Find your Following on Twitter

1. Introduction: Hi there. Welcome to find your following. I'm Oliver, and I'll teach you how to grow your Twitter presence by building intentional relationships in an honest and authentic way. All you need for this course is a Twitter account and attentive mind and a way to take notes. And that's really all. Let's start by looking at the main themes and lessons this course. When it comes to finding your following or audience building as it's often called, I follow an approach that might sound a little bit different from what you may have heard before. I focus on building honest and real relationships with my followers one person at a time. I consciously choose a sustainable growth approach, which makes all hacks and shortcuts completely uninteresting to me. There's very little value in having a lot of the wrong kind of followers. What I will teach you in this course is a strategic, intentional, and pragmatic approach to building and sustaining a long-term following on Twitter. I am teaching this course because I have done this successfully and I'm still doing it as we speak. Two years ago, I had 400 followers. Those were painfully gathered over ten years of being on Twitter. I didn't tweet much and when I did, it was all over the place. There was no strategy behind my tweets and it really didn't work well, then I made a choice to take audience building more seriously. Everything changed right after that. Right now I have a highly engaged audience of almost 50 thousand people. In this course, I will share what I did, what worked, what didn't work, and how other successful entrepreneurs and creators approach finding their following on Twitter. If you find a lot of examples from my own Twitter feed, from my followers and the builders that I admire. Personally, I come from a software engineering background. I've worked all over the place for agencies, VC funded Silicon Valley businesses, and then I started and failed several bootstrap businesses myself. And all that changed in 2017 when I co-founded feedback pen that with my girlfriend and yell, We agree the business to $55 thousand in monthly recurring revenue within two years and then sold it for a life changing amount of money. After that, I went straight into writing and I started sharing what I learned with my fellow entrepreneurs on Twitter. I wrote two books and now here I am sharing with you what I learned, building an audience on Twitter That's pretty much all above me. That's my journey. So, yeah, let's stick into the structure of this course. We will dive deep into the why, the how, and the what of audience building on Twitter. We'll look at the big picture. We zoom into the details and then we get right down to their day-to-day work. This is a hands-on course. Every module will leave you with something tangible for your audience building efforts. I'm not a fan of abstract theory, at least time when it comes to something as practical as showing up on Twitter. Anything I'll talk about in this course will be actionable and useful no matter what stage of your audience building journey you are at right now. There'll be templates, checklists, frameworks, and plenty of exercises in there to help you find your unique path towards an audience that respects you because it's different for everybody. But before you go into journey, I'll show you what you'll learn. Pretty much. We'll start with understanding the why behind audience building. And that's your purpose and your vision. In this module, we'll explore what you want to stand for, what your followers to be expected from you, and how to combine that into every single action you take, because it's foundational. And it might sound surprising because we haven't mentioned the word twitter in this section. All of this just yet, but it's the most important step, the getting the y right, everything that follows every follower, every successful tweet your right, and then the business outcome in the end is just a consequence of getting this initial step right. It all starts with the white will find your why in this. After we're done with this lesson, you will have found your core values and overall audience building vision. Those are stable foundations for sustainable journey ahead. After looking at your purpose, your y will look at the methods behind audience building on Twitter. You'll learn how to use Twitter efficiently, how to engage in power and bring value to people. That will be the how. You will walk away from this with a structured approach to a building a following that it can take hours every day. This is the practical part, the part that will change your life forever. And you'll apply these methods from the one, you'll see immediate improvements. That's the practical part. With that insight into your future audience, we'll dive into how to discover and validate ideas as well. This module will teach you how to find ideas that have a high chance of turning into a profitable business opportunity or just great inspiration for your future content. You'll, something in there will be for you. You'll learn how validation works and how you can establish feedback loops with an ever-growing audience. It's gonna be very useful. After that. Then the third lesson, the third module, it's time to dive into the building side of things. Hands-on technical module, we'll look into how sharing a journey can empower your brand and your business. This module, we'll introduce a lot of tweet templates and examples from real entrepreneurs who are having success with building and public. Finally, I'll talk about the risky side of things. Common pitfalls, shady behaviors, and all kinds of problems you might not expect on your journey. There's no light without shadow, and I want to make sure that you're prepared for this. There's an extensive FAQ section that closes off the course as well. One last thing, you'll need to do the work, I promise you it'll be worth it, but I really recommend doing the exercises in each module when they happen, don't skip them. You'll come out with tangible results that are unique to your own journey, gonna be really useful and will make the work that follows so much easier. I'll be sharing a few accountability strategies throughout the course and I know that your time is precious. That's why I will make sure that both this course and the ideas and concepts introduced will respect your time and equip you with high-impact tools and techniques. You'll also find a link to a community of dedicated Twitter experts and experts in the making, just like you in the course materials, please join the community while you will find not only other audience builders, but also motivation and accountability, and a lot of people sharing what they know. I know it sounds daunting to commit so much time and effort to building an audience. But finding a following on Twitter is building a legacy. I wish I would have done this many years ago. The amount of opportunities and relationships that I've built and found on Twitter for just building a following intentionally has been staggering. And life changing. The allowed me to do this. That's the map, the lay of the land. It's not the territory. Twitter audience building happens on Twitter. And we'll get to that. And that is something that you will have to experience for yourself. I promise you'll get that chance sooner than you think. Now, let's get started. 2. The Why: In this section of the course, we'll dive into the most important foundation of audience building, the y. We will talk about what finding a following really is about. You'll learn about focusing on your core values, understanding what your future audience is gonna be interested in, and how to combine that into a strategic approach. You'll also learn about several key concepts that will assist you in strengthening that particular strategy. Let's take a look at white people are on Twitter in the first place. I asked my own followers this question and I got a lot of replies and the results were very clear. People crave connection. They want to make friends. They want to learn more about things they already care about and who also cares about them. And you want to share ideas, connect, relate, and learn. Those are interpersonal things. They require human to human interaction. This can take many shapes and we'll dive into what people exactly expect to find on Twitter in a bit. For now. What matters is that people want to connect with other people. Nobody in the almost 200 responses that I got on my tweets said, Oh, I really want to become a customer of this faceless business or man, do I love being marketed to on Twitter? People don't want to be targets. They want to be not the demographic of a paid at. They want to be Pierce. They want to be respected, and they want to be treated with honesty. And it all starts with you being honest about building an audience, honest with yourself and honest to your prospective followers. I think this is a good opportunity to quickly take a look at the word audience because I want to make sure that you and I understand what exactly that word means. Here are my definitions that I will use throughout this course. As, you know, people to find things differently. Do we an audience is anyone who should be interested in you, your work and your business. This is a fairly far-reaching definition, and that's on purpose. And audience isn't just the people who follow you right now, that is your following. Think bigger. Your audience also includes the people who are wondering if they should follow you or not. It includes the people who, you know are out there, but who haven't heard of you before. While you might be out to grow a following, you should always look beyond that and look at the broader vision of your audience. It used toward audience to describe this potential just as much as the factual number of followers you have right now. Since operational definition. For the purpose of this course, I will use following an audience interchangeably. Because we're focused on Twitter. There is an audience beyond Twitter. And that's also interesting to look at. But for now, following is an audience. What is it not? It's not a metric. Looking at the number of Twitter followers you have isn't looking at your audience, it's a shadow of your potential audience, a lagging indicator at best, and a distraction at the worst. Your audience is also not a walking wallets, some money laying around for you to pick up. That is just disrespectful. You're dealing with people here and people have their own dreams and goals and they usually quite capable of understanding your motivation. The motivation of the people they interact with. Don't trick them, cheat, don't use them as subjects for your growth hacks, they won't like that and then quickly go find someone else to follow. Honesty is the key here. That's why I bring this up. It's become more and more important for your communication strategy to be honest. If people are very good at spotting attempts to manipulate them, then the obvious conclusion is that you should be just as honest as you can with them about everything you do. And audience building is one of these things that you should be honest about it, it's a good idea to reflect on this. So you have the answers when people come asking, why would you want to build an audience at the first place? That's the big question. Obviously, you've already decided to do this, otherwise you wouldn't be listening to me right now. And still, the reason why you're looking into building an audience will likely be very unique. Some people simply want more customers for their business. Others want to figure out what they should be doing in the first place. Or they want to validate that idea that they have with a large group of people. And others might just want to find people who share their interests. What unites all of these reasons is the willingness to establish relationships. That is what audience building is about. And that is also what you should be very upfront about your future audience. For example, you can just say, I am trying to help as many people as possible to learn about building better reading habits. And eventually I want to turn it into a business. That's an honest goal, perfectly fine to tell people and people will appreciate that honesty. In fact, people expect that honesty, that time of faceless brands is ending. Nobody wants to be friends with accompany. And nobody ever really wanted to be friends with accompany. But particularly today, it has become even more obvious. People want to connect with people. Who may run those companies maybe. But there's an expectation of transparency now. And building your own personal brand will allow you to fulfill this expectation. When you build a brand around yourself as a creator, a founder, a teacher, a leader, whatever. You will allow people to resonate, not just with what you do, but with why you do it. They want to build a relationship with your authentic self, not some fictional projection. Now with a product, not what a mascot and I would've persona, but with a person. Derek Sivers wrote a book called Start with why. And that's what the first book recommendation in this course. You will find all of them in the course materials. And in this book, it points out that people buy your products not because of some innate quality. They buy them because they believed in the reasons why you created those products. Do you need an example for this? Because it's just nice if you're a visual artist, they don't buy your art because it's the best art ever created. They will buy it because they believe that you have something to say, your art as an expression of those valuable thoughts, they buy you not just your art. What does that mean for audience building? While people don't follow you? Because every single tweet you write is worth Pulitzer-Prize. They follow you because you've kind and supportive. And every now and then, you provide them with something that makes their lives easier, a better. They follow you because your values shine through every time you choose to communicate. And that is 1.5 of your wife. Your values are all about what you as a person uniquely stand for. This is an intentional choice. Whatever values you choose will become the North Star for your audience building strategy. And everything you do on Twitter will be impacted by this choice. This is why we're talking about this now as one of the very first things before we talk about tweets or profile pictures and all the Twitter stuff. If you don't know what your core values are, then you'll just do random stuff on Twitter. And random stuff does not attract the focus audience. Intentional audience building leads to an intentional following. That can only happen when you know what you stand for. We'll get to the exercise that will help you determine those core values for yourself in a minute. Before we do that, let me share my three core values with you. And those are impacting everything I do. They are empowerment, connection, and kindness. Every interaction with my audience, I tried to live up to these values as many as possible. I tried to support, to help to put the spotlight on others or to give freely and to invite people to relate to each other. That's why most of my activities on Twitter are focused on celebrating the successes and fostering relationships. As a consequence, I find that the people who follow me are similarly interested in these virtues. They also want to create more connection and learn from each other and empower each other's lives. You'll attract what you put out on Twitter. What you do will resonate with people who wanted to do the same. Let's look into how you can figure this out for yourself and do it intentionally. For this very first exercise, I want you to go through this list of virtues and pick the three that most resonate with you. You might want to pause the course here for a few minutes and consider each of them for a couple of seconds. And the ones that feel right, it should end up on our list. Pen and paper should help here for each noun on this list, consider if that is something that you want to project with every single thing you do, do you want to create a joy for people by entertaining them? Do you want to make them feel seen by helping them voice their opinions? Or do you want to excite them by sharing new and interesting topics? You will find a more detailed list with explanations of each virtue in the course materials. If you need more information, It's called the core value of virtual list there. And if you think that any particular value is missing from the list, just add it. This is your journey and it should be based on your values. If you think quirkiness is a value, use it. There's enough room in our attention economy for all kinds of values, not just the ones that you see right here. After you found the three that you resonate with most Write down three bullet points each that express how you can show this particular value to your audience. For example, one of my values is empowerment. For me, those three ways of showing my value would be one, I retreat and quotes inspiring content from people who have just a couple of followers. Number two, maybe when someone asks a question I amplified into my large follower network so they can help this person and find an answer. Three, if I can help someone get more impressions by lightning or retreating their marketing efforts, I will do so without asking for anything in return. Notice how all three of these are public acts that people will notice and eventually identify with me when I empower people and incredible because I empower people all the time. It's something that is clearly not a growth hack or quick experiment. For me, it's a long-term expression of a core value commitment. Please go ahead, find your three values and write down three ways of expressing them. Each. If you only have two or one value, that's also fine. All I care about is that you reflect on your why. Pause the video here and take a few minutes. All right. I assume that at this point, you have a list of a few core values. And I recommend that you write them down on a piece of paper or in a document, if any sort, and either print them out or stick them to your wall and put them as a desktop background, whatever you do, however, you usually motivate yourself. I think it's always good to have your core values in your visual proximity. When you don't know if that tweet that you're writing right now is a good idea. Not just taking a look at those values can often just really show you communicate your values correctly. I said that this is the first half of your why. We looked at you and your values. So let's take a look at the other sides of your audience building efforts. Let's see what your future audience finds valuable. It's fairly simple, really. Everyone who comes to twitter has a reason for why they're there. They have some kind of expectation for what they want to find. And for you to fulfill that expectation, all you need is to figure out what your prospective followers find valuable. If you can provide that, there'll be interested in what you have to say. Now, there are hundreds of millions of Twitter users and they come from wildly different reasons. Some people just want to be entertained. Others needed a distraction from the stressful lives and others seek instruction. They wanted to learn new things are fine motivation to get started with what they always wanted to do anyway, the meaning of the term value and what's valuable will be very much unique to your particular perspective audience. And the earlier you know what that is, the easier it will be to provide that. In the same way you looked into your own personal core values. Let's consider what the people that you want to serve in power and build an audience with care about the most. I'm just going to lie. This will be hard to pinpoint right now. Understanding what's valuable to an audience you haven't yet built feels like a cyclical problem. But you don't need to get this perfectly right today. All I want to ask of you is to put yourself into the shoes of those who you think are the perfect candidates for your audience. What are their goals? What do they come to Twitter for? And if you don't know who exactly you want to serve with your work, that's fine too. You don't need to have everything figured out. By working in public and building a reputation, you will attract an audience eventually. For now, just look at yourself and examine why you come to Twitter or social media in general. We'll dive deep into how to find the right followers in Twitter in a few minutes. But that will be an almost technical approach. What I want you to think about right now is a question of mindset and intention. I want you to connect those value expectations with your core values. Take a look at my examples here. My audience wants to help other people succeed. I can channel my value of empowerment by helping them celebrate other people's successes. I can show them who most recently that's something great. Or I can amplify when they celebrate somebody else. They come to Twitter to find business tips from other founders. Well, it's very easy for me to share and amplify good educational content that will show that I care about connecting people with great teachers. Do this exercise by just writing down as many value perceptions as you can come up with. Reasons why people come to Twitter and what their goals might be. And then try to find as many ways of how you can apply your core values to them. This exercise will help you later on to understand what kinds of content you will focus on and how you can best interact with your future audience. Having a list like this will always be useful when you're out of ideas. Nothing better than a checklist rate. Pause the video right here, and take a few minutes to do this exercise. Back. Alright. Here's what happens when you connect your values with the value perception of your audience, you start aligning. Alignment is the key to service when you offer something and someone else needs it, That's when businesses are born. You apply your values relentlessly to everything you do and the people you serve starts to understand how incredibly valuable your contributions are. Knowing what you can offer and what is expected is the key to creating alignment. Thankfully, we just did two exercises that allow you to understand these two very important things. The easiest way to bridge values and value be kind, empathetic and selfless. Most of the time, people aren't just used to be treated with respect. In the world of business. They expect to be cheated, manipulated, and exploited. If they come to understand that you're genuine and honest person, building something meaningful for them. There'll be all over you. And this kind of honest and non-threatening approach will create real relationships with people. You'll be standing out from all those other voices just by being a real human being. Consider everything you do to be a small public investment into those relationships and don't expect much in return right now, like I said, people expect the worst. There'll be skeptical in the beginning, but over time, they will change their opinion of you. They will start trusting you because your actions show you to be trustworthy. Here's an example of this. Axial here goes out of his way to tell me that he thinks I'm a genuinely good person. And I checked his Twitter feed. He really doesn't praise people that often get into It's like this for me is public tweets. That's incredible. And it's a testament to my core values actually showing in what I'm doing. What I like about the street in particular is that axial points out that because he trusts me to be January, he's interested in whatever I have to say. And that is some trust. Better live up to that expectation of value that actually shows here. It took me a while to get to this point. Trust is slowly built but quickly eroded. Every action I take has the potential to be quite harmful if it's the wrong action. Another good reason to have a printout of your core values right next to your monitor. You can always check, is this in line with what I do? People trust you to be your genuine self and you've given them valuable things for free over a long time, they will eventually reciprocate, can't help it. It's in human nature to square up, to give back to people. And that's when you start monetizing your audience. The moment when they feel they need to give back because you have given so much to them. I personally experienced this a few months into building my own audience on Twitter. I had been writing a blog, a blog post every week, and it just finished curating all my 20-some posts into a free guided bootstrapping and I launched that on Twitter. One of the first comments to that launched wheat was Andrew gets Becky, who now runs micro require quite successfully, encouraging me to turn it into a book. I mean, he even said he pre-ordered right away. Up until that point, I hadn't even thought about writing a book. I just wanted to blog. And now here I was being told that people want to meet to do that so they could pay for it. And not just anyone but accomplished entrepreneurs wanting to read my work. That was incredible. And yet it's an expectable outcome of serving an audience. It took me several months, but I see this happening for every creator and founder who takes building the following seriously. Eventually, this happens. Eventually is the core phrase. It won't happen overnight. If you quit, it won't happen for sure. So let's take a look at a handful of concepts to understand about your whole journey. After which we will dive right into how to use Twitter to get you to your goals. These concepts, I put them here because they will help you speed up the journey and make it very enjoyable. There are three major concepts that I want to talk about here. Having a long-term perspective, playing an infinite game and focusing on inputs over outputs. And after that, we'll take a quick look at growth hacks, what they are all about. But first, the good stuff. Here's the secret. There is no secret. Every follower, particularly in the beginning, will be hard earned. If you build an honesty based Twitter audience, you're looking for trust, and trust takes time to develop your audience building journey will take more than a few days. Ideally, it'll go on forever and you get to enjoy the benefits more and more every day. But until you get to that point, it will be a lot of work and you will need to have patience with yourself, with your audience and with the slow nature of building real relationships in public, it takes time for momentum to pull you along. It needs to build up. What does that look like? Let's talk about compounding effects because I think that's really important. These graphs are from Twitter statistics tool called Social Blade. And they show my month over month follower growth and the average daily follower number. You can see that it has been slowly but reliably growing over time. The reasons the numbers, more people following me means more people get the chance to interact with my content, which then is visible to their followers. Also, more people. And building momentum like this just takes awhile. But once it's on your side, it'll pull you along and you can see where this is going. Up into the right. It's a constant growth pattern and there is no numerical goal to reach. The actual goal of audience building. To me, is to keep building an audience. The side-effects of, of a growing audience are growing opportunities for you. There's no wind condition to this, just more and more amazing opportunities. And that's what infinite games are all about. This concept has been popularized recently by Simon Sinek in his book The Infinite Game, which itself refers back to James P. Courses, similarly titled book finite and infinite games. The idea is very simple. Finite games like sports matches have fixed rules. You know, all the players and the game has a clear win condition that when they're losers, infinite games, on the other hands don't have these well-defined conditions. Consider politics as such a game. New players joined all the time and the rules change and winning and losing are unclear cut. You can't win politics. You can best win an election. So the closest you could come to winning the infinite game of politics is to keep playing the game for as long as you can. And you'll see politicians do that. They want to stay in office, and that's very much true for audience building as well. The best audience builders play infinite games. Why? Well, it's in the nature of finite games with their winners and losers to be all about short-term thinking. How can I defeat my opponent right now? How can I grab that ball from them and score a goal? How can I win as much as I can and as quick a timess again, that's all 0. Sum thinking you winning means they lose. It's the winner-take-all mentality. And you see people do this on Twitter too. They scan, people are run fake giveaway so they could get massive follower numbers in a short time, but that's not sustainable. None of this creates meeting or connection with their followers. Reading a village and burning down all the houses. How can you expect to build a single positive relationship from that? By what you want to do that on Twitter, Well, you can't, at least not for long. Instead, approach audience building as an infinite game with a positive sum mindset. If you consider your work to be part of a community of like-minded and supportive people, then it becomes clear that the right move is to move. That makes the game easier for everybody. The great thing about trying to be the tight that lifts all the boats is that people will be eventually quite supportive of you if you should ever run into problems or your business efforts failed. Here's supporters will be, there, will still be there. Because your personal brand, playing the infinite game selflessly is something they care about. They'll make sure that you come out of his struggles stronger than before if they can help it. Playing an infinite game is all about showing up consistently and doing things that benefit everyone. And that's really the reason why growth hacks won't help you. A quick note here for definitions, there's a difference between growth tactics and growth hacks. Atactic is a method that optimization of a particular way to attain a goal and to meet tactic is a neutral term. Hack, however, that's a shortcut at the expense of someone else doing a fake giveaway of a MacBook Pro that you neither ONE or never intend to give to anyone, will probably get through a lot of followers very quickly. But if you don't deliver, the backlash will be disastrous. Your personal brand will be damaged forever because your audience will forget that you cheated them. Hacks a zero-sum. You again, somebody else loses. Tactics are positive sums. You asking somebody to sign up for your newsletter in a follow-up tweet, which is a popular growth tactic. It's a mutually beneficial deal. They get access to more of the content that they like, and you get a subscriber. And that's the difference, it's win-win. In the following sections of this course, I will introduce a lot of growth strategies and tactics. Whenever become close to a potential growth hack. I'll point out the dangers both to your brand and your audience building efforts. I'll make sure to show you the most ridiculous growth hack attempts and how you can stay on the safe and honest side of growing your audience. Finally, let's talk about what I believe is the most rewarding part of your whole audience building journey. You on the path of becoming an expert. And you may already be one or maybe not. It doesn't really matter. All you need to be as an ambitious learner. Because we all start out that way. Your audience will recognize this in them. And we'll be talking about reputation and credibility at a later point. But for now, just understand that building an audience is a process that will change you for the better. You'll learn. You'll share your teach, and you'll improve your connect with other experts and built a network of high reputation friends and Twitter colleagues to, you know, like an expert, For me, building a brand and building an audience and becoming an expert in the field. That's really the exact same thing. It all draws its power from your values, your why, and how you can serve the people that you've chosen will choose to serve. That's what makes you an expert. And that concludes part one. You learned what audience building is about, what your core values are, what your audience considers to be valuable. And the main concepts that will facilitate the growth of your audience coming up. Actually using Twitter. Excited. I know I am. 3. The How: Welcome to part two, the how. In this lesson we'll dive into the methods of audience building, but focus on Twitter as a platform, social network and a hunting grounds, and the source of inspiration and as many faces. So get your Twitter account ready. This will be a lot of fun. Now, how do we get from creating a Twitter account to building an engaged audience in tens of thousands? The answer is quite simple. We get there one follower at a time. So let's take a look at how people actually follow on Twitter. We need to understand that to optimize for it. Like on any other social network, following can be looked at as a funnel. Let's imagine someone ends up following you. What steps that they take. People see something that hooks their interests, which in our case is a Tweet of yours. This looks interesting. Then if they enjoyed that tweet, they looked at who wrote it, who set this? Do I know them? Should I know that? If your name and profile picture looks interesting enough, they might click on it and check out your Twitter profile to see what you're all about. Can I trust this person? Do other people trust this person already? They might reach your bio. They might look at your links, your follower accounts. And then they may even scroll down to the timeline to figure out if there's anything else you have to offer. What else can I learn from this person? Is following them a good idea? That's for opportunities, for them to follow you, for chances of getting a follower. But these are also for potential situations where they might decide not to follow you. And your mission as an audience builder is to make each of these points of contact as interesting and positive as possible so that have no reason not to follow you. Take a look at the very first of those four points of contact. The first impression from a tweet, that is usually a surprise to them. They come across your tweet by random chance. Then the second impression from a name and Avatar that often is just a glance away from your tweet. It already has some contexts and they're already maybe intrigued, but there's still not too much information there. Then they start actively researching you. The third impression comes from your profile and the forth from your timeline of content that you posted in the past. Every single one of those points is something we'll look into in this course. Better yet, we'll look into how you can optimize each point of contact for higher conversion, what we want is for as many people as possible to convince themselves to follow you as quickly as possible. Now you may notice that there are two more steps to it as funnel, the three dots and the question, Do I still care? And here's why audience building isn't over when someone follows you. Actually, that's really just the start of it. I've talked a lot about relationship-building so far and it's no different here. Maintaining the relationship is just as important as establishing it in the first place. Maybe even more important. Attention is a rare commodity. With every tweet you put out there, you have to convince your existing followers not to unfollow you. At the very least, the baseline, ideally you convinced them to interact with you and show your work to their peers. But for retention sake, keeping them as a follower is the baseline. We'll take a look at all of these touch points during this course. This section in particular in great detail. But here's something you need to be clear about first before you start optimizing. Who do you want to follow you? If you just answered everybody, we have a problem. Not just an audience problem. This is a business problem in general. Seth Godin says that you need a minimum viable audience. That means a well-defined niche audience. The group of people that's very similar. If you try to please everyone, you'll end up pleasing no one. Be specific when it comes to who you want to serve. Serve software developers or writers or private chefs or sports friends, but doesn't matter, make a choice. Build an audience of people who you are proud to see. You gathered around you and try to attract like-minded people. Let's just have a much easier time forming a community than if everyone like different things. It's just hard to please people who want different things with one thing that you put out there. But that's not all there is to your audience. There's a huge difference in quality between individual followers. Even. The first thing we do before we get people to follow us is to understand what our ideal follower looks like. Whatever field you want to build an audience in the ideal follower will always look the same. They're active. They are using twitter daily, multiple times if possible. They are the kind of people that will engage with your tweets or tweets in general, they reply the retweet they like. Ideal follower interacts with your content positively and constructively. Not just your contact, but everyone else's that they follow on Twitter to an ideal follower is a member of your community. They care not just about the field, but even more about the people in it. They understand that they are not just on Twitter to learn, for example, about software engineering, but that the world of coding wouldn't be as exciting if there wasn't this amazing and supportive community of developers around it. And that is also the reason why they are a good fit for you. They have something to gain from following you just as much as you have to gain from them following you. This is the perfect person to interact with on Twitter. So whatever you do, try to align your actions with their behaviors and expectations. This list of ideal follower traits has been inspired by a tool called fake followers audit by Spark Toro, and that's an audience analysis company. You'll find a link to this tool in the course materials as well. Fake followers audit looks at a random sample of your followers, just a couple of a 100 people and then checks them for common signs of accounts being fake. Either their bots or low quality spam accounts, things like that. This list right here, you'll see how they determined the thickness of each account. Inactive, new user oversharing default images, nodes we'd count, there's a lot of parameters in here. But it also means that if you invert every single point on this list, you will know that an account is legitimate. You'll find that having an active account that has been around for a while and it's properly posting content without spamming to regular-size group of followers. Now that's a clear sign of being a good potential follower. I recommend checking out the stool for your own account right now. Or maybe use it to find out the fake followers score of some big account in your industry. You'll be surprised this interesting stuff out there. You'll learn a lot from just playing with that. And I know that these are a lot of data points and then not specific to an engaged audience, we need to add a few things to that for that to work. Let's take it one thing at a time again, looking at your ideal follower and how you can best attract them. If they are active every day, your best bet is to be equally consistent. Show up every day and they'll start seeing you as a peer. Someone just like them. The more you show up on their feed, the more likely they are to give you a chance. When you interact with your ideal follower in a positive way, they'll feel good about interactions with you. If you add value to their lives, they would want that every day. That's why they follow you. And anything you can do for the community on Twitter, off Twitter doesn't matter that will attract your ideal followers if you connect and help people, they want to help and connect to you. Just how humans work. We want to reciprocate. And it's easy to help someone who you know has already helped so many people, maybe even yourself. And that is the ultimate reason that people will want to follow you. You're someone who can help them. When we talked about this in the value perception part of finding your why, whatever way that they desire. The insights, education, entertainment, motivation, whatever they're on, Twitter for. If you can connect them with them on that level, they will want to be a part of your audience. And this is what audience building is all about, attracting one follower at a time by being aligned with their goals. This is also where focusing on a niche audience comes into play. Again, don't appeal to all people everywhere. Be the person that is the best person to follow in your niche. Be the best and kind of software engineer, the most joyful yoga teacher or the most discipline nutritionists. Wherever you are, be selective in what you put out there. You will attract people like yourself. If you're kind, will attract kind people. If you're sarcastic, you'll attract people who are very fond of sarcasm themselves. If you want to appeal to other people that are not like you, you'll have to find ways to connect with them and connect them with you. Usually being supportive will do the trick. No matter if you're already in a community or not. But time to get back to our funnel. Let's take a designated look at the first of many touch points, the hook, that first ever tweet of yours that your potential follower gets to see. How can we get people to see this? How can we make people curious about you and all that? Talk about followers doesn't really mean anything. If you don't know where to find them, if you don't know where they can find you, if you have 0 followers, how do you find your first few? Well, thankfully, there's a way I went through this myself and I'll share that with you now. It's a very safe and enjoyable approach. I believe that there are three steps to solve a sustainable and honest Twitter growth. And those are engagement, empowerment, and valuable content. In that order, engagement is the antidote to tweeting into the void. You know that feeling when you have just written your best tweet ever and no one likes it. Every audience builder has this problem. The beginning, at least. It's such a painful problem. While you can overcome it by going where people are already having conversations. We'll get to that in a minute. Let's look at empowerment now it's similar, but it's less about writing tweets and more about helping people increase their visibility. This is to community focused aspect of being on Twitter. We treating, encouraging people, helping them solve their problems. It's incredibly powerful for your personal brand because it's kindness and action. Finally, there's valuable content. And that's the stuff that keeps people coming back from war. The tweets, the threats, the means. Content is something more or less permanent that people can consume for their own benefit. It's really something that works best when you already have somewhat of an audience. Otherwise, you know, the void is waiting and valuable content contributes to the pool of knowledge in your community. And valuable content does not. But I said that these things happen in order. An engagement should happen from the very start. Even if you have not a single follower, you can already started replying to other people and help them find value and meaning from your Exchange. Start this now, right now, this might feel hard if you're not used to engaging on Twitter, if you're just lurking, but don't worry, it's a numbers game. You'll have to engage a lot to get people to find you interesting. And you'll learn by doing the earlier you get going, the better you'll get at it, and the faster you'll get over those first few awkward conversations, they're probably going to happen and it's fine. Everybody starts their empowerment is something you can wait with. And so is producing a lot of content. These things only work when you already have an engaged and engaging audience built that first, you don't need thousands of followers to start posting your own tweets or retweet other content. But focused almost all of your time on engagement than the beginning sets you up with a very trusting and well-meaning initial audience. And they will just help you grow quite quickly once you start with your own content, at some point, you'll notice that I haven't talked about selling people something yet. I haven't even talked about finding business ideas of what content you post and how to monetize it. Well, that's because all the moneymaking stuff is a consequence of building an audience, not as starting points. You don't monetize an audience while you're just getting started. You don't usually harvested tomato. While it's still green. Money will eventually come. The tomato will turn red, but that you have to wait until you've created the space for that opportunity. And I promise we will get to this, and you will get to this soon. But for now, let's figure out how to build an audience first before we start selling. I said engagement is the most important method of audience building. And this might sound surprising because after all, most people talk about content creation all the time. Let's take a step back here at this moment and define what this means. What is content? And content isn't just thoughtful tweets are links to interesting articles, at least not for me. Sometimes well-phrased question is content because it attracts interesting answers from interesting people. Celebrating someone else's success is content because it exposes them to new and interesting parties. Whenever you add value to someone else's Twitter feed, you create content. With that definition, engagement turns out to be some kind of content creation to, it just happens in the context of an ongoing conversation. But to know where people are chatting, you need to understand who is having those conversations and when they take place. And the best way to have a steady stream of conversations to participate in is to follow the people who are having them. Sweetie Twitter in a nutshell. And at this point I follow over 12 thousand people. It's quite a lot. Sometimes it's way too much, but it brings with it and never-ending stream of conversations that I can readily jump into and engage with. And obviously I started out with 0 follows just like any other person. But I found a few ways of figuring out who I should follow and what should be following for maximum efficiency engagement. And I will share these three techniques with you today. Next, discovery, recursive following, and list expansion. Together those will allow you to find the right people. Remember your ideal followers very quickly. Next is discovery really means find the most active experts and community members in your field and follow them. Every community has this kind of distribution. Some people are extremely prolific and part of every conversation. But most people are just watching, are contributing only occasionally. But by finding and following those hyper engaged experts, the people who are at the core of the community and the nexus of all conversation. You'll be quickly exposed to every important conversation in the field. These people are usually called influencers. They are cool group members that are high reputation and long-term contributors to their communities. They commit significant amounts of time and money and effort through their work for and with the community. Connecting with these influencers provides you with a few amazing opportunities. First off, experts attract people. These influences will have sizable audience themselves already. And that allows you to do something that I call the audience of this. Whenever this influencer posts something, you have the opportunity to add value in some shape or form to what they just posted. You can comment, share an opinion, and add another interesting perspective or give critical feedback. As long as it's helpful to the influencers audience, you are auditioning for their attention. It's essentially free exposure for your replies. This is the most effective way to find early followers because the audience you're auditioning in front of is pre-assembled for you. The people who follow this expert care about the same things that you care about, they're going to be much more likely to listen to what you fellow fan of the expert have to say. It's a great opportunity and something you can do from day one. No followers follow experts, engage in their audiences and make people interested in you. Where do you find out who's an expert worth following? While you may already have seen them on Twitter, you probably even have followed a few. But now it's time to do this intentionally and strategically. But if you don't know who those people are, here are a few ideas and how you can find them off Twitter. My go-to for quickly finding experts, podcasts, every industry, every hobby, space, and every human possible activity has podcasts. Lot of them do, and most podcasts eventually evolve into interview shows that invite the brightest and most exciting experts every week. You couldn't wish for a better list of candidates for your Nexus discovery. Whenever I look for experts in a new field or for new experts in the field that I already know. I check out the biggest podcasts and the space for bootstrap our stats, the indie hikers podcast or shows like startups for the rest of us. Anything Apple podcasts, Spotify, consider similar. Then I just scroll through those most recent episodes and then look for interesting guests. Usually read the show notes and time permitting, I listened to an episode or two. When there's a Twitter link in the show notes, you can bet that podcast guests want that we're learning to be in there. Click it and follow them. You can do this for a few minutes and you'll find dusts of experts in your field. Another place to look for is written interviews on popular news outlets in your industry. And usually there's a minimum notability requirements to be interviewed so those people can pre-select it for you as well. The same goes for speakers at conferences and podcasts 3D, but for conferences, go to the websites of the most popular conventions and conferences in your field and make a list of the attending speakers. Most of them will be on Twitter to, as the speaker community is quite established there. And make sure you go back a few years and you'll find long established experts there. Honestly, there are hundreds of different ways of finding experts on the Internet. They leave traces all over the place. They write books, they organize meet-ups, they run investment funds. They appear on TV and radio on Twitter spaces, clubhouse, look them up, find them on Twitter and then follow. You only need to follow a few dozen influences in every given field to start having this reliable stream of interesting conversations showing up, the more the merrier, of course, and as I mentioned earlier, the more you connect with experts, the easier you own journey to expertise will become. Because when you audition in front of an expert on experts audience, you also audition in front of the experts themselves, provided that you're genuine and providing meaningful and valuable support for their followers, they might even follow you back eventually. It's really, really useful to do this. All right, if you thought that this is already pretty time-saving way of finding interested people are interesting people to follow. Let me introduce you to a concept that speeds this up even more and that's recursion. If you don't know what that is, let me explain it real quick. It's a self-referential use such as a concept. There's a lot of us in math. Fibonacci sequence comes to mind, and certain programming language In languages use it a lot too. This is old joke about recursion. To understand recursion, you must first understand recursion. That's not dive too deep into this in the context of Twitter audience building. What I mean by recursive following is the following loop. You find someone interesting. You follow them, and then you check out who they are following and who follows them. From these two groups. You select a few and you follow them. Now you check out who they are following and followed by. Then you dive into those groups. Again. This is a great way to explore a community one person at a time, while making sure that everyone who follow is still connected to each other in some way. And you eventually end up going in circles and the same people showing up again and again, that's a good time to stop. No need to do this for more than half an hour or so. But this process will quickly allow you to see the lay of the land. Very connected map of accounts that all have a lot of followers and participate in plenty of conversations and that's a good foundation. Now let me share a way of speeding this up even further. And that's Twitter lists. They are gold mines. They are severely under used by most Twitter users. For our community exploration purposes. They are like pouring fuel on a fire. Once you know how to leverage Twitter lists, you're going to fly. Here's how Twitter lists work. Every Twitter account can have any number of public and private lists of other accounts. And every Twitter accounts can also be part of any number of lists. Any public list can be seen by anyone. And if you follow our list and access, if you were following every account on that list, that means that if you can find an expert, you can find the lists they curated and the lists that are part of either they've curated something useful for you or they are part of something someone else has curated for you. When, when. Now most lists were created around a certain topic. And that is where the magic happens. And look at this list by Peter levels, very popular in the hacker. This list is incredibly specific. It's about people who build in public without all the noise. And Peter maintains this list in a fairly effective way. If you're ever asked to be on the list, you'll never make it on the list. And PDA cleans up this list every month. It always will contain only the most active builders. You can see that the list has a 161 members and it's followed by over 3 thousand people. Both of these numbers are clickable. This means that from this one list to get 160 prevented builders and public for free. And you also get a list of 3 thousand people who want to follow these builders. Also for free. I recommend the double follow approach here. Follow the whole list. When you find that by clicking the Follow button and after that, go through the timeline under the list and select the accounts who stand out and continue your recursive following loop. From there. Let me show you where to find Twitter lists. Let's go to Peter's profile on Twitter. Click the three dots under his profile banner, and select View lists. Now you'll see the lists that Peter has curated, including the one we just saw. You can explore these lists from here, maybe open each in a new tab. Now click the three dots in the top right and select lists. They're on. Depending on the size of the accounts iam looking at, there might be a few dozen to a few thousand lists here. This will be a hit or miss kind of research, but you will eventually find amazing lists in there. It's going to take some time, scroll around and check out a few lists. Again, new tabs. If the list has a picture instead of the default image, that's often an indicator that the person who made it put above average effort into it. So good sign. Here we are. Lists are incredibly useful to quickly explore space. If you find the Nexus list and list of the most exciting experts in the space, take the time to go through the membranous and look at every single account. These people might be exactly what you're looking for, for your audience additions. So it really pays to follow them. In fact, let's do this right now. Let's go through a follow gathering exercise. Let's build a followership. No matter how many people you already follow at this point, I want you to go to Twitter and consciously find ten new highly active, influential accounts. To make this a conscious exercise, I recommend writing down the Twitter handle of everyone you follow and connecting them with arrows like a graph. Visualizing this network between people is a good way of understanding how word of mouth travels and how they're related, how important nexus accounts are. Really the core of your audience building efforts. Take ten or 15 minutes to do this. You don't have to stop at ten people either. If you're having fun exploring the space, just keep going. Pause the video now to go on your follower hunt. Enjoy. Back yet the result of these three things. Next as discovery, recursive following enlist expansion is that you are now following an amazing group of high activity accounts. Now, you need to set up a way of learning about new conversations as soon as possible, even if you follow that. So people setting up notifications on Twitter will help with this. Here is how to turn on notifications. You go to the profile of the account and click the little bell icon next to the Follow button that said, anything this account does will now show up in your notifications tab and you can react to it. Let's look into a few other ways to see what's happening in your Twitter community. I use a tool called TweetDeck to get insights into what's going on. If you have a Twitter account, you have access to tweet, TweetDeck for free toward are acquired that at some point in the past, Here's my setup. On the left, I have a column that updates whenever someone mentioned is one of my books. Then a column that updates when I mentioned. The next column catches all tweets that include the words built in public. Because I'm interested in that. I used that to discover new builders who are not yet on any list that I follow. The four columns on the right are all Twitter lists, high-impact tweets. That's a private list that I use to filter people, people who I want to read every tweet from. The bootstrap list is a public list that I add new follow founders to that I admire. And finally, I follow KP's and Peter's lists. They keep adding great people. I want to see their work as soon as possible. Glance at TweetDeck gives me more than enough insight into what's going on right now. I sometimes keep his browser tab open for hours, just watching what's happening in real-time. While I watch Netflix or play a game or something, it's really nice and opportunity. It's a great tool for community observation. That's something that you'd be doing quite a bit. You'll find the link to, to attack and all the other tools that I suggested in this course, the course materials as well. Finally, manually checking what's going on in your Twitter feed is a good idea every now and then to the twitter algorithm is pretty good at surfacing highly engaged conversations to you. If you follow enough of the right people. And that's why we're starting by following so many influential accounts were giving Twitter a chance to show us to content we want to engage with, because that's the goal of the algorithm that Twitter is running. I want to leave you with a warning here though. Don't turn into a follower gathering robot. It's not a chore, it's an active discovery process. Your real human beings seeking connection with other real human beings. So don't let this degree of separation that Twitter is distract you from this fact. We all looking for honest and genuine relationships. So don't treat people like mere statistics. You don't get a 1000 followers. You attract one unique person, one follow-up, one hundred, ten hundred times. Try to learn as much as you can before you follow a person or a group of people and there'll be afraid to unfollow them. They turn out to be someone you don't want to connect to. That is perfectly fine. Now that you have interesting conversations pop up, what should you contribute? Any tweet you send out for your audience? Addition should be one or more of these four things. Expand, focus, syndicate, or invite. These four options are essentially zooming in and zooming out along two axes. The level of detail you're looking at and the exposure of the conversation. You can either focus on the detail in particular people to join, or you can expand the scope of the topic and expose it to a larger audience or anywhere in-between. Really. Let's talk about expansion Tweets first. Here you assume out of a specific issue and bring in some broader insight. You can also transfer information from another field or prospective into the conversation. This is most easily done with a perspective shift. In the original tweet here, check butcher, and an experienced trader in the digital content realm talks about iteration. Dominic asks about expanding this conversation scope. Then Elliot obliges both introducing an interesting concept and even referencing a few sources. Just asking this little question, cost of conversation to expand. And now it contains resources and new interesting accounts for everyone who's reading the streets. Super valuable addition. And it was just seven words. That's the power of a question. Now, let's focus. Focus street zooms into an issue even more. You get into the nitty-gritty finding the underlying motivations and concepts in China, light and hidden details. Follow-up questions allow for this to happen specifically, they have a high chance of triggering a direct interaction with the original author. And that often leads to more exposure to their audience for you as someone worth answering to. Like in this example, the original author replies to Ramsay says request for elaboration on a definition of what makes authors call themselves an author. This engagement even triggers other audience members to join in. It's a great way to shine a light on a particularly particular subtopic. And it also shows that Ramsey has stalled about what Carol was talking about and asked a question worth answering, making him an interesting person to follow. Now that we're assuming in and out on content, let's think about people and exposure. This syndication mean you expose the conversation to a bigger audience. This increases the amount of learning that anyone interested in the subject can experience. You can do this by either retweeting or body of quote tweeting the original tweet y co treat. Well, you got to take your own spin on the topic, adding something of value, hopefully, while still enjoying the engagement of the original tweets. And additionally, let's kind of technical. Twitter will show you your own engagement metrics on the street. While they don't show that for simple retreats. Well, this isn't too important. It's nice to see how many people saw your quote tweet then chose to interact with it. It's just a nice little useful thing. Exposing someone else's content to your growing on, growing audience won't go unnoticed, particularly when it results in someone else jumping in and helping out. Whenever you don't have anything meaningful to contribute, but still want to be supportive, start sharing. That's a nice way of syndication. Finally, let's talk about invite tweets. The idea here is to expose specific experts to this conversation. Bringing in the expertise needed to solve a problem. Now that will increase the quality of a conversation significantly. This is targeted syndication. You make sure that a particular person gets to this conversation and engage. I do this whenever I know that the only thing standing between a problem and its solution is for a particular expert to chime in to show up and participate. The benefit of the exercise we did earlier is that you have this huge list of experts that you already follow. Now you can mention them specifically because you know what they are about and that they can help with this particular conversation. Inviting people to a particular conversation creates connection. In a few ways. The original author benefits from learning about another expert in the field. They may not know. Your additional audience learns that you are a person who enjoys building and connecting, building relationships and connecting people. The expert you bring recognizes us, someone who considers them reputable and you get to enjoy the resulting conversation. That's a win-win, win-win. For wins. That's all there is to writing an effective engagement rates, expand, focus syndicates, or invite. As long as you do at least one of these things, your engagement will add value to this conversation. And your additional audience will notice, always be there and always be appreciative to no matter if you agree or at further information and present a different opinion, you are acting under public scrutiny. People are seeing you for the first time. Make it clear that you're operating from a compassionate place, be kind. In any case, the main point is to respond to the original message with some form of value. It doesn't have to be the world's smartest answer, but it has to contribute to the overall solution of a problem. That's what people see. The first thing they see about you. There are many ways to mess up your first contact with a person. Let's talk about bad engagement and how to avoid it. Just imagine you meet an interesting person at a conference in real life. How would you approach them there? Would you only talk about yourself? Or would you ask them about what they do, showing that you're interested in their life. Would you be kind to them? Would you start shouting at the slightest sign of this agreement? Well, the same goes for Twitter relationships. I know that you might consider some of these things to be part of your personality. Many people liked to think they're fun in a sarcastic way or they're brash but an, a confidence sense. But these things often don't translate well to the written medium. And Twitter is a written medium. If that's the case for you, you have two options. Either you tone it down for awhile or you lean into it and make it part of your brand. Some people, very few people thrive on being sarcastic at all times towards everyone they encounter. Go for it if you must. But note that this will severely limit the kinds of people who will want to hang out with you. If you want to build an audience professionally, you might want to avoid being confrontational. A professional demeanor will result in a professional relationship. So here are a few things to scare off potential followers. And what you can do instead, just don't be selfish, biggest thing. Instead, contribute selflessly and allow for people to see that in a way that is selfish, but only as far as old charity work is selfish, you feel good for helping someone. And people notice some really a problem. You just show up and be supportive. People will notice that I also want them. When I do this, I want them to feel like I talked to them for their sake, not to sell them something. Don't spam people. Even with something as innocent as a link to your few newsletter that you can drop these things eventually, but not when engage you when you first interaction. There are two kinds of messages you can send on Twitter. You can either give, you can ask, and selfish and spammy tweets are always asks, cut down on those and focus on you gives instead. Provide something valuable in a link or an opinion or perspective. Something that makes people consider that you have done something for them. Don't be aggressive most of the time. It's better to be kind than to be right. The first thing that someone reads from you as a 20 tweets counterargument to something that they said, they will likely consider you to be combative and aggressive. Not saying you should agree with everything that everybody says, but consider that you're trying to build a new relationship. What state of mind should they be in when the conversation is over? I prefer to have them enjoyed. The first conversation with me and rejecting their opinions, are dismissing their projects, are being cynical about the efforts, being very sarcastic. All of this will make you look like a jerk. And people don't follow jerks. 4. The What: Welcome to the third part of find. You're following the watt. In this lesson, we'll dive into the tangible items of your Twitter audience polling journey, the Tweets, your content, and how to build a personal brand in public. Now, building in public is a great way of connecting with your audience. And it's not hard, nor is it complicated. This lesson I'll talk about my experiences building in public for over two years now. What worked for me, what didn't, and how you can use building in public to build your own Twitter audience. And contrary to what you may have heard, building in public is not just about building a business in front of your audience. Anything that is based on making progress towards a somewhat definable goal. You can build that in public. Really anything goes, your journey, going from learner to expert is just as much compatible with building in public as it's building a software as a service business, you can write a book in public. And I did that with my second book. And you can build a law, Kevin in the woods in public while sharing progress updates every day, maybe even live stream at anything goes. So if building in public isn't just for businesses, what exactly is it about and how does it relate to Twitter? It boils down to sharing your journey in great detail, allowing for people to invest their attention to energy and a supportive you. The most basic terms that is all it is. You keep them hooked with an interesting journey and every day you share more, they grow more invested in your success. Humans are social creatures. When we see one of our peers showing signs of ambition, we take a closer look. Maybe we can benefit from it. Maybe we can help, but maybe we can grow by affiliation. Building in public is tapping into that human need with incredibly altruistic outcomes. Well, it's not purely selfless. You benefit from your audience in many ways. Either they help you, they buy from you, they share the word, they help you fix problems or even teach you valuable essence. But you do so much more. You teach the things you learned to an audience of first dozens and hundreds and thousands of people. By sharing your journey, the ups and downs you instruct at scale, your updates state were kindled a passion for entrepreneurship and other people. And they won't forget who gave them that initial push. Building in public is celebrating win-win situation at scale. It's empowerment through constant teaching. And it's incredibly easy and fun to do. Because people have been doing this for a long time. It's not new. First, it was just called blogging. Then there was a subreddit called entrepreneur right along. That one took off. In 2015 or so, Twitter started exploding with people sharing their journey. And if it's instead founders, creators, and every other kind of ambitious person has benefited from sharing their journey. In this lesson, I will share the opportunities, the risks and limitations, and the methods of building and public. I'll start with what you should be doing and what you should be sharing. Because nothing is better to understand building in public than watching the pros do it right in front of us. This is going to be example heavy. One thing that you'll see all of the successful builders do is to create and maintain a strong narrative overtime. They share progress updates and they show as much as they tell. Noah Bragg sets a great example with his journey. Let me show you some of his building public tweets over time. So you can see what a journey like this looks like. Here's no one looking back at a year's worth of building in public. He went the extra mile and created over 70 videos in addition to as written update. So many builders do that they invite investment people relate so much easier to human being if a toxin has a face. That earlier and the narrative for Noah starts here, he was just around a thousand followers at the time. No, I have been heavily involved in the community at that point already, SCO hosting a popular podcast and at the same time he was running and building his first software project, someone in public as well, sometimes shared a couple of updates and stuff then that got him to one hundred, ten hundred followers. But look at what happened right after this announcement. The expectation of a journey that's worth following is what caused this jump and followers more than doubling his follower account over a week? No, I had done the work to prove that he means it has been active on Twitter since 2014. And that paid off. And it doesn't just tell you what he's going to be doing. He's also sharing the why. No one wants to stay accountable. Building a project that can benefit from having an audience from day one. So what exactly is this product? And he shares this soon after, the next day. In fact, waiting a whole day to share his announcement is already a strategic choice. Building public is not dumping everything at once, but pacing yourself to establish a long-term narrative. Noah already creates a tiny amount of investment. People checked out his stuff yesterday and now they have a reason to check it out today. And now that he revealed what he's building, they have a reason to come back tomorrow. This is classic relationship building. And it's already here in his first tweets. I think no one knew exactly what he was doing at that point already. He didn't hold back with behind the scenes material either. That's the stuff that people just find captivating. Not only is he talking directly to his audience, he's also sharing his private nodes in a video. Nobody can resist that. And people did. They follow him for that stuff? No, I like any other creator and entrepreneur out there has committed to a very risky journey. Many projects like this fizzle out before they ever shown any sign of success. And he has to work on answering these questions. But instead of sitting at his desk and pondering them in private, he shares his thoughts and his fears with his audience of builders and creators. There are technical considerations and questions about his market. He talks about all of this in the video. And as a fellow entrepreneur, it is immediately makes me bond with him. Having gone through the same stuff myself lots of times in the past, I immediately invest my attention and I wouldn't know what to succeed because I know the pain of struggling with us. Then Noah just keeps sharing status updates. Summary, technical, like this one right here. This might be only interesting to a subset of his audience, but it shows the larger picture of the journey. It's a lot of work and Noah is not afraid of going into detail. Other updates are explicitly instructional here. Noah explains the thoughts and frameworks that went into creating the landing page for his product. Here, something really cool happens. One of his followers points out a little error and invites another expert. Together. They fixed the problem for noaa free, creating a better website copy right down to spot, right down Twitter. This is the explosive potential of building and public tight feedback cycles with other experts and your target audience. This happened within 25 minutes of nowhere tweeting out this video, it's incredible and it happens reliably. If you get people to invest into you in your journey, that's what they will do. They will help make it happen. Another thing nor does really well, is sharing his successes. This is a big part of the building public journey. When you hit a milestone, you share it. A single paying customer. That means the world to a new entrepreneur. And it's a major accomplishment that, that stage by sharing this know what taps into the social proof aspect of building in public. You can leverage the action of some parts of your audience to motivate the remaining people. And there's one way they will always stop people from scrolling over your tweets. And that is graphs that go up and to the right. Just kidding. Kind of metrics matter to any long-term project. And it doesn't just have to be revenue. I often share the metrics for my podcasts. For example, listen numbers, they go up, and that means progress just as revenue going up means to same for our business. Look at the engagement on this tweet by Noah. Didn't have to write much. A picture like this speaks a thousand words and it will be something that reliably makes people stop scrolling. In the grand scheme of things, a $100 of monthly recurring revenue that may not sound like much. But to a founder starting something new, It's one of the most important milestones at around that mark a low touch software as a service business, it starts paying for itself. And seasoned entrepreneurs notice. And Noah sharing this number signals to them that he knows it to his building a reputation as an expert entrepreneur at this very moment. He's just talking about a $100. He's also building a reputation for being a human being. You're not just building a business in public. You're creating opportunities for other people to forge a connection with you, to establish relationships. And showing the person behind the thoughts, behind the numbers, who you are and what you care about. That's a big part of building in public. To look at the book in the background here, a 100 ways to love your wife. How can you not like this guy? Any major life decision is also prime material for building in public. No, I was building potion as a side project for a long time and I truly appreciate that it allowed him to validate if there was enough demand and pulled from the market without risking his livelihood. On this particular project. Side project, usually a good idea. When he figured out that it was indeed viable. He chose to commit, and he made it a public statement. In the video, noah shared a full eight minutes of his thoughts about making this move. What is financial background is right at this point, and how to juggle the risk. And this is the kind of insider perspective that is both interesting and instructive because you don't often get to experience this and by people sharing that, you learn as somebody who follows Noah. And this is also a major milestone in an ongoing journey. Know what promises so much with just this one tweet, he's going to keep working on his project obviously full-time now. And it'd be working even harder, share more risk more, and commit more. It's a promise. It's all about creating this coherent narrative story that others would love to follow along. That story comes with promises and with claims. Here's an example tweet of how Noah establishes a little bit of backstory within his ongoing built at public story. He. Also adds to his credibility as successful founder with this one. In the fat that goes with this tweet, he shares the whole story of his small but still impressive acquisition. All of this happened within five hours and that makes it super interesting and super special story. The photo itself is just nine tweets, but they do pack a punch. The tweets on the left is where it starts. No, I just offers his business for sale and a tweet on the right. It's the final sale. Every tweet in-between, it's tension and most importantly, visual proof of Noah success. He shares conversations with his acquirer in the DM, which he cleared with them before, obviously, and that is incredibly attractive. Barely anyone ever gets to have these conversations. Who sells their business? Few people and watching someone else have those conversations and succeed in selling. Sign me up. The level of transparency that noaa shows here is what attracts people. He discloses to price the conversations, his thoughts and everything is under table. That is one of the main parts of building public that people are always afraid of. What if I overshare, but if people use it against me, I think these are valid concerns and we will talk about risk and limitations of building in public. In this lesson, I will share risk minimization strategies that will help you overcome this fear and doubt so you can actually get started. But whereas risk, there's always opportunity. And here's an example of what regularly happens for noaa because he's building in public. He gets a shout out from the user right on Twitter in the middle of their community. This is what elegans word of mouth marketing really looks like when your customers do it for you and with you. Thanks as customer. And that person reciprocates by celebrating the tool that allowed him to build his personal website that has amazing marketing. And it happens right there and public. Here's another one. This is consequences of building in public. People do your marketing for you. The best part about it is that they speak the perfect language, their own. Who knows better with resonates with your customers then your customers themselves, and how to phrase it. They can definitely do that. While marketing is a great reason to have this direct communication channel to your customers, there's maybe even more important opportunity here. That is, direct customer feedback loop. Noah asks if he should have a public roadmap, and he's rewarded with a dozen of in-depth replies arguing for or against it. He regularly the dust and even with feature ideas as well. A big part of building public is just testing the waters. Either by doing it or by asking about it. You're coming out of it with two great consequences. You get answers to your questions and your audience gets to be involved in your project, turning it into their project investment. That's why building in public works so well for entrepreneurs and creators. It creates this consistent stream of little investment opportunities for an ever-growing audience of peers, customers, and anybody else. Let's take a closer look of the different kinds of mini investment opportunities and how we can trigger them on Twitter. How can we tweet and built in public? For each of these message types, we'll look at great examples that work and why they work. In the course materials, you will find many templates to create your own unique versions from your own tweets. And at this point, I can only recommend to start bookmarking good building public treats that you find on Twitter or better yet competent URL into a notion document and just keep track of all the great content and create a swipe file to be inspired by. If you ever run dry, you don't know what to say. And even all the templates that come with this course don't help look at what other founders did and do what all great artists do. Steel get inspired. Sorry, for now, let's take a closer look at each of these kinds of tweets. Let's start with progress updates might be the easiest kind of messaging for Builder. As you really just need to look at what happens on your journey and then turn that into a tweet. That can be anything. Having shipped new product features, hitting a new customer number milestone or a particular metric, hitting a new threshold that you never reached before, anything really. As long as it's an update, if it's a number, it'll be easy to share. Just make sure that it's relatable in some way to your audience. Not just a random number, but the number that they understand and better than just numbers is to connect them to an event. If you want to report your monthly revenue figures, take a screenshot of someone subscribing to your product, anonymized, of course, and then add it to your progress update. Visuals that show where you're coming from are particularly interesting because people want to see the narrative, the update, where is this coming from? Where is it going? We already had an example of metrics growing up into the right, but here's another one. This is Matt sharing his MRR graph without it being a self-absorbed celebration. He's very clear that while it's going up, it's not perfect. And he's working on improving as numbers. And every founder will eventually reach this frustrating point where growth exists but underwhelming and sharing. This invites two kinds of support your fellow found as my jump in and help as to the format, since many of those surprise are found us offering their support ideas and feedback. And mats still gets to show his potential customers on Twitter that his business is being adopted more and more. You can tell it's really not a milestone posts but emit progress reflection format. This creates accountability and visibility for his followers. It's a glimpse inside the mind of an entrepreneur and what keeps them up at night. It's instructive and interesting. This treat by old who paints a similar story. They experienced a lot of churn over the first few months of the startup's life and they did something about it. On the day that tweet was posted, they had onboarded this 700th customer, which is a great accomplishment and that is a milestone. And its signals, confidence and willingness to struggle through hard times like audience is now experiencing. And that's what progress updates are best at. Show that you are relentless and serious about your business. You don't have to share this updates every day. Once a week is fine. Maybe once a month, maybe not enough, but, you know, just be regular with it. The important thing is that your audience should always feel like you are constantly working on improving whatever you're building. If your progress is consistent, so should be you're sharing, your audience will understand those two to be the same thing because in their perception, that's all they get to know and that's inferred from there. Some milestones can be quite bitter, sweet. Like Damon here sharing that he's now having long conversations for this client so much that he has to start paying for Zoom. It's a great problem to have for an entrepreneur to be so successful that they have to provide better tools. I think this is a tongue-in-cheek, humble brag, but be careful with not doing too many of these as people can quickly figure out a pattern if you repeatedly do it. But I believe daemon that is genuinely has been a surprise to him and I loved that he shared that accomplishment with this audience immediately. You could call this an upgrades. Updates. When you have to improve your tools to handle your demand. Think is signaling that you're doing great. But you're also showing that you're human being who didn't expect certain things and that's okay. Sharing your feature update is also something you can do is one particular kind of progress update, most often used by farmers to run software businesses. But the idea is quite general and you don't need a software business to run as if you have created something that has improved in any meaningful way, shared that particular improvement. Shareholder used to be what you change. Why you did that? What it looks like now, no matter if that's the software product or piece of art, any improvement is worth sharing. And it will involve people in the journey of that particular thing. Now let's look into a few templates for this. Remember that any visual you can find your hammer home. The point you're making will benefit the engagement you get on your tweets. You can find the time. Take the video to Twitter. Videos have to be less than two minutes and ten seconds. For some reason, keep it short, keep it on topic and consider you are talking to one person and not your audience. Nobody likes to be considered an audience member. Talking to them directly is much better because the person wants to feel like they are standing right in front of you when you talk to them, you want to feel that right? There you go. But let's get to the tweet. That will be more important because it's the meat of your message when it comes to what people find on their feet. Don't just give an update. The update is the hook, but the rest of your message is the content that makes people excited about your journey. Share things you did to get to this point. If you don't know why you reached a particular milestone, just say that there's humidity in admitting ignorance. Honesty goes a very long way here. Don't embellish numbers. If you only grew by 2% this month, That's awesome. You grew. Most companies don't even get started. Context is everything and small wins are important too. And of course, you should show you big wins to make it a habit of sharing the small ones and celebrating them just the same. Because this creates a consistently progressive narrative. And that causes buy-in from your audience much more than if you only share the big things every few months, the consistency. The first template therefore is the small wind. And it goes like something good happens for and you put your business name here today. I found out that and put your small when they're here's what led to this. And after that, add some contextual information on your wind. This is a solid template to go back to whenever you have something small to share. If it's something bigger, go for the second template which introduces a consequence. Today, I reached Milestone. It happened because reason, Here's what that means for my business. And this one includes past, present, and future. It's a perfect snapshot for your building public journey. If you have any metrics you want to share, make sure you give contexts. We finally reached metric like a 100 customers. This is some percentage increase from last week a month. Here's what happened to make this possible and then context for this one. Find some way of visualizing the number. If you have a dashboard, share screenshots. Graphs are always great. But numbers on the dashboard will do to people trust screenshots of real systems. If you want to build an authentic brand, just be authentic and share what's there. There are, of course, many ways to share progress. These don't have to be concrete events are related to metrics that you already track. Anything good or bad that happens in end to your business is going to be interesting. Let's talk about another kind of message that makes these things accessible, but in a slightly different way. Where status updates are about the progress of your project. Sharing your challenges is about you, the person behind the wheel. People aren't really interested in tweets that say everything's fine, move along. They know that life isn't that easy. And you can play into that, share what didn't work and be transparent about your feelings and thoughts about this. Being vulnerable in public. That's pretty new thing. For the longest time, the common advice was to only ever admit success. And then we'll talk about your failures. But this time is over. Only talking about the good stuff. It has turned the marketing world into a house of lies. If you want people to trust you, you will need to show them not so good things as well. If your ego can deal with that little bit of discomfort, you will end up creating incredible opportunities for yourself and your business efforts because trust happens. First off, by showing that things don't always work out, you shatter this perception that you're just another brand trying to scam people out of their money. Anyone who try and cheat their audience, they wouldn't show any sign of success. Your humidity is a strong signal for trustworthiness. And when people trust you, they want to see you succeed. Sharing a challenges invites people to help you and support you through them. I've seen this time and time again, a founder shares a struggle and someone seemingly out of nowhere joins the conversation and brings about the unexpected solution to the problem. If you never share your challenges, how are these people supposed to find you and help you? Let's look into how this is best done. Whenever you share a challenge focused on sharing the what and the why. The what is the hook and the y is the learning opportunity for your followers can be anything. You made a mistake when writing a cold email and that resulted in a super annoyed prospect or you run a Facebook ad experiment and spend $500 in one night because you didn't set a limit. Your latest software deployment, deleted the whole production database because you didn't test it before you push it to the server. It doesn't matter what it is. The formula is simple. Something happened because something else wasn't right. Mentioned both. Here's Richard Cash sharing a Google Ads experiment that went nowhere. He shares some context in a reply to the tweet as well about what they're planning to do in the future amount is kind of stuff. As one of his followers, I eat these things up. I don't need to spend $15 thousand and adds to see 0 revenue. I can learn from this right away. It's very helpful. His Brian sharing some insight into his chaotic approach to marketing and conversion tracking for his startup. In the thread, he goes into detail about the underlying issues and how he plans to fix it. Here's an update. Just five days later. This creates such a powerful narrative. He saw a problem owned after it's in public, set things in motion, and now is seeing positive results. And he gets to celebrate it in public to the journey from challenge to success is so exciting to watch. This will be magnetic for you to find followers. And he has no Eigen because he's a great example for everything building public. He leads with making a mistake. It's clear that this will be interesting. It's a good hook. He then dives into what happened and quickly within two tweets, gets to the incredibly dangerous outcome. Google marketing is whole email domain as spam. This is a warning for every other founder and that is what drew me to me to the tweet when he posted it originally, it was very exciting to read about this because it's quite dangerous. And here's something magical about this particular kind of tweet. People remember it. I asked on Twitter for great examples of mistake tweets and people were called Noah sharing the story over half a year later. Is mindshare. This is how you make people remember you by being humbled, admitting mistakes, and sharing the lessons learned. Let's translate this into a few templates. The failed experiment template is great whenever something turned out differently than you thought. Share your assumptions, your experience, and your reasoning. Pretty much like this. I recently tried to experiment with the subject, experiment. It didn't work out the way I thought it would. And then what happened instead, my takeaway is that and then reasons for failure. This one is super useful because it allows other founders to learn from your mistakes without making them themselves. And even if they run into this problem themselves in the future, they know now what to expect is one, It's just one of the best teaching moments you can have because you have the data. People will ask questions in there applies and you can answer them right there and then building relationships. The next template I recommend is the mistake. Just own up to your failures by making the public. It's a great window into your life as an entrepreneur. For your audience, they get to see the real you and how you deal with those states when stuff just isn't working out. So be up front about it. I made a mistake. I mistaken reactivity because the cars reasons for mistake. Here are a few thoughts on how I could do this next time and then corrections. This template again uses past, present, and future to establish a small part of an ongoing narrative. And this is the Trust Builder. One message at a time. Same goes for the mix-up, which is just a variation of the mistake. Can't believe I mix these up instead of the right thing. I did the wrong thing. It didn't go unnoticed. Consequences. Here you introduce what should have happened, your optimal alternate reality. This invites great discussions about both realities. Why did you want to go for the other thing in the first place? How can you make sure you won't make the same mistake? Again, it just invites engagement. Beyond these three messages, take note of everything that didn't go the way you want it. Technical problems, all. Talk about them. Can't find the right co-founder. Just tell your audience, discuss it, open up. You'd be surprised what just talking about your problems can do when an ego audience is listening. And make sure you follow up when things are turning around. It's a great way to get people to cheer for you twice. Once for owning up to the mistake, then for fixing it. That's it for sharing, uh, challenges. This might be the hardest kind of content you put out there that professor will rarely happen. You'll make plenty of mistakes. But because owning up to them in public takes courage. We'll talk about the risks of oversharing in a bit. Generally, if there's something to learn for your audience, I just must have the courage to share it. If I was here, it will make you stand out from all those good things only brands immediately. And it will humanize you like a person. But obviously not everything has to be gloom and doom for you to show yourself in your authentic self and probably your journey will be full of ups and downs and sharing both will do the trick. So here's something that will resonate extremely well with your audience. Sharing what worked for you and what you think you'll learn from it. Can never really know, but for your bill in public purposes, you can take any learning big or small and use it as content. No matter if you had a breakthrough in your pricing and you have w revenue in two days, or you just figured out how to write a little script that turns a text file into a PDF. Anything goes here. Your audience is made up of individuals and everyone is at a different point of their journey. What you learned today could be something they already know, but more likely, it could be something they never thought they didn't know. Share freely and help people become aware of how they can improve themselves and their projects. Just be kind and help. If you run experiments, share them, share your decisions to run this experiment. And maybe even why you didn't choose any alternative set of parameters in the background of it, the Otero expectations, the best-case, worst-case scenarios, and then talk about what actually happens when you ran it. Or learning stone always come from controlled experiments. Sometimes. Well, I guess even my, most of my learnings happen by accident. We discovered something by chance and a new perspective opens up right in front of us. And this is the true luxury of entrepreneurship. We get to create knowledge. Instead of just being taught knowledge that others already possess. We have the privilege of inventing new ways of solving problems. I think that gives us the responsibility of sharing it to that goes for anything that helped us better understand things. And I regularly share the books, I read the articles, two blocks and the resources that I couldn't sue. Podcasts, videos, tutorials, courses. All of this is interesting for your audience. This particular kind of content is really a teaching activity. I believe this is central to effective building in public. Here is why. There is this line in a song, Son of Man by Phil Collins from Tarzan soundtrack. And it goes in learning, you will teach, and in teaching you will learn. I always loved deadline and a song long before I started building in public. But it's only now that I fully understand that it makes sense to me. Whenever you learn something, you can teach it so that others can learn. And when they learn, they might find something to teach you. Now that you can learn. This is the learned teach cycle and it's the consequence of community learning. It creates these incredibly tight feedback cycles that consistently result in win-win situations. People teaching each other and learn teach cycle is an asynchronous, an ongoing event. Every day, someone in the community will learn something new, some will share it, and it's perpetual teaching. You can amplify this loop by doing two things. Make sure you always share your own learnings. Because small and secondly, always amplify those shared by others. That's empowerment right there. Someone learns something, shares it, and you retweet it to your audience, you, and the original offer gets some kind of credibility and everyone gets to learn. That's the win-win that I'm talking about. That's why I'm on Twitter. Example time. The founders of reform share the results of an experiment they ran regarding their logo on embedded forms, leaving it there and taking it off. This is a common growth tactic, putting it over there and does decision they made is very insightful for founders in the audience who may have thought about doing something similar for their own businesses, for their own products. Extremely helpful. Here's Josh Pickford, talking about a new content management system. They're trying out. They just tried it out today. Josh being so excited for this new system, whatever, it just costs more people and founders to check it out. And somebody even find exactly what they need for their own businesses. This is to treat that can only create winners. Here is fed about brennan Dunn's latest newsletter referral experiment. In the Fed itself, he dives into the plan and what choices he made for the new version. And he shares his doubts and challenges with general outlook and the technical implementation. I don't know about you, but these kinds of tweets just excite me. As a founder peer, I want to jump right in and share my thoughts we've been in since this audience for right messages other founders, and he has over 15 thousand of them following him at this point. This will resonate with a lot of his followers to inviting engagement and people building relationships. Another experiment, this time by Nick, pricing experiments, no matter if they're for your business, for your products, your services, they are always gonna be interesting to us, somewhat entrepreneurial audience, because money is how we measure value. More often than not, people are drawn to anything that has to do with it. Revenue metrics, price experiments, discounts, earnings. Anything with money is interesting. Just don't talk exclusively about it that is boring. Finally, resource. Madison shares a screenshot of a comprehensive guide to computer science. There's no affiliate link there. She didn't write it and there's no self-interested in this is just a great chair for people who want to get into computer science. And as a plus, if there are more coders out there, they can become part of her audience. I guess that's the selfish angle here and that's quite weak. This is a win-win for everybody involved. So let's turn this into a few temporary. So if you run an experiment shared like this we experimented with, then you spell out your experiment. It turned out that Then you add a couple of consequences because of and who you put the reasons you think that went into it. Here, more details about the whole thing. Then just add a few details. Maybe share screenshot or two best when you have before and after pictures, always good. And your experiment will teach hundreds, if not thousands of people. Experimenting in public is a great way to build trust with the audience. Because you're honest, you're upfront about the fact that you're trying to figure things out. And that just makes you both sound honest and serious about your work. I do don't mind generously sharing the outcomes. You're kind and helping your community. The same goes for accidental learnings. You can share them like this. Today, I experienced the accidental event and learn something new. It appears that, and here you elaborate on your new learning. Here's why that matters. Then you follow this through a few insights that will help your audience understand better 5. What if?: One of the benefits of being a teacher is being able to answer questions you asked. And I will answer the best I can. These questions will be all over the place, just like the reality of things is complicated and hard to structure. I recommend that you pay close attention to all those questions because I pick them out of hundreds on purpose. Let's get started. What if someone unfollow is here? Here's something I learned. People unfollowing you is perfectly fine. It's actually something to look forward to. Don't believe me. Here's why I'm right now. I get somewhere between a hundred and fifty and two hundred new followers everyday. I also have somewhere between 2040 people unfollow me every day. We'll probably be hard to believe, but I'm more excited about the unfollow those then about the new followers. And here's why every person that unfollowed me has found the reason for not wanting to see me or my content on their feed. Either they've learned all they want it, where they followed me expecting something else. Maybe they're leaving Twitter. Maybe they are shifting into a new career. Whatever the reason. They have self-selected out of my following. And that is wonderful because mathematically, each person unfollowing me makes the remaining followers more likely to really appreciate my work. Even if I were to have more people unfollow me than I got new followers. I'd still appreciate it. I focused audience is a good audience and people unfollowing you. It makes it more focused. It's the same. When someone blocks here, they have a reason and you only play a minor part in it most of the time. Maybe they don't like your position on something. Maybe they are competitors. And want to stop, see you seeing from what they are talking about or something like that, whatever the reason is, accept it and move on. If you build a brand that will be liked by everybody, you don't have defined brand. Of course, you can build a kind of generous reputation, But even then, people will find reasons to block you. It's happening to me too. And I stopped carrying accepted and I keep doing what I'm doing. Consider that every moment you spend thinking about someone who doesn't want to engage with you is a missed opportunity to actually engage with them. Many, many more people who chose to engage with you, to follow you. They are your audience. So if someone blocks, you, just focus on everyone else who didn't. What should you want to go viral? I asked a happy, happy moment. One of the most important things for you to remember when one of your tweets goes viral is that this happened because meaningful content was combined with strong amplification by your existing audience. Your followers were the catalyst that made this content flying. Whatever you do, don't ignore that. They trusted you enough to reach video content. They want to associate with you so far that they shared your stuff with their audience. Which means that even though you might be very enticed to plug your business or your product, at this point, you might need to stop thinking about yourself and think about the people who are reading your tweet instead, because there really are only two groups of readers, those who already follow you and those who meet you for the very first time, your existing followers already know about your products. No need to tell them. And your new prospects probably don't want to hear, they totally should buy right now. This is your first touch point. Don't ruin it by pushing something right in front of their faces. Instead, stay calm and engaged self-esteem at something valuable to each reply. Thank people for the retweets and comments. Be kind and show your best self. Some of those prospects will follow you and they will in due time be interested in your products, no need to push it. This is a great opportunity for relationships to start. Don't waste it for the hollow promise of some fast cache. That's short-term thinking. Another kind of short-term thinking is fighting with people on the Internet. Sometimes someone says something mean or flat-out wrong, and you have this incredibly arch to correct them. Don't bite back the snappy reply and consider that you are using twitter professionally and in public. People will be watching and they will judge you for how you react. When someone yells at you on the Internet, you have three options. Ignore, respond, or remove. I personally choose to ignore these things I can live with someone disagreed with me or voicing their negative opinion in an obnoxious way. Whatever. I always go about it like this. If everyone liked my work and my work would be both for everyone and for no one. It wouldn't have an etch review generic. And since I'm trying to serve a well-defined niche audience, I want to be as clear and specific as possible. That means some people won't get it. I've learned that I can't control how other people think. I stopped caring. When they think negative, negative comments will happen. You choose how to engage with them. Try not to have fights on the Internet. You won't ever benefit from having an argument. All people see as you being defensive, no matter if you're right or wrong, instead, thank people for their comment. And this can be very disarming. They say, Hey, you suck. And you say, Thanks, How can I help you? And you'll turn us into an engagement opportunity. Maybe not for those people but for others. Most of the time, people were actually apologize later down the road. One exemption exists. And if the communists inflammatory or racist or sexist or in any other way over the line, delete the comment, hided, reported, block the person, do whatever it takes to get it away from your content. And all of the cases, ignore it. Sub worth your time and your real followers are waiting to engage with you in a good and constructive way. So focused on them. What if you ask a question to your followers and nobody responds? What if you tweet get little to no engagement? Tweeting into the void is a real problem and it has a solution. Joining ongoing conversations instead of trying to start them. Particularly when you have a few followers, only, his standalone tweets often won't get any engagement at all. That's why I recommend finding ongoing conversations. That's easiest by following the influential conversation started AS in your field and replying to them. You can ask your questions there to just contextualize them in the ongoing conversation. The reality is that anything you do just in front of your own small audience won't get much engagement at all until your audiences sizable enough, few thousand people may be accepting that in the beginning, you just need to focus on engagement instead of the content. What if people think I'm weird? Well, first off, I think that's actually a good thing. You'll weirdness is part of you. And for better or worse, I believe you're doing your audience as service. By not hiding who you truly are. Obviously, you shouldn't build your whole personal brand by being weird. But for consistency, say keep the quirky stuff, personal stuff to 20% of your public messaging and focused the remaining 80% of stuff. Things that are meaningful to your audience. And you've written this log matter as much, but do understand that you won't be able to please everyone. If someone thinks a weird let him just a loss for them for judging you. Always remember that everyone else is not thinking this. The people who don't complain about you, they like you, they follow you for who you are and what you have to say. Those are the people who should listen to it and not the ones who don't care about you. Think it's a common theme with all kinds of negative stuff. Focus on the part of your audience that supports and encourages you. Ignore the part that doesn't there. Find the door soon enough. What if people say you're not an expert? Well, we're all on a journey. Just because you're not finished yet, doesn't mean that you won't get there. I recommend re-framing this comment from you're not an expert to you're not an expert yet. It makes a big difference and it allows you to see that your journey is really just a series of gradual improvements step-by-step from novice to expertise. Consider this. Most experts don't consider themselves full experts. But that didn't stop them from getting to the point where they are right now. Do you know that they don't know many things. There focuses on improving, not in claiming to be experts. That should be your focus to ignore people's need to put you in a box, instead, bursts out of the box and probably be a novice working to become an expert step-by-step. I promise that you'll find the right people to support and empower you along this journey. If you act like this, what if I can't talk about other topics once I have an audience? One of the best ways to build an audience is to focus on one particular issue and relentlessly make your content that by PET issue. But if you never switch it up, you'll sound inauthentic to no human being. Only ever. That's one thing. We all have many talents and interests. So why should we limit ourselves to just one all the time? Hasn't many other situations. 8020 rule, the bulk of your content should be about your professional field of interest. After all, we're all trying to use professionally. If you just wanted to be casual, go ahead and talk about whatever you want. But for professional and strategic approach, you need to be selective. Only occasionally talk about other things and make sure they're not completely off-topic. Don't indulge in controversial or divisive topics. Again, this is a professional audience you're building. Share something personal, something that enhances people's understanding of who you are. But mostly focused on a topic that your niche audience expects you to talk about. What if there isn't a real audience for my topics on Twitter? It's very unlikely that there's no audience for your topics on Twitter. There are millions of people talking about millions of things there. But here's a good test to run before you get started. Try finding and following five influencers accounts with a few thousand followers to talk about your topic. You just try to search with a few specific keywords from your topic scope. And if you can't find them, you may have found a topic that has no real audience, but I bet you'll find more than five. You might find hundreds of these kinds of accounts talking about your topics. There will be an audience around each of these accounts, follow those influencers, get involved with their followers and build your own following from there, you will find that audience. You could definitely have too many followers to, particularly if you have too many of the wrong kind of followers. There are plenty of ways for you to cultivate a healthy following. The first one is preemptive. The moment you notice that a certain action brings in the wrong kind of people like posting incendiary comments are for shock value. Stopped doing it. If you run giveaways and they attract people who only want free stuff but don't care about you stopped doing giveaways if you hilarious Web three names are only attracting **** coin enthusiasts. But you don't want them in your audience. Don't make those memes. But if you already have these people following, you go through them one-by-one and used photos. Remove this follower feature from the three little dots on their profile. If you don't want to. Ever have them follow you again, you can also block them. Finally, if you're overwhelmed and constantly attracting the wrong people, pivot into another topic where people are kinder and more attuned to your way of thinking. Generally, this works best when you overlap your original topic with a more human-centered topic, from developer to community building developer, or from marketing to small business relationship based marketing. Move towards human connection. There will also shift the audience that you will attract for the better. We're good question, what if success here is absolutely random? I don't think it is. All the evidence points to the fact that consistency is the key to eventual success. But there are random components. Viral tweets being retweeted by large accounts and meeting the right people at the right time. And you know how you can make these more likely to happen by showing up every day. He opportunities surface will increase with every piece of evidence of your ambition that you leave in the public sphere, it's all based on the fundamental trust and reciprocity. You will have to give a lot before you receive, but you will receive eventually. As long as you keep giving selflessly, surround yourself with people who have a similar mindset and it turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy. It will take time, though. Many successful creators spent several months with their slowly growing audience before they have a breakthrough moment. This is a long-term investment and it will take persistence and consistency if it helps, think of it like this. There are many people on this journey and some choose to give up at this point. If you're not one of them, you'd be the one that will be still standing when everyone else's quit. That in essence is the success of almost everyone on Twitter. They just didn't quit when he could have. What if I put in tons of effort and keep shouting in the dark? When it feels like you're shouting in the dark, then you overemphasizing content. You need to step back and focus on engagement probably for quite awhile. If you want people to be interested in you and your content, they first need to follow you and be expect you to say, interesting Thanks for that. You need to interact with them where they already are, just posting content and expecting to magically attract people is misguided effort. The two hours that you wrote that thread, you could have engaged with 20 people and ongoing conversations. Now that is leveraging your time when you're just starting out. If you have any further questions, please reach out to me on Twitter. I'll answer them all in the end. I promise also, I will add those questions and my answers to them to the FAQ section in the course materials, there'll be a living and growing documents. So check it out every now and then. And I've been talking a lot about positive some behaviors. While let me show you what that means, I'll use that opportunity to introduce you to my competition. The other wonderful people in our community that we're building courses and writing books on the subject of growing a Twitter following. Phenomenal course that has always been inspirational to me is Daniel has solos. Everyone can build a twitter audience. So two-hour video course, then you shares everything he learned about audience building. And he focuses a lot on credibility and tracking the right metrics. I can highly recommend it. Another creator you have to take a look at is given shell, who has a free e-mail course and the paid CTE course, both about building in public. He's very good at that. And he's a great teacher to, he's walking the walk, building his work in public to now, I usually recommend all kinds of books. When I talked to my consulting clients are mostly entrepreneurs and software founders. I do have a huge list of good books on my blog called the bootstrap as bookshelf. So please check that out for inspiration. In general, you find that any work can be helpful for your Twitter experience. Any of them, just use it as a share your lessons resource with the book. Share what you learned and put it into context. It's one of the magical qualities of audience building that reading any book is conducive to your journey. As long as you teach from that book. So go ahead, build your reputation, built your sharing habits, and built your audience. That's it for finding your following. Thank you so much for spending some time with me today. And I wish you the very best on your Twitter journey. Let me know how it's working out for you. Bye.