Cultivate a Following.

About a month ago I decided to start making a dedicated effort toward growing my online following and cultivating somewhat of a ‘personal brand’ online.

I know what you are thinking… self-centered, cliche, lame (?)

For a long time that’s what I thought about people who sold their personal life online. The word ‘Influencer’ still gives me a strong negative visceral reaction. It symbolizes shallow, over-sharing, vain people who care about stupid things like fame and nice watches or whatever.

But that’s admittedly a pretty narrow view of things.

In reality growing a robust online following it probably the highest-utility thing someone can do for themselves these days, and there is a whole spectrum of people who are doing it.

Building an online following does 2 extremely important things.

First (and most obvious), an online following is the most robust distribution channel of all-time. When you have 10,000 followers on Twitter, TikTok, Youtube, LinkedIn, whatever, that’s 10K people who have OPTED-IN to listening to what you have to say, and they are highly receptive to buying what you have to sell.

If you are building a business or selling a product or simply looking to connect with the right people, the best way in human history to do this is by growing a following. Never has it been easier to connect with every person on the planet that it is right now — you are likely 2 or 3 connects of freedom away from your heroes or best partners right now.

Second (less obvious) is that growing an online following is an implicit forcing-function for cultivating and organizing interesting thoughts. Because the only sustainable way to get people to follow you consistently is by providing outrageous value. Posting content that’s so good people comment “how is this free?” or “idk how this isnt viral”. And providing consistent value requires consistently having good, well-organized, developed thoughts to share.

The only way to get good at it is simple doing it a lot and learning from your mistakes. People think it should be easy (I thought it should be easy) — after all it’s probably the lowest barrier-to-entry thing you could spend time doing… any one with an iPhone can post online and grow a following.

Yet most people don’t realize how much effort it takes to become prolific. With low barrier to entry comes increased competition. And the algorithms make it a meritocracy — only the most compelling content wins, especially with smaller accounts. Early on you simply have to post more value than anyone else and eat glass doing it and like it.

So this past month I set out to achieve one primary ‘personal brand’ goal: see if I could get to 250K impressions on Twitter. (My rationale: Greg Isenberg said 250K impressions is all you need to build a serious lead-gen funnel online for free)

I thought this would be impossible TBH. Prior to dedicating time to this, I was averaging less than 25K per month impressions.

But after putting some time in, I came much much closer than I would’ve expected: 220K impressions in 28 days, a 1300% increase from last month.

The secret? Honestly it’s pretty simple, here are 5 steps to 10x-ing my Twitter impressions in under a month:

1. Post often (duh) — we are talking 5-10 posts per day if you can. Like Wayne Gretzky would tell you, the key to winning is shots-on-goal. You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take, and no one remembers (or typically even sees) your bad tweets; even if they do, I guarantee they dont care.

2. Log your ideas: A great way to help yourself out is by keeping a simple Notes tab on your phone/laptop of content ideas. Good thoughts are spontaneous, capture them and log them. Write down everything and let it simmer

3. Don’t get discouraged: the algo isn’t what it used to be. Most of your posts will probably get 0 likes and <50 impressions. That’s OKAY. Focus on the handful of poeple who really value what you put out and make content for them

4. Prioritize higher fidelity content styles: long-form tweets, threads, or videos are heavily-weighted by the Twitter algo, try to find time to post something high-effort at least once a day.

5. Interact with the big fish: A great hack is to simple reply early and often to big accounts you like. Turn on notifications and do your best to add value (sometimes that best way to add value can be simply hyping them up :-))

Hopefully that is a bit helpful, althought I admit I am not an expert by any means. I am still very early on in this journey. But as a young entrepreneur I know this is something worth prioritizing.

Whether or not you think dedicating yourself to growing an online following is a worthwhile pursuit, I hope at the least this will encourage you to share a few more thoughts online than you would previously.

The best way to live in 2024 is by being a part of the conversation :-))

Peace,

Ramsey