Sometime in June 2020 I realised the importance of having an online presence when I saw how much money some creators were making by selling info products on Twitter. It was really shocking to me how one can leverage social media to make life changing income. You can in fact replace your salary (and so much more) by using Twitter as a marketing channel.
Specifically, I came across tweets by Daniel Vassallo where he shared how much he was earning through two of his info products on Gumroad. Each of his courses had earned him around 100K+ USD in the last 1.5 years. This opened my eyes and made me realise the endless possibilities having a good online presence provides.
Daniel became my inspiration and I started building my online presence on Twitter right away.
The first thing I did was to buy Daniel's course on how to grow a Twitter account. I did buy courses from other creators as well. I really wanted to learn on this topic from different people.
These courses were really great and helped me learn different strategies to grow on Twitter. Although these strategies provide you with the base templates you can work with, you need to figure out the type of content that works for you, yourself.
So I started building my online presence right away. Since then I've grown my Twitter account from around 150 followers to 22K followers. This is good growth considering I did it along with a day job. At a startup. Some of my friends who started around the same time have grown their account to 80K followers in just one year.
How to Get Followers
Just hard work will not get you followers. You need to follow certain strategies to achieve it. Basically the process consists of these 4 steps:
- Post content / comment on others' posts
- Get users to visit your profile
- Convert visitors to followers
- Go back to step 1
Strategies To Get Followers
Over the last 1 year I've experimented a lot and here are the strategies that worked the best.
1. Comment on Others' Posts
When you're starting out it's difficult to get visibility on your posts because obviously you don't have many followers at this point. So to start with, comment on other big accounts' posts.
You can comment to provide:
- Your own perspective on the idea
- To agree or disagree with the idea
- To add more details which you think are missing from the post etc
If people like your comment, they will visit your profile. If they like what they see on your timeline and what they can expect, they will follow you.
2. Write More Threads
One thing I've noticed is that people like to read threads and more importantly bookmarking them!
I have had a lot of success with threads on Twitter. But again it depends on the niche and the way you present your content. For me personally even though many single-post tweets have gone viral and received thousands of likes, it's the threads that bring me followers more often.
For example, I had written this thread last year when I had only a couple of hundred followers. It mainly provides a step by step guide to get started with freelancing on Codementor platform.
This thread was very successful and brought me hope that anyone can go viral on Twitter. It gave me the confidence that I too can grow my account to hundreds of thousands of followers.
3. Network: Make Long term Friends
Networking on Twitter (or anywhere for that matter) is equally important as posting valuable content.
It's the connections you make on Twitter that help you grow and be successful in the long term if your plan is to build a business and make money on the internet. If you're trying to do it all alone, you can only get so far. But having genuine friends will take you a long way.
I have made a lot of good friends on Twitter in the last 1 year. Some of them are really helpful whenever I publish a product, post an article or post a tweet. They support me by retweeting, by buying my products and helping me spread the word about them.
How To Make Friends on Twitter?
When you come across someone who is posting similar content as yours or someone who is posting anything interesting, DM her / him, get on a video call, get to know that person. Do this regularly and you will make a lot of good friends on Twitter.
When you start you will definitely find like minded people who share similar vision.
4. Consistency is the key
Growing an online presence takes persistence and hard work. You need to show up every single day and post valuable content.
Posting consistently is important because of 2 reasons:
- If you want someone to follow you, they need to know that you post regularly and you're worth a follow.
- Twitter algorithm supports people who post regularly. It's just the way it is designed. I've experienced this first hand when my posts were not getting enough visibility when I didn't post for a couple of days straight in the past. Basically twitter wants to encourage people to keep coming back to their platform. I don't make this mistake anymore.
Being consistent is beneficial to you, the content creator, in many many ways. Since you want to post regularly you need to learn regularly. That's the only way you get so much of content to post and this helps you improve your knowledge and become a better person in general.
Having done this from the past 1 year, I personally have learnt a lot about good engineering practices, freelancing, talking to clients, different ways of making money online and my writing skills have improved a lot.
I'm very glad that I started building my online presence. I wish I had started earlier.
5. Build Credibility
Showing up every single day is only half the battle. If you want to build an audience who trusts you, who wants to help you in your journey, then you need to build credibility. And you can achieve that when you post valuable content and do it often without spamming. Be genuine. Be honest. Help others and grow together.
"100 followers who trust you and want to support your work >>>> thousands of followers who follow you simply because they saw one good post from you."
These 100 followers are the ones who will help you achieve success online.
6. Keep a Clean Timeline
We have discussed different strategies to get users to visit your profile. But if you don't have a clean profile or timeline the conversion rate will suffer. So it's important to have a clear profile without many retweets, quote retweets of others' posts. They follow you when they see a lot of original content and ideas from YOU.
Retweeting is fine when you have a good audience. But don't do it when you are just getting started.
Keep the profile visually attractive with images, emojis etc in your posts. But doing this more will make your profile ugly. So do it carefully.
Importance of Having an Online Presence
I cannot emphasise enough on the importance of having an online presence. It can definitely change your life and give you the freedom and wealth you always wanted. It provides immense opportunities you had never imagined.
I personally have benefited a lot from having an online presence. I have made good friends, sold e-books, generated more traffic to my blog, paid advertising, interview opportunities and so much more!
You can read this article where I explain how I make an average of 250$ every month on Twitter.
Your goal can be any of the following:
- build and sell a SaaS product
- freelance
- sell info products
- get more traffic to your blog
- affiliate marketing
- start a YouTube channel
- or just want to be famous on the internet
Even without having an online presence you can still achieve all of the above. But having an online presence will definitely help you achieve these goals.
Check this article if you want to learn how to make money by growing an online presence.
Resources
Here are the courses that have helped me in growing my online presence on Twitter:
- Everyone Can Build a Twitter Audience
- Improve Your Online Presence
- The Art of Twitter: Build a Business That Makes You $100/Day
Summary
Provide value in comments: Commenting on posts by big accounts in the only way to get visibility when you are still small.
There's magic in threads: People like reading long threads on Twitter. Keep writing threads if you want to grow faster.
Be Consistent: People want to follow them who post valuable content regularly. So be consistent.
Don't spam: Once you start building your audience on Twitter you will have opportunities to do paid advertising, affiliate marketing etc. These gigs will make you money but may result in loosing followers if you overdo it. Your audience follows you for your valuable content. Not for your advertising.
Network: Talk to people. Become friends. Help each other and grow together.
Clean profile: Keep a clean profile. Use emojis, image etc to make it visually appealing.
The article was originally published on my blog here.
Top comments (2)
Thanks for the short, concrete post on how to grow an audience. I'm currently on a similar journey (although instead of growing in audience as a side hustle, I took the leap recently quit #aws after 5+ years as a software engineer) and also discovered Daniel's course as well. As you mentioned, the algorithm for growing the audience is simple — but it's work and requires consistency. As they say, "nothing worth having comes easy"
Cheers,
@memattchung
Great tips!