people.
Example, most people suck at writing.
Second is if you struggle with.
Example is if you struggle to focus for more than five minutes.
The third is the worst.
Example, the worst skill you can learn is web design.
My best content that actually captures attention and delivers some value to people hits on a pain point or a problem.
Problems capture attention.
Problems open a curiosity loop.
Problems make it a hundred times easier to make the rest of the post impactful.
Seriously, if you don't know what to write, just find any idea, any idea in this video, write it down.
Think of a pain point.
And then after that, it's pretty simple to finish off the writing, right?
If it's a problem, then you give a list of steps to overcome it.
So most people suck at writing, do this, do this, do this, do this, boom, done.
It's valuable. Or you can have a unique perspective or novel insight.
So most people suck at writing because why?
So if you need just a framework for writing content, pain point process.
So step -by -steps, then pain point why or pain point insight.
So there's bullet list content or there's pain point followed by why, why should you solve that thing?
So that's tip number one for beginners.
Tip number two is to cover the most important ideas in depth under your brand because you need to become an authority.
So once you pick a topic to write about for your creator business or whatever you're building.
You don't just start writing random ideas.
You can. We're going to talk about that a bit later with make noise and focus on signal, but you have to understand that there are a select few evergreen ideas that almost every single brand that talk about a specific topic talk about.
Your job is to find out what those are and talk about them under your brand so that you have this library of information for people who follow you to dig into and see you as an authority.
Think of it like writing a small -scale book on a specific topic to become an authority about it, all over your brand, in all kinds of content.
You just need the pillars there, the fundamentals.
So, in something like building a business, those evergreen ideas are things like how to choose a niche, the best business model for beginners, the best skills to learn, or how to make X amount of money in Y amount of time.
There's a reason you see these all the time and why they always do well.
If you try to avoid these because you want to be unique and you want to be all these authenticity, uniqueness, whatever, without the fundamentals that actually help people and are the starting point for everyone getting into the topic that you talk about, you're going to fail.
As I said, artist or art and business, they need to cross over.
There needs to be a blend of both.
Those topics also work because nobody gets sick of the fundamentals.
And as your audience grows, the new audience hasn't seen that old content.
So it needs to be on repeat.
I posted a video last week about how I made $6 .9 million writing for two hours a day.
And it's a video I posted before.
I just re -recorded it.
There's a reason behind that.
Someone commented like, this is just repetitive.
I'm leaving. I'm unsubscribing.
And that's fine. That's what you're supposed to do.
You're not supposed to follow me all the time and just continue consuming the content.
You're supposed to do something with it, and if it's being repeated, does that not signal to you that it's an important thing to do?
Now, a lot of other people, they like the repetition.
I know you do, because you need it.
That's how you condition your mind to do something different.
That's how you change your behavior.
People need to be reminded more than they need something new.
Get used to that as someone who is trying to give value.
Now, once you know what topic you want to write about, research five to ten accounts that talk about that thing.
Notice what content they repeat on a weekly or monthly basis and notice what content they all talk about.
Then make it a consistent part of your brand.
Create multiple free guides around those topics.
Create content about one of them at least once a day.
Write short, medium, and long form content.
Posts, threads, carousels, newsletters, and the rest.
For those asking what a carousel is, it's on Instagram where you can swipe through multiple posts.
It's like 10 posts in one swipable carousel.
Now, this is a point in and of itself for later in the video, but you need to build a world that people can sink their teeth into.
You need your own small -scale Netflix that people can binge watch or binge read.
Now, step number three for doing what works as a beginner is to just filter your favorite accounts for their oldest content.
Because chances are, you're probably just copying feel -good content from the accounts you follow.
They already have an audience.
They already have a baseline level of engagement.
People already know who they are.
So what we're trying to do here is we're trying to study what that account created in order to grow.
So on YouTube, you go to their profile and then you filter by oldest content.
Now you're not just going to take all of the oldest content.
You're going to look through and look through them all and you're going to see, okay, which one, which one created that spike?
Because as you'll find social media growth comes in waves.
It's not just linear.
It like kind of stalls out like it was for me for like four videos in a row where normally I'd get like 150, 200 ,000 views.
And then both a combination of the ideas, not just, just not being very good.
And just how social media goes in general, I hit multiple where it's like 50 ,000 views, 60 ,000 views for like four videos.
And it's demotivating for a lot of people.
That's where most people fall off because they're like, oh the YouTube algorithm changed and this and that.
It's like no dude, you just need to iterate.
So the point with that is find their oldest content.
Scroll all the way to the bottom.
If it takes an hour to get to the bottom of someone's content, do it.
Scroll up and just copy paste into Cortex or something like that where you copy paste over the content that started to do well for them that was an anomaly and then you use that as a framework.
We'll talk about how to do that.
Now Number two for how to escape beginner hell is that your content just isn't that good because if you aren't growing, you're doing something wrong.
And once you're honest with yourself about that, you can actually change it.
You can't just pick a topic and start writing.
You need to take the reader's psychology into account.
You need to become a dopamine dealer.
You need to capture attention, hold attention, and deliver value.
Most people think they're doing this, but they aren't.
They write a post and send it without any second thought or questioning whether it's actually good.
All of those things, capturing attention, holding attention, et cetera, require a lifetime of study within themselves.
Now, what we're about to go over is extremely important.
This is like the 10 commandments of engagement is what I call them, or the 10 commandments of impactful writing.
If you want, you can download Cortex on desktop.
And if you press option C, it will open up a capture modal as you're watching this video.
So you can do both at the same time.
You can watch and take notes so what you would do in that case is you would create a new document titled youtube video notes and then you would go into capture and you would type at youtube video notes so you can connect to that page and then you start taking ideas there and then they're all categorized
it's like texting yourself ideas so the first commandment of engagement is specific numbers and with all of these these are just uh little things that you can sprinkle throughout your content to capture attention or hold attention that's important because you're competing on social media.
You're competing with dumb memes or funny memes and hot people.
You need to stand out.
And another click that you have to make is like, hey, there is something that I can write.
There's something that I can put right here that will stop their scroll and deliver something valuable.
That's the creative challenge.
So what you're doing here is specific numbers.
In the headline, it's like, okay, here's seven steps to achieve desired outcome.
Or Apple just released a $1 ,175 iPhone, whatever.
Now, this also ties in with number two, which is pattern interrupts.
So pattern interrupt is something that breaks them out of their conditioned process of what they're doing.
So on social media, they're scrolling through, they're seeing on Twitter, they're seeing like blocks of tweets.
They're seeing on Instagram, people talking to the camera or whatever it may be.
You need something that is different and that stops the scroll.
Now, there's multiple ways to do that that we'll talk about, but in general, you could do a visual pattern interrupt.
So you can have something on the screen that makes them be like okay what the heck just went on the specific number is something that most people probably aren't doing so that's a pattern interrupt as well the third thing very powerful is negativity bias because the human brain is wired to pay attention to
and remember negativity now this doesn't mean that you have to be negative it just means that you should try spinning some of your writing in a negative light an example could be, you are going to achieve great things compared to you will never hit rock bottom again.
The second point is a lot more potent, but it's just switched.
The framing is switched.
You're going to achieve great things.
It's like, okay, cool.
Thank you. You're never going to hit rock bottom again.
Pain point problem, very potent.
Commandment number four is just a target callout.
So you're calling out who you're talking to.
And this doesn't have to be a specific target audience.
like, oh, hey, calling all coaches that sell a $10 ,000 offer or more.
I have a lead generation system for you that will bring you to $50 ,000 a month.
It doesn't have to be like that.
It could be as simple as if you're in your 20s or calling all creators or creatives or musicians or something where you're not even calling them out.
You're just talking about them.
So fathers are a gift to mankind.
As an example, you could say mothers, you're just calling out a specific group of people or talking to them.
You can take one idea and you can tell it to another person, to the people in your audience, and it takes a completely new shape.
Commandment number five is problem call out.
In other words, what we talked about, just use more pain points.
Now, number six is the opposite of that.
So the potential benefit, because all good content implies a transformation, a story.
You have the pain point, what's the benefit of overcoming it?
You have to answer the question, what's in it for me?
If you read through the content that you wrote and it doesn't answer what's in it for me fast, then they're not going to pay attention.
Some people will, some people won't.
That's just the nature of social media.
It's not zero or one.
It's in between. Commandment number seven is social proof.
Because when you flex your results, experience, or credentials, people assume that you know something they don't, and they want to continue reading or following.
Now, Justin Welsh is someone who's great at doing this without being cocky.
I remember a post of his that I actually saved where it says, sometimes you need to ask people to buy your product.
If you don't, you're missing out on 12X days.
Simple as that. And he had a screenshot of him hitting like $468 ,000 in a month.
And it's like, you don't have to be cocky.
You don't have to be like, I made $8 billion in five seconds here's exactly what you should do and everyone else is wrong on the Justin Welsh side of things he's like my little one person business hit this revenue goal it's pretty cool so not only are people now seeing him as an authority as someone
they can learn from but he's being humble in the process because the thing here is just talk about your results because AI can't compete with results it doesn't get results for you your AI can't lose 20 pounds for you it can tell you how, maybe, but you're the one who did it.
So, whether you're a writer who just finished the first chapter of their book, share it.
Share what you do. Share what you accomplished, even if it's a small goal because you're not trying to attract, you're not trying to prove anything here.
You're just trying to show that you're doing something because most people don't.
This doesn't have to be around money.
It's just any goal.
Even if you read five pages of a new book.
Just share it. Now, commandment number eight for higher engagement.
Extremely important.
This one will change everything for you, is just confidence and conviction.
Now, this is my favorite point because a lot of people just refuse to have conviction in their beliefs.
They say, well, oh, nothing's black or white.
Nothing's absolute.
And I get it. You just read a book on metaphysics and I get it.
But you're not doing this to be factually correct.
You're doing this to be metaphorically impactful.
If the other person can't read through the lines of your writing, if they're reading literally not metaphorically to get the point, the writing isn't about the literal words on the page.
It's about the energy.
It's about the point that people come to in their own minds.
So to do this, just eliminate words that imply uncertainty, speak in absolutes when possible, and exaggerate your point to add energy.
And of course, do not abuse these for the sake of engagement.
So as an example, rather than saying it may be wise if some people develop their skill set, say it is crucial that everyone on planet earth develops their skill set.
And I would argue that that's pretty true most of the time.
So an example from me is a previous tweet I had, which said how to get ahead of 99 % of people go quiet for three months, laser in on one big goal, self -educate like mad, apply everything you learn, fail as much as possible.
Every month, take a break and have some fun.
Bursts of intensity are how you blow past everyone else.
Now, I wrote that post almost five years ago now, and I'm sure you've heard that headline everywhere.
How to get ahead of 99 % of people.
It's my most popular video now because what I did is I noticed, hey, this post for me got a lot of likes.
It brought in the most followers I've ever had.
It brought in like 600 when I was a beginner.
Now, if you copy that, if you just copy paste that tweet and post it over, you may get some engagement.
I'm not telling you to do that, but you're probably going to be disappointed because you're still taking shortcuts.
But because that piece of content did well, I turned it into a thread, which did extremely well.
I turned that thread into a YouTube video, and that is my top YouTube video now with over 1 .6 million views.
Commandment number nine is punch, rhythm, and readability.
So when you're writing.
Do this. Start short into the point.
Then, just like this, continue on with your idea.
Use line breaks. People love bullet points.
You can get as creative as you'd like.
Do you notice how I'm guiding you down the page or through the video?
Do you notice how I start short, keep you engaged, and deliver a hint of value?
Even the bullet point list is ordered from the shortest point to longest.
Now, last commandment, number 10, is warnings or cautionary advice.
So let's read this post.
Be careful telling people your goals.
It releases dopamine similar to actually achieving them.
Skip the instant gratification, go quiet, and build.
So I got an idea from a book, and then I started by warning people about a trap and then telling them why.
This is an incredible way to write content because every topic has an entire list of traps that people can fall into.
So by giving those warnings, you position yourself as someone who knows what they're talking about now you don't and shouldn't use all 10 commandments that we just talked about at once but i would encourage you to have a list of them open as you write so you can write something and then refer back and like
okay how can i make this better if you want extra help with this i this came from to our writer my writing and content course and that goes over all of my writing frameworks newsletter thread tweets and how all of those tie together how i start with a newsletter or break it into a thread, break it into
tweets. Super easy to write content each week.
Now, step number three for escaping beginner hell is to start with training wheels.
So important because most people don't have an idea problem.
They have a structure problem.
Any idea can go viral if and only if you structure it the right way.
Just like there's a series of steps you can take to achieve anything you want in life, there is a series of sentences or a structure that makes any idea go viral.
That's the entire fun, right?
You have an idea and you're like, I don't think this will do well on social media.
You can structure it right.
You can rewrite that idea in a way that does do well.
That's like when you practice that and fail at that so many times, that's how you become a master creator.
And the thing here is that generating ideas isn't hard because you just pass by at least 50 in this video so far that you could take and run with.
Then the objection there is like, well, Dan, I don't know all of this stuff.
I didn't come up with this myself.
You don't have to talk as if you came up with it.
You just share the idea.
So the thing with that is you can turn even the worst idea into something that people want to read, watch, or listen to.
You can tell a story.
So how do you practice structure, writing structure?
First thing you can do is to create a swipe file.
If you want my swipe file inside of Cortex that you can duplicate over and open as you write content.
If you don't know how to write content in Cortex, go to the Cortex YouTube video.
I know I'm promoting Cortex a lot, but this is literally what it was made for and it's free.
And mobile's going out soon and it's sick.
Our goal with mobile is to make it faster than Apple Notes to be able to capture an idea because that's like a big hurdle for us is getting people over from Apple Notes because it's just ingrained into their brain, right?
We have to play the psychology game.
But with this, if you want to be a creator, then you have to keep your finger on the pulse of the market.
You need to study. You need to scroll the timeline as a researcher, not a consumer.
You need to scroll to hunt for ideas.
And as you're scrolling, you see one that's good and it's like, damn, I want that under my brand.
Just like the evergreen ideas that you have to write under your brand.
Your brand is an amalgamation of the best ideas that you think are the best.
It's not about you taking one idea and then your brand is known as that.
It's all of the combination of ideas that you post over time.
That's what makes you different.
It's not just one piece of content.
It's all of them over the course of six to 12 months that you stack up.
So when you see one of these posts, you copy the link, you paste it in Cortex Capture or in Cortex itself and embed it as a tweet.
So let's go back to that post as an example and just break it down.
So how to get ahead of 99 % of people, go quiet for three months, laser in on one big goal, self -educate like mad, apply everything you learn, fail as much as possible every month, take a break and have some fun.
Bursts of intensity are how you blow past everyone else.
So you can see a clear structure.
You have a broad hook with a desired outcome in specific number.
Then you have five exaggerated and polarizing steps in a bullet list.
Now with a bullet list, there's more benefit than it just being readable.
Anyone can engage with any given point in the list.
They read through it and they're like, I don't agree with that one.
Don't agree. Don't care.
Oh yeah, that one. I love that one.
Like retweet. After that, it has additional context that answers the objection.
Well, I can't disappear completely.
I have friends and family.
And I know this because I've written enough content to know that was an objection beforehand so I could add it to the post.
And then finally, a last line that ties everything together.
So let's take that same structure and let's plug in a new idea.
Let's act like I got an idea from the book and it's like, meditation is running for the mind.
So I could turn that into something completely new with the same structure, like how to clear your mind in 60 seconds.
Lock yourself in a room, sit in the corner, breathe deep into your belly, feel the breath with all senses, repeat for one minute.
Anytime you get distracted, refocus your attention on the breath.
Meditation sprints are how you achieve calm fast.
That's a good piece of content.
Do you see how I'm not just copying people's tweets?
I'm studying the structure, studying what works, and plugging a five -word idea into it.
Now, if I didn't want to use that hook, like how to clear your mind in 60 seconds, I could take any of the 10 commandments of engagement that we went over and create a new one, like how to destroy negative thoughts in 60 seconds.
So spin it negative.
Now with all of this, don't just do this with tweets.
You do this with anything.
You do this with a newsletter, a landing page for your product.
Next video, we're going to talk about how to build and launch your first $100 ,000 product as a creator.
You can do this with YouTube videos, with reels, with TikToks, with any of these things.
You need a structure open so you can practice writing scripts or just content with training wheels.
And then once you're good or once you can write on your own, then you take them off, but then you start to wiggle a bit.
And that's where you learn the most.
That's when you really solidify the learning.
Now, a second tip for writing with training wheels is to just study writing frameworks.
Because when I first started writing, frameworks were a lifesaver.
And I feel like most people don't do this.
They don't write according to a framework.
I personally read the book Cashvertising and learned the basics of frameworks like ADA, which is attention, interest, desire, action.
And it's like, think of that.
It just makes it so much easier to structure an idea.
You're writing all of these ideas like willy -nilly.
When you could take ADA, P -A -S, P -A -S -T -O -R, you can type into chat GPT or Cortex AI when it comes out and say, hey, give me 10 copywriting frameworks for short form content and see what it spits out.
And then you take those and you practice writing an idea in all of those frameworks.
If you want my own framework or if you want a document that you can duplicate to Cortex, I'm going to give you a bunch during this video so that you can actually have something in Cortex so it feels like it's all there.
But the pain and process framework, go link in the description, they're free templates, just duplicate them.
Now tip number three for using training wheels to enhance your writing is to just have them open as you write.
I'm just doubling down on this idea.
So capture ideas throughout the week, sit down two to three days out of the week for one to two hours, open up Cortex or another writing or notes software, paste in your content frameworks, open them in a pane on the side and write out your ideas and reference the frameworks.
Now, step number four to escaping beginner hell is just understanding that nobody knows who you are.
You have good content.
You know, your ideas hit hard.
You're writing all day, every day, but you still gain maybe a few followers a day max.
So what's the problem?
Nobody knows who you are.
You're just waiting for your Lord and savior, the algorithm to launch your post to the moon when that's not going to happen.
And even if it would, you should act like it wouldn't.
Your growth is on you.
It's in your control.
If you know what you're doing.
Because understand this, content is only one small piece of the puzzle when it comes to growth.
The bigger part of the equation is the amount of people who know you and like you because they're more likely to share and engage with your posts, the amount of people who see your posts because almost nobody will as a beginner, and the quality of friendships you make with those on the rise because they'll
pull you up as they grow.
Another thing to understand is that if you have 500 followers and you get retweeted or reposted or shared to your story by someone who has 500 000 followers your audience is no longer 500 your audience is 500 and 500 500.
of course there's some drop off with reposts or story shares but your audience is much larger when you get shared by large audiences this is how people make tens of thousands of dollars with small audiences because they understand how to generate traffic manually through networking.
Beginners think they are limited to their follower count and the algorithm is how they grow.
Experts know they can access their own followers and their network's followers.
They write a post they know will bring in followers or sales and have 10 to 15 people share it.
This isn't something they do every day because it's strategic.
They build up goodwill and act right when the time is right.
Sahil Bloom is someone even with over a million followers right now is doing this perfectly well because he understands that his audience is only a small portion of the people that he has access to.
He's launching a book, The Five Types of Wealth, and he's working day and night to get eyes on those books.
But he's not just working day and night on content.
He's working day and night on getting other people to share the book.
And there's unique ways to do that where he sends the book to them, he marks specific spots in the chapters, and he says, hey, if you could share, that would be awesome.
Simple as that. I posted it to my Twitter.
I just took pictures of the pages, and then that was doing really well, going almost viral.
So he told other people to do that, and it's just taken over Twitter.
If you just do that on a small scale with something like a Twitter thread, then you have a ton of impressions.
And if you can't turn a ton of impressions into a replacement for your salary.
I don't know what you're doing.
So what, what do you do here?
One is inject yourself in a tribe because the most basic social media advice is to just reply to large accounts, but that's like half -baked doesn't really work advice.
What you're actually doing here is a few things.
You're writing quality replies, not great posts or repeating what they said with chat GPT.
So people have a reason to look at your profile and follow you.
Again, follow the 10 commandments of engagement that we talked about.
This applies to all writing, not just your posts.
The second thing is just becoming well -known to a tribe of people.
So if I wanted to break into a social media circle, like the startup circle or the tech circle, I would simply reply to 10 great accounts in that space by adding value and personal experience.
The consumers in that space get used to my face and follow me after they see enough, not after my first reply.
When you go on social media, you see one account and you're like, oh yeah, they're friends with this account, this account, this account.
It's unconscious to you, but you make these connections to determine who's important in your network.
You have to become a part of those connections consistently, and this takes time.
So the last thing about replies is that you're seeding connections.
The more you reply and DM people within a certain niche group, the easier it is to DM them or have them DM you.
They will engage more with your posts and feed you opportunities.
Now, this goes into number two, which is practicing non -needy networking.
I have an entire video on this.
Go watch it. But it's a shame that this has to be taught, but it does.
Social media has made us like very socially awkward.
Nobody has social skills as a skill anymore because they weren't taught through school or when they were younger.
So you have to teach yourself because what you don't understand is that social media, social skills, are arguably the most important skill you can learn to succeed there.
The thing with this is that people are as afraid of DMing someone as they are to saying hi to someone on the street.
When was the last time you said hi to someone on the street and sparked up a conversation?
Do you think you're going to do it in the DMs unless you know how?
You have to actually learn the skill.
But in reality, both of those things are as simple as finding a shared interest to form the connection around.
So here's an example of when Dickie Bush, who had a lot of followers at the time in 2021 reached out to me because I just posted my own fitness progress and what I was doing.
I was talking about switching back to high carb and to see how it impacts mental clarity.
He asked a few questions and talked about what he was doing.
And then I just continued talking, right?
It seemed like a natural conversation because it was a natural conversation.
What he did here was he took what I wrote on Twitter or Instagram or LinkedIn or any of those things.
And he just acted as if I was talking to him and then continued the conversation with me in the DMs by linking the tweet and then just writing what he thought.
And then the conversation flowed naturally.
Now, what happens next is that he sends me a thread that he wrote five days later.
And he just said, through this together after a bit of reflection, appreciate you bringing the positive energy around here.
And then I reposted that, right?
I had a decent following as well.
So I reposted that and he knew well that I was going to do that.
He's just playing a smart social game.
There's nothing wrong with that.
That's what we're all doing when we're making friends.
Now, if you want the non -needy networking, again, link in the description.
I'm just giving you Cortex documents so you can reference these things.
Now, this leads into number three, which is planning one strategic post a week.
If you aren't trying to get one of your best posts shared every single week by someone on social media, then you will not grow.
Even if you will, act like you won't.
So what you're doing here is you're having conversations every week.
You're researching the timeline, not scrolling or consuming, and then you're just talking to people.
You're replying to people, keeping conversations going, starting the conversations in the DMs.
And then based on those conversations, you have a ton of content ideas that you can write about.
Write a post, write a thread.
A thread will usually bring in more followers or a carousel or a reel or whatever it is.
Send it to the person or people you were talking to about the same topic and just be like, Hey, threw this together, thought you'd like it.
You can even mention them in it so that they benefit from it as well and get followers.
And they know that.
So they're more likely to repost it.
Now, step number five to escaping beginner hell is just you need a product because most creators wait to monetize until they hit some imaginary follower account just to be disappointed when nobody buys, or they think they'll make a decent income from platform monetization like YouTube until they hit
a wall and their views plummet for two months.
The point is, if you want to be in control of your income, you need to sell a product or service, because that's what your employer does.
That's how you make an income, is you play a role in the marketing and sales and operations of selling a product.
So if you want to start a one -person business, you need to build a product or service, because this also does a few things.
This is what makes you an authority.
That's the first thing, is when you have a product, people start to see you as an authority in that thing.
Your engagement increases because you have something worth buying.
You have value and people can see that even if they don't buy the product.
The thing here is that most creators build an audience of people that don't care about them.
They stay surface level.
You can't go deep on social media that deep.
People need to invest in you in order to care about you or to pay more attention to you.
People aren't on social media to adopt new habits.
They're there to entertain themselves.
When they buy a product, they're investing in their behavior change.
I guarantee if you were to post a course worth of content on YouTube, you'd probably get a lot of views because people feel like they're learning something, but they don't do anything about it because they don't value that it's free.
If you were to put that inside of a product and just make content about something similar to it and fuel the product, not only would you make a bit more money, which is great, but you'd actually impact the other person more because they're serious about going through it.
Then since you impact more people, more people trust you and see you as an authority, and then more people like and follow you.
Social media growth isn't only about content or networking.
It's also about having a product that changes lives.
The second thing with having a product is it gives you a frame.
It gives you a pillar to return to when writing content.
So if you don't have a product, you're probably jumping between a bunch of different interests and ideas, and there's nothing wrong with that, but you have no anchor.
So when you don't know what to write, you don't have an offer to start writing around.
You don't have a thing to build authority or expertise in.
And yes, these things can change.
You can go and launch a new product and start talking about something else, but you're not understanding how authority is built.
The third thing there and how it helps you not quit is that it makes trial and error more tolerable.
I'm a firm believer that you should launch a product now, ASAP, immediately.
I launched my first at 500 followers.
If you don't know what to create, watch the next video on creating a product.
Because with a product, if something isn't working, you know what isn't working.
You can identify it.
If you aren't getting clicks, then your content sucks.
If you aren't getting conversions, then your landing page sucks.
If you aren't making sales even after optimizing those things, your product probably sucks and you need to make it better.
And that's fine. You're supposed to start off in this embarrassing state and then iterate and improve with time.
And because there's the potential to make an income from being a creator and not getting so disappointed because you make five cents from YouTube AdSense, you actually have the opportunity to make a decent amount of money if you learn and do things right.
So it's easier to stick it out when someone can actually pay you.
Now, to help with this, let's go to step six for escaping beginner hell, which is to build a world, not a funnel, because gone are the days of countdown timers and fake scarcity.
Today, creators are building worlds, not funnels, although a simple newsletter and a landing page can be considered a funnel.
In that case, you're building a world of mini -funnels.
The average consumer doesn't trust people out of the gate.
You need both time in the game and enough value for them to explore in order for them to gain trust in you.
You need to build a small -scale Marvel Cinematic Universe.
You need to build movies, action figures, and lore that people can binge.
In other words, you need short -form content.
So on x, LinkedIn, Instagram, threads, or TikTok, pick one.
You need long -form content.
So a newsletter, podcast, or YouTube, I'd recommend it newsletter first because you'll need that anyways.
And then you need free guides.
So ebooks, templates, video trainings, anything else that people can show interest in.
Then you need a low -ticket product.
So a course, template, or cohort.
And you also need a high -ticket product.
So coaching, freelancing, consulting.
If you want the basics of starting with all of this, I would recommend either the one person business launchpad or mental monetization.
One person business launchpad is for beginners who just want to start writing content, write their first 10 posts, guide it, and create their first, what I call, minimum viable offer.
If you want more advanced, more low ticket product, get mental monetization, then that's like a marketing masterclass, everything you need to know.
What I would recommend doing is start with one short form platform like X or LinkedIn or Threads.
Writing is a lot more accessible, easier to start.
You don't need to know video editing or any of that.
You just write out your ideas.
Then one newsletter, same thing, just writing.
So that way you have long form to build trust and nurture and you have short form to attract traffic and feed the newsletter.
And then in between the two, you have a free download for people to get onto the email list and you send them that.
It's a template. It's a free guide.
It's something that helps them.
That's like how you build authority around one topic or not even one topic, but just in general.
The free download is kind of like you planning a flag of, hey, this is what I'm teaching and then everything else can revolve around that.
The other thing here is that social posts are the new MVPs.
So post a bunch, turn the best into newsletters, cross post those everywhere, turn the best of the best into a digital product, refine it until sales are high, turn that system into a software or complement it with a physical product.
My two hour writer course turned into Cortex.
Not exactly, but it allows me to do my workflow better in that software.
It's not the education part of it.
It's just, it sprung the idea.
Now, the last step, step number seven to escaping beginner hell is to make noise and double down on signal.
Because the last objection here is, but Dan, I want to write about my ideas in an authentic way.
This whole social media thing feels so soulless and templated.
And I agree, but to handle the first part, templates and frameworks don't make you inauthentic.
Creativity thrives with constraints and a framework allows you to express your authentic ideas in a way that other people care about.
If you want to be purely authentic without regard for what others think, that's great but good luck being able to sustain that as a lifestyle that pays you.
Not that money is the end -all be -all but it is important and it's only as evil as the person who wields it.
Now for the second part, you can write about whatever you want.
You don't have to fall into the trap of only writing content that performs an algorithm.
That's the entire point of me creating this video that you don't have to be a slave to the algorithm.
You can do what you want if you understand what you're doing and can make it out of beginner hell.
You should make room for both art and business, templated, frameworks, or whatever.
The ideas that are based around your offer and the ideas you like writing about.
So feel free to make a lot of noise.
Write about any idea your heart desires.
Pay attention to the ideas that people resonate with, the ones that get slightly more engagement, DMs or followers.
then incorporate them as a consistent part of your content strategy.
You don't need to choose the niche.
You need to experiment with ideas until people tell you what niche best suits your relationship with your audience.
If you want to learn more about that, go watch my videos on the most profitable niches you or you are the niche.
That's it for this video.
Again, start using Cortex, save your ideas there, write your content there, write any other project, plan your days there.
To our writer to learn a high income skill, one person business launchpad for the fundamentals of all that stuff.
Other links in the description.
Check them out. Like, subscribe.
Say hi in the comments.
And if you made it this far, I want you to answer in the comments if you want.
What was the one thing that kept you trapped or is keeping you trapped in beginner hell?
Because once you become aware of that and make that public, it's a lot easier to overcome.
So what is your sticking point?
And if you say you have none, you're lying or you just don't have the knowledge to know better.
That's it. Bye.
