How To Build An Audience That You Can Never Lose : This One Habit I Learned Increased My Writing Ability From Newbie To Advanced
Building an audience using a method 99% of creators aren't using
It’s inevitable
You’re going to lose your social media audience
Give it enough time, and you will eventually lose all your hard work
Thousands of posts, thousands of interactions, thousands of DMs
They all come down to the same thing..
Your social media account can be banned at any time
And if your entire internet presence is based off that account..
You’re basically putting yourself in the cross fire
Customers, clients, and sales
They all depend on people knowing you exist
And how can they know you exist, if you have no social media presence
The harsh truth → You don’t own your social media audience
But what do you do then? Are you going to spend months growing..
Only to lose all your hard work out of nowhere?
I’ve seen it before..
People getting their Instagram account hacked or blocked
Same with TikTok
Same with X or Twitter
Then YouTube has the copyright issues..
It’s all branches of the same problem
And the worst part? 99% of people don’t know how to fix it
If you, as a creator or digital writer keep going on this path..
You will eventually lose all your leverage
But there is a better way
A way you can build your audience without worrying about your overlords
You do this by owning your audience
Most creators don’t own their audience
If someone runs a YouTube channel with say 80,000 subscribers..
That is not their audience (even if they think it is)
One snap of the YouTube overlord’s finger and BOOM! It’s all gone.
So how are you supposed to build a digital audience..
Without suffering from the same fate?
By building a newsletter
Think about it for second..
Newsletters are not owned by companies
You can at any time, take your list off platform
You can’t do this on YouTube
As long as you get good at your writing, your audience will follow you
And they will follow you anywhere
That means no more worrying about getting blocked on social media (that much)
That means building a revenue source that can’t be lost
That means building an audience who will keep reading your content, always
And that means a much more engaged audience than the numbers you see on X
But getting there, is not going to be easy
What do you write for instance? And what do you sell?
Let’s break it down step by step..
Step 1 - Craft your 3 content pillars
1 of the biggest reasons I’m able to bring out content every week, is because of my content pillars
Your content pillars are what make up your personality, interests, and skillset
Think about the 3 things you find the most interesting..
Then put each into its own category
Go broad enough, and you’ll realize all your interests fit into these pillars
Let’s imagine for a second that you feel passionate about training without weights..
Then you feel passionate about Greek Mythology, but you also like building websites
These 3 interests are very different, but by putting them into 3 broad categories..
You create 3 pillars
Training without weights → Fitness
Greek Mythology → Fiction
Building websites → Business
The goal, is to create pillars that include all your interests, and everything you’d like to talk about for the next 5 years
They will change, but that’s normal
Once in a while, your pillars might change a little bit
Over a long period of time, your pillars might change a lot
That doesn’t matter
Remember who you are writing to, yourself
You are attracting people who have similar interests to you
Yes, your audience might be segmented because of your different interests..
But there’s nothing wrong with that
The large your audience becomes, the more readers you will attract
Readers → Attention → Clients & Customers
Remember, you should write because you love to write
“Picking a niche”, will make you miserable..
Because there’s nothing normal about it
Instead, you need to attract the people who resonate with your writing..
And people who find your writing educational
By doing this, you create content you want to create, while building your digital writing business
Now I want you to go sit down with a piece of paper, and do exactly what I just told you to do
Come up with your 3 pillars
They will define everything you write on social media..
And that writing will determine how much money you make
Step 2 - Build A Writing Framework
To start out with, you need to find a method of writing a lot, without “burning out”
Truth is, burn out only happens because people don’t have their own framework
Long form writing is the best way to improve your writing ability..
But the issue, is that writing 2000 word long forms every week is not easy
This is why you need a framework that keeps people reading and interested
To start out with, I suggest using the writing framework I use to write 2000 word articles (like this one), every week, here
These articles help me setup all my content for the week
Then what you need to do, is take my framework, and develop your own one
Write enough with my framework, and eventually you’ll find one that works for you
This is a long process, so really put in the time
A good writing framework:
Pulls people in
Keeps them interested
Solves a problem
Has a CTA to Sell something
Remember → You can sell services, products, and ideas
Step 3 - Pick a topic to write about
By looking at your content pillars, find a topic inside those pillars that you’ve put a lot of thought into, and it needs to be something you’ve used to solve a problem
Let’s look at this article
Content pillars → Writing & Business Education
Writing Framework → ICIB Writing Framework
Topic → The Habit That Drastically Increased My Writing Ability
Now:
Take the content pillar (or multiple of them), you want to base your topic on
Pick your writing framework (mine is here)
Pick a topic (give your solution a unique name)
Now you have the fundamentals
Step 4 - Habitize
I’m a big fan of this term, even though it’s not widely used
To efficiently do something, you need to make it automatic
Walking to school
Adding sugar
Pouring milk
These activities have become autonomous for us
It happens without us thinking
The less we need to think about a task, the easier the task becomes
Which brings us to learning a new habit, specifically a writing habit
For the next few weeks, you need to stick to writing
Write a 1000 long form every Weekend
Pick a day that works for you, and write a long form
I’ve already given you all the tools you need to make it happen
The only is thing stopping you is consistency..
I’ll be honest, you’re probably going to suck at it
Writing is a skill, but writing consistently is an even greater skill
There will be day when you get nothing done
On these days, you need to do it anyway
It won’t come naturally, and that’s okay
To write consistently, you need to consistently write..
Even if it feels unnatural
That means if you miss a day, catch up the next day
Keep doing this even on the days you hate writing
The more you do it, the easier it will become
Until eventually you will be writing effortlessly
But remember..
This is a skill learning process
It won’t happen overnight
But if you manage to stick to it..
You already have a foundation for a digital business
A piece of digital real estate on the internet you can direct people to..
And where people can find you and go from being readers, to customers or clients
PS: In case you didn’t realize by now, the habit that advanced my writing ability is writing a newsletter issue every week
But what do you sell? That really depends on the origin of your audience
Depending on where they came from, they might be interested in different things
80% of my readers are from Substack, this means a large part of my audience read my articles for entertainment (and potentially education)
But my audience on X are designed to be buyers of business education
This means my audience consists of 2 groups of people with different desires
Something to keep in mind → Whether you can sell something depends on:
What their desires are and whether they actively buy things they read about
Where your audience came from and why they are reading
If they actually have the problem you fix
This means if you’re going to sell something, make sure your audience wants it
Speaking which.. If you’re reading this newsletter, I’d like to know what kind of paid options you’d like from me. Below I’ve put together a poll for you as the reader
Give it 2 seconds of your time and pick your option