How I Built An Online Audience of 500,000+ People and Counting

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Throughout my years of creating content online, I’ve managed to grow sizable audiences on various platforms like YouTube (~140k+), LinkedIn (~240k+), X (~87k+), Skool (~25k+), Substack (~25k+), and more amounting to over half a million people. Originally I figured I’d gotten lucky or simply persisted long enough to eventually gain traction, but as I migrated to other platforms and saw similar growth I realized that I actually understood the key, reproducible ingredients to growing an online audience. Once I manged to do it on enough platforms I became convinced there’s a recipe. Today, I wanted to share with you all what I view that step-by-step recipe to be.

1. Understand the Platform

The first step in growing an audience is understanding the platform you’re trying to do it on. This primarily requires being a frequent using of the platform to understand how and why people use it. Specifically what you should be thinking about is:

1. When do people use it — is the application used while commuting to and from work? While waiting on a subway platform? Jogging around the neighborhood, or while drinking your morning coffee? Maybe it’s all the above.

2. Why you people use it — is it used to understand news around the world? Keep up with friends? Learn something or simply be entertained and have a good laugh?

3. What content do you (or others) consume and engage with — what makes you stop to watch a particular video, read a particular post, or interact (click on someone’s profile, like a post, comment on a video, etc) with a specific piece of content?

While many of these platforms are now large enough to satisfy all the combinatorics of the points above, analyzing these questions will help you understand what content satisfies what needs, common themes of content that perform well, and what potential content corner(s) you might aim to occupy.

2. Know Thyself

Once you’ve understood a platform, it’s time to start asking yourself what kinds of content you could create. What you’re looking to find is what I call the Ikigai of content i.e. the intersection of what you love, what the world needs, what you are good at, and what will perform.

If your goal is to grow an online audience each of these four aspects are essential. If you don’t love the content you create you’ll eventually burn out. If you fail to deliver something the world needs you’re likely joining a very saturated market segment. If you’re not good at what it is you’re creating content about people won’t care to watch (don’t be fooled with this one; someone might be “bad” at one thing but that’s not really their content i.e. someone could be bad at playing video games, but people watch because they’re entertaining or funny). And finally, if you make content about something that has no potential to perform well, i.e. have large reach, your content is unlikely to be surfaced to large amounts of people.

With this visualize it’s now time to consider content niches that check all four of these boxes landing you square in the middle. My advice is to first narrow down the potential options by thinking about the different mediums of content you would prefer to occupy. This is where it’s crucial to know thyself.

If you enjoy writing, consider a newsletter (if you’re not subscribed to this one I’m offended)

or text heavy medium, if you’re camera shy and prefer casual conversation maybe you’re destined for audio-only podcasting, and if you love film, video platforms might be a natural choice. Consider which medium might most resonate with you as this will help you find your content corner. Take time to think this through because failing to do this, might land you somewhere you don’t want to be. Off the top of my head, imagine someone who hates cameras, but loves gabbing about food nutrition while cooking…I don’t know you but I’ve never heard of a successful audio-only ASMR nutrition food content creator (I will gladly be proved wrong).

3. Develop Your Voice

Once you’ve narrowed down the medium as well as the content area you plan to orbit it’s time to develop your voice. The best way to do this is to start making content since you find your voice through creating. While it can scary to do, my best advice is to simply post something — it literally could be anything. Take this as your homework today. If you’re seriously interested about growing an online audience, post anything about what you’re interested in creating content about on whatever platform of your choosing (link it in the comments below and I’ll take a look). People often become paralyzed about posting because they’re afraid that something scary will happen when they do. Most often people are afraid of what others will think, but here’s the truth:

1. Their opinions don’t matter (the sooner you learn this, the better)

2. No one cares. You’ll post your first video, for example, and not a single person will watch (I mean this in a good way, the fact that no one is watching is freeing!)

Once you’re over the initial hurdle I generally find that there are two buckets of “voices” that each creator can be placed into:

1. Transactional — you watch, read, listen to, etc. this creator because they are giving you some information. For example, I watch a ten-minute video and by the end I understand how to find the eigenvalues of a matrix (just kidding I’d need way longer than 10 minutes)

2. Relational — you watch, read, listen to, etc. this creator because of who they are, their personality, or something similar. For example you might watch a creator because they live in New York City, are in their twenties, and work in a field you’re interested in.

I don’t believe you need to strictly pick a bucket, but it can be helpful to think about when considering the content you plan to create to grow your audience: maybe you want to teach others about a particular topic or maybe you simply enjoy documenting your life and having others follow along. Initially your goal should simply be to create content consistently and focus on improving your content as you go. You’ll learn infinitely more by spending twenty hours producing twenty videos (for example) than spending twenty hours producing one video.

Just Consider It

The final two thoughts I’ll leave you with is as follows. Building an audience is not for everyone and that’s not a bad thing. I always say that if you’re not willing to consistently make content for a year I wouldn’t recommend making content for a day. The people who win in building audiences are the ones who are able to think in decades. There’s no Superbowl of content or trophy you can hoist at the end of a season (there are some plaques though) which is to say there’s no real finish line. You can always strive to build your online audience larger, get more clicks, drive more signups, or attract more eyeballs and this is the reason why it’s crucial to learn how to build an audience in a fashion that’s sustainable for the long-term.

My final thought is that while building an audience is not for everyone it’s something that I think most people should at least consider. As technology increases and tools level the playing field of who is able to build things I believe what will become increasingly more important is having a distribution channel (i.e. an audience). A place where you can reliably reach tens, hundreds, thousands, or even millions of people. While building and having an audience is not for everyone, everyone is inevitably a part of some audience and that is inherently valuable.

Where you can find me online:

• X

• LinkedIn

• Twitch

• YouTube

• Instagram

• FAANG interview prep

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