How To Grow An Audience If You Have 0 Followers (It's Only 2 Habits)

All right.

I'm going to sound pretty arrogant for a second, but growing on social media is easy, and I actually mean that.

I'm not just saying it because it's a good hook.

It is a good hook, but I never really had a problem growing on social media on any platform.

So when I was outlining this video, I kind of asked myself, okay, why was it easy for me to grow?

And it really came from me failing at like seven other different business models before I actually started on social media.

So when I started on social media, I wasn't starting from scratch.

I had a bunch of high value skills under my belt.

Even though those prior businesses, thanks to Shiny Object Syndrome, failed and I tried so many different things, I tried digital art with like Photoshop.

I tried photography and charging for like in-person photo sessions.

I tried multiple agencies like Facebook ads, SEO, web design.

I tried dropshipping twice.

I tried building an e-commerce brand, like actually ordering this pretty much dropshipping twice.

And I probably even did a few more that I don't even register because they were so short lived.

It was like a week at a time.

I'd start something and then I'd build the website.

I'd get so excited about starting the LLC, and then the dopamine would fade and then I'd quit.

And that was kind of unfortunate because as a teenager, for some reason, it was just the bane of my existence to get a 9 to 5 job, right?

I looked around me, I looked at my parents.

I love my parents, but I looked at the older generation. Right?

You go to Walmart, you look around, you see the people, and you're like, that's not what I want my life to end up as.

And when I reverse engineered, okay.

What led them to that in my head as a teenager?

It's like 9 to 5 job, right?

That takes up most of your day. You get home at night, you're super tired.

You don't really get to work on something meaningful.

So I wanted to do something creative.

I didn't want to work at 9 to 5, and I wanted to do something creative.

And I did end up going to college for five years, but I was kind of treating it as a buffer period to just experiment with things.

I was a straight A student in high school, but when I was in college I was the sees get degrees, dude.

And so five years into college and just switching around so much, that was a theme of my youth, I guess, is I just switched around so many different times.

I just changed, I made mistakes, I pivoted, I experimented, and that gave me a lot of experience, but it also gave me a lot of failures.

And at that time I was probably like $20,000 in student debt.

And that continued to stack up.

So out of urgency and out of honestly just being scared that I wasn't going to be able to survive.

I started applying for jobs, and I got a job at a web design agency because I had previously acquired that skill.

And so at that job, it was kind of a cushy job.

I just continued to learn how to freelance. Right.

I was doing web design.

I could see inside of the agency that I was working at how things were kind of pieced together.

It kind of made sense to me how to start freelancing in a good way.

And so I started doing that.

And long story short, that started to pick up over the course of six, seven, eight months.

And after like nine months of me working the job, I was able to quit because I felt secure enough with my freelancing job.

Now, because freelancing is really just a glorified 9 to 5 job, you're still working for other people on projects that aren't yours.

Probably projects that you don't care about that you don't have any creative direction in.

But that's aside the point. Actually not really.

That's why I started on social media is because I saw other I don't know why I was on Twitter of all places, but I was scrolling and I saw that there were other web designers and people talking about my interest.

The web designers were just giving out basic advice, right?

They were like saying, here's the top ten skills that you need to learn if you want to quit your job.

And to me, that resonated at the time.

But they were landing web design clients from that, and they were selling courses on how to do web design, how to freelance, other things like that.

And so I'm like, I can do the same thing.

They're saying all of the things that I know how to say and they're doing really well.

Why am I not in their position?

So I started posting on social media, but my edge and the way I kind of had consistent growth out of the gate, it wasn't super fast all at once.

It was kind of like 100 followers a week for two months, and then it picked up to like 500 followers a week, and then kind of stabilized around 2000 followers a month.

And then there were waves.

There was like large explosions of follower growth when I had a tweet do really well.

And then there was just the troughs of like of 1500 to 2000 followers a month, and it was pretty stable.

But the reason I was able to do that is because my failures in digital art taught me brand esthetics to some degree, right?

All of skill acquisition is really just pattern recognition.

So it's not like I was actually practicing or doing the skill when I was growing on Twitter.

It's more so I had just like failed and had so much experience under my belt already that I had better taste out of the gate for what a hook looked like, because I had studied Facebook ads and copywriting when I was trying to make the agencies work that I had, I did some cold outreach.

I knew how to network, I knew how to DM people. I knew how to make friends.

I knew how to provide a value so that they would provide value in return, which we're going to talk about in this video.

When I finally get to the point and the web design that I was doing paired with the copywriting really well, paired with the branding really well.

And so I was off to a better start when it came to learning how to create digital products or just creating digital products better than most beginners, because what most people do when they start on social media is that's their first endeavor, right?

So they're learning the skills as they go in there, building up taste over time.

And that's kind of what gets you stuck in beginner hell.

Beginner hell is where you kind of you just post into the void and you don't really gain any followers.

And usually if you don't correct your mistakes or you don't pay attention to what's working and what's not, and you don't course correct and iterate, then you're never really going to have your breakout.

And that's why most creators, and I don't blame them, quit because they just can't gain any traction.

So that's my goal with this video.

Social media is a very viable business model, especially for one person, especially with AI on your side.

Like, you can build so many cool things in today's world, and if you have the skills that allow you to stand out because most people are just going the route of, oh, I need to post content, or I need to build something with AI, everyone's doing that, and if everyone's doing it, then like nobody's nobody's going to succeed doing that.

Yes, AI gives you superpowers, but when everyone has superpowers, nobody has superpowers.

So again, that's my goal.

You're not going to avoid the failure.

You're not going to avoid the mistakes.

You're not going to avoid having to build up the experience that leads to pattern recognition.

That leads to skill acquisition.

But what I can tell you is the two levers that you actually need to pull to see social media growth faster, and it will help with pattern recognition faster.

My secondary goal with this video is to show you that social media isn't luck based on an algorithm.

You don't just post and hope that the algorithm picks you up, and then blame the algorithm for your failure and your lack of skill.

Social media is like a video game.

Many things are like a video game.

They have specific mechanics and levers you can learn and pull.

And when you're at a higher level in the video game, you kind of see it all.

You've already gone through all the mechanics, you have already leveled up all of the abilities.

It's just like you get to be more creative.

But when you're an expert at something, usually you have more.

You have more potential for shiny object syndrome, and you need to focus more.

So as a beginner, you actually have an advantage over people, because the people who are very good at social media also tend to fall off.

You see a lot of big YouTubers or people just like decrease output.

I've decreased output lately, and what that does is it opens up space for new creators to come in.

So two levers.

That's what we need to know.

Treat everything else as a distraction.

Literally just focus on these two things.

Don't get distracted.

Focus on these two things and you will do just fine, I promise.

So the first lever is to do what works from your own perspective.

And that sounds kind of that doesn't sound that great just yet, but I promise, like, this is the secret.

This is it.

If you actually treat it as a priority, it will become a priority.

Because a big problem that beginner creators have is like they always think, oh, I don't have anything new to say.

As if people are on social media to see something new.

They're not.

If you actually think about how you consume social media or how I consume social media, people are there to see what's already being talked about from a specific creator's opinion.

That's literally how the algorithm works, especially YouTube.

If you watch one video on a specific topic, YouTube is going to show you the same fricking topic from another creator.

And if you understand that, you understand if that you create a video similar to one that has already done well, then you're going to be recommended to the people who viewed the one that did.

Well, I'll explain that soon, but I hope that really clicks.

That's YouTube growth in a nutshell.

Every other course, like all the other tactics, are secondary.

They're useful, but they're secondary.

And it lines up with my own consumption habits.

Like, I could see the same video title every single day from a different creator, and I would probably watch it.

I do watch it because I want to hear their opinion.

Everyone's talking about Claude, Code, Claude, OpenAI, all of this shit, the future of work.

When I fall down a rabbit hole of wanting to learn about that, I'm just going to watch the same topic over and over again so that I get all of the nuances so that I understand it completely.

The same goes for like fitness videos on YouTube.

That's I'm I love fitness, like that's my honestly my main priority.

This has all become secondary.

But if I had an ounce of muscle for every time that I've watched a nutrition 101 video or just some creator's opinion on nutrition, I'd be Ronnie Coleman.

This is the single most fundamental aspect of social media growth on any platform.

So if we look at someone like Craig Perry, who is just running my playbook, I don't know if he got it from me, but his YouTube bio is literally reading my newsletters to a camera.

I just had my newsletter open here.

It's not like I read it word for word, but it's like an outline that I can riff off of.

But if we look here, these are his first two YouTube videos ever, ever.

Like, do you see this?

You have 230 K views and you have 144 kvue's.

That's literally absurd.

Like, you do not see that for the first two videos on someone's YouTube channel.

And that proves exactly what I'm talking about here.

Did he get lucky a bit?

Maybe if you were to copy these 1 to 1, would you get the same results?

Maybe.

Maybe not, I don't know, but all I do know is that if you do this enough times, you will start to see a green streak of engagement and followers coming in.

So how is he doing?

What works from his own perspective?

If you look here how to remember everything you read.

If you're on this side, I've created a video like that I've almost created with the exact same title.

If you look on YouTube, you can see that all the Abdol has created a video like that.

You can see.

Just look up how to remember everything you read in the YouTube search bar, and you'll see like 10 to 20 iterations of those videos.

And then right here how to become dangerously Self-educated.

Now this one is actually kind of unique, but it uses the same validated structure because I've seen multiple times how to become dangerously articulate, how to become dangerously confident.

Right.

This is a rather new structure with the whole dangerously, but it still shows that it works.

Now is this copying?

Are the things inside of Craig's videos the same exact script that every single other person who created a how to remember Everything you read video the same?

No it's not.

If you actually watch the video, there's some great insights he's pulling from his own experience, from his own perspective.

It's his own opinion on how to do it.

Another thing for people who are worried about copying you like nobody has a novel idea, novel ideas are extremely rare.

It's not like Craig or I can claim how to remember everything you read like that's a process.

That's not something that you can claim.

Now, if it's something else, like a unique category or a unique concept that you've created, then yes, it is kind of copying if you take it.

But of course, then semantics come into play.

Like I did a spin off of Tim Ferriss The Four Hour Work Week.

I did the four hour work day because I kind of created a little framework around it from my own experience, and other people could take the four hour work day, and some people may attribute it to me, but honestly, I wouldn't be very mad because it's like, I can't claim that.

So you kind of have to use your own judgment here.

Like if you're obviously just purely copying, then yeah, don't do that.

But still, like an artist is a thing for a reason is because that's just how nature and reality works.

You don't reinvent the wheel.

And the same thing goes with like tweets or short form posts or reels.

Like nobody can claim the idea that they're saying because it's usually not completely novel.

The way that they worded it, the way that they structured it can be considered theirs.

And obviously, like you're going to look like an idiot if you just, like, copy paste it, change a few words, which I've seen a few times, and when I see those, I kind of immediately label that person as like, wow, you can't think originally, but you can take the idea.

So I mean, if we just look at these posts here, like major cheat code for life, increase your recovery speed, you will get rejected.

You will lose money, you will embarrass yourself.

The goal isn't to avoid the fall.

It's to shorten the time between the fall and the reset.

Fast recovery compounds.

Now there's an essence to this idea, obviously.

Like saying increase your recovery speed.

That's kind of Saul Bloom coded, but major T code for life.

You could definitely use that as a hook. Why not?

And then if you actually look at this tweet, you can just read into it and be like, you will get rejected, you will lose money.

And then you start to think, do other ideas spin off of that?

And most of the time they do.

And one thing I like to actually use AI for is just that for iterations on those ideas, because like, I can think through them and let ideas come to my mind, but when I'm actually sitting down to write a post like you kind of need a topic to write about, you don't necessarily need to brainstorm and like, have this non

practical way of coming up with an idea or reject AI, like you're just trying to choose a topic to write about so that then you can think, you can think in a certain direction.

So what I like to do is take really good posts that I like and be like, hey, just give me iterations of these and I'll read through them and I'll just wait for one to hit and I'll be like, okay, yeah, I'll write about that.

And usually through so many, through those two filters of like, okay, goes through AI to give me a iteration, it goes through my mind because I'm usually not taking exactly what it says here.

By the end of that process, I usually have something that's pretty original.

And since I've read and pattern recognized and pattern matched so many good posts, the structure of my writing starts to come out over time, and then I can use my own taste to refine it to make it even further mine.

So that's like that's content 101 in a nutshell.

Now, an even better way to just lock this in is many of you remember this video, how to get ahead of 99% of people in 6 to 12 months?

What many of you don't know is that I wrote a tweet in 2019 or 2020.

I think it's 2019 with the first line that said, how to get ahead of 99% of people.

So it was already a validated idea in 2023.

I turned it into that YouTube video.

That's now my highest performing YouTube video at 1.7 million views.

After that, video did really well.

Mark Manson, the author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, created a video with the same exact title, except he said something else instead of in six months, and that video got like 4.5 million views.

It's a proven topic, at least for now, until it gets ran through.

That's another thing is you'll eventually learn that some topics that used to do well are kind of just dead now, or they've been exhausted to the point where they need a reset period, and you'll see how to get ahead of 99% of people start to come back up in maybe a year, two years, and it'll flood the space, it'll be super viral for a second and then it'll die down.

But after Mark Manson made the video, Alex Hermosa made a video titled How to Get Ahead of 99% of people.

And then after that, Tom Bellew retitled one of his videos to have how to get ahead of 99% of people in the title.

So that's four massive creators who just prove what I'm saying here.

And that's the thing, is that these creators aren't creating the same exact video.

In my video, I'm talking about, like the process of creating an anti vision and a vision and so on and so forth.

But Mark Manson, like he's written so much about this before that he is a completely different view, right?

Anyone can take the topic how to be, how to get ahead of 99% of people and just think, how would I get ahead of 99% of people based on my interest, right?

It doesn't even like it can be business.

It can be start a business like this to get ahead of 99% of people.

It could be finance budget like this.

It could be relationships. How to get ahead of 99% of men.

Because for some reason, young men just compete against each other and look smacks all day and don't really get anywhere with it.

But they'll learn that lesson when they get to it.

But the point, the overarching point is that the best creators don't just post what's on their mind, right?

They don't just, like, open up their phone and send a post.

Some do, I do.

Sometimes you should, but that shouldn't.

That's not a strategy, right?

If you're treating social media as a way to pursue your life's work, then business is a part of that practicality strategy, tactics.

So the best creators most of the time research what works and base what they're going to create about on that.

And so what most people do here is they'll just like bookmark posts on social media and hope that they come back to it and remember it when it's time to actually create.

But then most people just start looking at a blank page and write something that isn't that good, and then wonder why it didn't do well since they're actually doing the steps, or before they write the YouTube title, they'll go to YouTube and they'll search for similar titles, and that's a solid way of doing it.

Or they'll go to the creator's account and filter by most popular, and then they can write down and study those specific titles that did well.

Another thing people do is they just jot down ideas as they come to mind, and hope that those ideas are good enough to do well.

And sometimes they are, and all of those are fine, but they're not really strategized.

They're not really a system.

They're not something that you can rely on.

And frankly, they're just time consuming and they're slow.

And so this is where I transition into a sales pitch for the new iteration of Eden, which is very focused on outlier content and just being the place where you research content and write great content.

Eden is quite literally, you have boards that you can paste links to of social posts or websites, or you can upload PDFs to.

You can create notes in or documents.

So you can write.

And so it's like I showed you my YouTube swipe file.

I showed you the post swipe file. I can reference these with AI.

Or I can go to the discover feed, set my content pillars, and then I can just scroll through here and see which post catch my eye.

I can also filter by platform if I only want to see tweets or YouTube videos, and then I can click one when I like it.

Let's say I add this one to my YouTube swipe file.

Boom! Add it there.

So if you don't know what to create next, just scroll through here, add it to a board, and then when it's time to actually create, go to your board, create a note in there, and then start writing.

Another thing that you won't find anywhere else is just the ability to search a specific creator and look at all of their platforms and filter by top performing content.

So a lot of mine on Twitter are articles, so Twitter just renders those as a link.

But I can scroll through here and I can just see one my own good ideas so I can iterate off of those.

And I do that all the time.

That's really how I continue growing at this point.

But I can save a bunch of these two aboard and just use them as an inspiration.

Or you can do what I showed you earlier where if I open the post swipe file and then I open the chat and I can reference this board in the chat, and then I can ask for variations of these, or I can just chat with it, or I can add a creator's top performing YouTube videos and just be like, hey, break all of these down.

What is this person's worldview?

How does these structures videos?

How can I apply this to the next video that I create?

Help me create that video.

So super simple, super powerful.

I'm actually very excited about this new version of Eden.

If you're wondering what happened to the old version of Eden, there's actually an article up that is at Eden.

So the New Eden and that kind of goes over how we went broke thanks to AI credits and how we had to pivot to something specific that is actually a lot more valuable.

And we landed on this.

So blessing and a curse, because this is going to become a staple in what I hope is every creator's workflow.

And I'm going to work to make that happen, because this is just like a massive unlock that no other app has.

So I'm super excited about it.

You can try it out with the link in the description, and I think you will enjoy it quite a bit.

Okay, onto the second lever that you can pull.

The first one is just validated content.

Study what works and create your own opinion on it.

It is that simple.

That's how you start practicing writing good content.

Please do not overcomplicate that.

So the second lever you're going to hate this word but it's networking.

And so with this I don't know what goes through most people's heads when they actually start on social media, but for some reason they're just probably bringing consumer behavior over.

Right?

They're used to just scrolling on social media and seeing that oh, people post and oh, this posted really well.

And so all I have to do is start creating posts, and then one will do well and then I'll become famous.

They don't see that a creator treats it as a business because that's what it is at this point.

But a business doesn't have to be soulless.

It can be very purposeful.

It's been the most purposeful thing in my life.

It's led to some of the most drastic changes I've had in my life, and it can actually provide good.

Oh, no, you're selling something for money.

That thing, preferably for a specific person, is valuable and it's worth paying the money in.

Preferably it would be worth more than what you're charging in the value that it does provide.

It's called voluntary exchange.

But if it were as easy as just posting, then everyone would do it.

And then if everyone did it and then if everyone did it, then it wouldn't work for anyone.

Just like AI.

Like, you have to understand that if you want to be good at something, you have to treat it as a skill that you acquire over time.

I don't know how that doesn't click for people, like just because it's social media.

A thing that you use on your phone every single day, doesn't mean that there isn't a very high skill cap to succeeding at the business side of that thing.

So now the question is, okay, Dan, well, what do I do if it's not just praying for the algorithm and hoping that my post goes viral?

Because we learned about validated ideas, we learned how to find those.

We learned that if you create your own opinion on them, you're setting yourself up to do really well.

But if you're in beginner hell, if you're at the very start, you're still posting into the void.

You can't expect the algorithm to just launch you into the ether and give you a ton of followers, especially on certain platforms like Twitter, where the algorithm is kind of non-existent.

Right?

I started on that platform, so I knew that my growth had to take manual effort.

Right.

And I'm blessed that I did it that way, because now I know that, like, if the algorithm isn't working in my favor, I still have a lever I can pull.

So let's just break this down so it makes sense.

You want followers?

Followers come from people seeing your post on their phone and then clicking your profile and being interested enough to follow you.

And so if the algorithm is like the lottery, so people aren't going to see your post on their timeline organically, how can we manually get people to see your posts?

How can we start rolling the snowball until it, like, starts rolling down the hill or becomes an avalanche or whatever?

So you have to think where is the source of followers or people on social media?

And it's in other people's audiences, right?

When you're on social media, you really have only a few actions that you can take.

You can follow someone, you can like their post, you can repost it and you can comment on it.

That's the that's the bookmarks, etc. like those are all those don't matter.

That's the thing you do on social media is you engage and you follow.

So the followers that you want lie are following someone else.

This is why brands pay so much for creators to post about their product, because they have an audience.

Like how else is the brand going to find people to buy their product?

They need to put it in front of people, and the way they can do that is like podcast sponsorships.

Partner with the creator on social media, run paid ads, Facebook or Google.

Maybe you run ChatGPT ads now that those are a thing, or they can do other forms of marketing.

But on social media, as a creator, you're practically marketing yourself, so you could technically pay people to share your posts.

And that works to some extent if you do it the correct way.

But let's not bank on that.

And for those who kind of get turned off by that, that's a very viable strategy, right?

If you're treating this as a business or as like a way to pursue your life's work and you have the money to do it.

Go ahead.

I do not care because people are only going to follow you if your content is good, right?

If your content sucks like people say, it's cheating to pay someone else, it just doesn't make sense.

They don't have a business mindset, they don't understand it.

But if someone else shares your post and people don't like it, they're not going to follow you and then it's a waste of money.

It's the same thing as putting money into Facebook ads and people not buying your product because your product sucks.

So in essence, it doesn't really matter if you pay or not, because you're only going to grow, if you're good, if you're skilled.

But if you don't want to pay someone, and if you're smart, you can get in front of other people's audiences for free.

And all of it just boils down to making friends.

And I know that sounds simple again, because it is.

But most people don't know how to make friends.

Most people in today's world are antisocial.

You would think that more people being on social media would be more social, but they're not.

And so yes, that means that you're going to have to talk to people and that on social media that happens in the DMs or in the replies, but one on one, it's in the DMs. And for this to work for you, I would recommend prioritizing it.

I would recommend time blocking it for 30 minutes on your calendar so that you actually sit down and do it right.

30 minutes on your calendar should be for researching validated posts and writing out ideas and actually drafting the posts.

And then the other 30 minutes should be reaching out to people to get those posts shared right.

When you launch a product, that's practically what you're doing in the first place.

To kick it off the ground is you're reaching out to people to see if they like the product and to see if they'll promote it, whether it's for money or not, or if they'll just use it.

And if they do use it, boom. You have a user.

You think one user isn't a lot, but if you compound over time and then word of mouth kicks in, then you start growing organically.

The same thing works for building an audience.

And so the goal here is to make actual friends, because what do friends do?

They support each other and they're usually working toward the same goal.

They have a similar value set.

So if you have like five people that you're in communication with, and then you write or create a really good piece of content, and then you send it to them and you say, hey, I put a lot of time into this.

I think you'll resonate with it.

I think your audience will resonate with it.

Can you share it now?

Obviously, it takes a bit of time to get to that point, which we're going to go over, but it really does become that simple once you actually have friends, because if they are friends, then they're more than happy to do that.

Like sharing something takes no effort, like it's not a big deal at all, but if the content sucks, then they're not going to want to do that.

So go back to step one.

So you know how to write good content and you're there to return the favor, right?

Like with Eden, when I go to my friends and I say, hey, I built this really cool thing, do you like it?

And they say, yes.

And I say, okay, I'm launching this week. Will you help me promote it?

They'll say, sure.

And then like they have a lot of followers.

So that's really helpful for me.

And so what I say, anytime that you launch product or any time you need something shared, please do not hesitate to send it to me so I can return the favor value exchange.

But if you don't have that friend group yet, I call this process.

Some of you may have heard of it non needy networking.

And so if you do this right, this is how you get someone like a 50,000 follower account to share your post.

And now your post is in in front of 50,000 people and you didn't rely on the algorithm.

And that's how you grow if you turn this into a repeatable process.

So the first step is to just find someone that you want to do.

Obviously, like you shouldn't just reach out to anyone and everyone.

This should be like a small, curated group of people that you're going to strategize and grow with over the course of 6 to 12 months, or probably even longer.

Like, I have built so many long term friendships just by being on social media and being social.

I moved to Texas with JC Melina and Dakota Robertson like three years ago.

My buddy Joey lives down the street for me.

He literally moved here from Atlanta.

My trainer Randy lives over there and we met online.

He was using my software, reached out.

He's like, hey, I know you like fitness and I know you do everything yourself, but let me do your meal plan and training.

I think you'll like it.

I was like, fuck it, okay, let's do it.

And now we're very good friends and we're starting a new tropic business together.

Like, it's it's so serendipitous how these things happen.

And just opportunities pop up when you have people who either have opportunities or like the connection between you creates opportunities.

I know that DMing other people is just like this non tangible strategy.

Like it just doesn't result in an immediate direct outcome as feedback, but I promise.

If you do this like this is the greatest advantage you can have.

And so where do you find these people that you want a DM on social media.

Like you kind of just take it easy, like you scroll if you see an account that you like, make an effort to dmn them.

Make an effort to engage.

Make an effort to be seen by them and to and for you to show that you're supportive.

And if you just have time to look around like you can go to someone's profile that you like, like you can go to my profile and do this, I don't I don't know if it'll yield any results, but you just find people on social media by how you would find people on social media.

There isn't like an exact way to just pinpoint exactly who to talk to.

But you could go to like my profile, click on my following list who I'm following and see people who are similar to me or similar to you, and just go through them and see if you like any of their content.

And so step two, once you have someone that you want a DM, which should be pretty quick, you literally should just open social media, see someone, and then be like, that guy sounds cool, I'm going to.

But the second thing you do is you just send them simple praise, right?

Like, you don't have to do this.

You can skip to further steps, but we're just getting into the flow of things here.

You have to learn how to make friends. You just send simple praise.

It's like how girls compliment each other's shoes or something like that, and then they're like, oh my God, girl, where do you get those?

And they start up a conversation and then one thing leads to another, and then they're getting lunch and then they're best friends.

So what you do here is you go and look at the person's like content at their website, at what they're creating, if they're creating anything and you trying to find like something that you resonate with.

And in my opinion, the simplest thing you can do here is to just send a single sentence.

So if someone wrote a social post that was like about how most people quit social media too early, I'd be like, damn, that's true.

I actually quit like four times and now I'm back at it.

How long have you been a creator?

Wow, so difficult to start a conversation.

You can ask GPT for how to start a conversation.

I wouldn't recommend it, but if you're that far gone socially, maybe try it.

The only other tip I can give with this step is to just avoid corporate speak like the plague, right?

You're not here to connect with someone on LinkedIn.

You're here to just, like, text them like a friend.

Like you're just act as if you're passing by.

You're at the gym, right?

And you see someone with a similar shirt as you and you're like, oh, dude, nice shirt.

And then that connection is kind of form.

You go on about your workout and then you come back the next day, and then you see them again and you go, oh, what's up man?

And you give them a fist bump and then you go home and you come back, and then you give them a fist bump again.

You go, oh dude, I didn't get your name. What is it?

And then you give her your name and they're like, oh, nice.

And then you just be like, oh, what's your what's your split?

What are you training today?

And then they go, oh I'm training arms. What about you?

And I'm like, yeah me too.

And it's like, oh what are you training like on Saturday?

It's like chess. And they're like, oh, we should hit that together.

Do you come around this time?

And they'd be like, yeah.

And you'd be like, okay, cool, it's a date.

So it's literally the same exact thing.

Like you're just doing it in the replies and the DM's as opposed to in the gym.

And rather than getting in a lift together, you support them in some way on sharing their content.

And so that kind of covered step three, which is to just show interest in them.

So we are trying to do is drill into something that is important to them.

And for another creator it's usually what they're building.

Like you can ask them or what are you building?

Or I see that you're building Eden, how is that going?

What's the next feature you're going to drop?

I actually looked into it looks super cool.

I'm going to start using it or just be like, oh, I was on your Substack and I went back like a year ago, and you had this really good article that I read through in this part really resonated with me.

Like, where did you come up with that? Just something. Right?

It doesn't even matter. So step four is to show you are useful.

And this is really where like the power comes into play, but it's also the part that trips people up the most because they don't think that they have any value to provide.

And the thing here is that, like you personally don't need any value to provide.

Like you just need to be someone who can connect the other person with some form of value.

That can be a resource, that can be a person.

If you need another person that you think that person should meet and just be like, dude, I think you should reach out to this guy.

I think is really cool.

You guys would hit it off or what I really like doing, and what I really like when people do for me is when people know what I'm working on, or when I know what other people are working on, like me working on Eden.

Imagine I'm someone else.

If someone else were working on a software, then if I watch a YouTube video about AI and how it's going to disrupt tech and how this is the way forward, I would just send them the video and be like, hey, you might find this interesting.

I know you're building X, y, Z.

Maybe this will impact it a bit and then they might watch it, or they'll just be like, thanks.

Or they'll take mental note and be like, oh, that was really cool.

Like he thought of me outside of our DM's.

And then that's when the law of reciprocity kicks in and they feel the need to return the favor.

If you give something, someone else is going to feel the need to give something in return.

So all you really need to do at that point is just ask, which we'll get to.

But step five, which is an optional step, but highly recommended, is to just get on a call with the person.

Right?

This is like getting coffee or getting lunch with someone you met at the gym or something of that nature, but online you kind of just be like, yo, we should catch up on a call sometime and talk about business.

That's it.

And then you get on a call and then you come out of it with like a lot deeper connection.

The amount of calls that I got on when I was just beginning on social media was absurd.

It's like people just like to speak with other people who have related interest, because they're not going to find those people in their everyday life, like there are very few people around me, or especially that I went to school with that have similar interests or that do similar things.

So you kind of have to build a tribe of those people so you can do that or you don't have to.

But step number six is to just continue sending more resources or to just check in.

So you send them a video that you thought was interesting.

You send them an article, you send them a tweet and be like, oh dude, this is exactly what we were talking about the other day.

You just kind of maintain faint connection while providing value to them.

Maybe you create something like, I've had many people scrape all my YouTube videos, which you don't have to do anymore because you can just go and eat in creators.

Go to my YouTube chat with all the videos.

You don't have to spend thousands of dollars scraping with manis anymore to actually get the transcripts of people's YouTube videos.

So try that out.

But they'll do that, and then they'll have the AI, like, get all of my stuff, like all of my patterns and all of my concepts in one place, and I'll be like, oh, that's really cool, and thank you for doing that.

Even though I like that's what I do as like, you reverse engineer your own stuff.

Like I have a database, not really a database, but I have a note of all of those things in one place already.

Yeah, it's good either way.

But now step seven and finally.

And you don't need to go through all seven steps to do this.

It can just come naturally in the conversation.

But this is where you ask and you can ask them a few things.

You can just ask them to join a group, chat with other people you've been talking to, and now you have this really powerful group chat where you can stir strategies, or you send them one of your posts that you put a lot of time into.

Or you can just ask them questions, right?

If they're an expert in a place that you're not, you have a connection where you can kind of get free answers out of them without paying for consulting or coaching.

But if you plan to leverage their audience for growth, which isn't the goal of the friendship, but that's a benefit of it, you want to send them a post that you actually put a lot of time into, and that's good.

And then you ask them to share, because if it's not good, they're not going to want to share it.

But this is also how you can come up with content ideas right?

In your conversation.

Something comes up like a problem or just some idea, and then you can write about that thing, and then you can send the post to them and be like, hey, I just wrote this up.

It was inspired by a previous conversation.

If you hit it with a share, I'll hit you back at some point.

Or just be honest.

Like my favorite outreach strategy in general is just brutal honesty and be like, hey dude, I'm really trying to grow.

If you could share this, that would be awesome.

If not, absolutely no worries at all.

I'm not expecting anything.

And so that's literally it. You have two levers.

You can write validated content.

And then if the algorithm doesn't magically pick it up, which it probably won't, especially if you're a beginner, then you have a manual way of making friends and having them share it to their audience so that it can at least get kickstarted.

Is this all going to happen overnight? Is it going to happen tomorrow?

The next day?

Probably not.

It's going to happen over the course of two weeks, four weeks, three months.

But it will compound and you'll definitely see some growth out of this, because these aren't levers that you guess at.

They're just levers that you pull.

It's just an action that you do and you get better at.

It's a skill.

Not that you're going to DM 500 people, but if you DM'd five people a day for 30 days or 60 days, it's a lot of freaking people.

And if one isn't kind enough or close enough of a friend to share one of your posts, then you're doing something wrong.

So that's it.

Those are the two ways to grow.

If you like this video, like the video, subscribe.

If you want to research outlier content or have a place to write high performing content, check out the new version of Eden.

I think it's really cool because I like just saving links to boards and being able to write with them open next to it.

So check that out. I'm super excited about it.

Yeah. That's it. I'll see you in the next video. Bye.