5 Steps to Building a Better Internet Audience

What's up, everyone? Welcome back to another episode of Founders Journal. This is your host, Alex Lieberman, co-founder and executive chairman of Morning Brew. For those of you that are new to the show, welcome. For those of you that have been along for the journey, welcome back. And in case you don't know, Founders Journal is a show by a builder for builders. It is my personal diary made public for the world. Now, before we hop into the episode, I have 2 quick asks for you. First, if you have friends, family, colleagues in your life that you know want to be entrepreneurs, or they are entrepreneurs and they want to continue to accelerate their businesses, please tell them about Founders Journal. It is the number one way we grow this show. Second, shoot me an email, say hi, introduce yourself, recommend a future topic you want me to cover, ask me any questions that you want me to answer. Maybe I'll answer it right there, or maybe I'll use that question for a future episode. I would love to hear from you, so shoot me an email to alex@morningbrew.com. Now, without further ado, let's hop into today's episode Where I answer one very simple question: how can I build an audience on the internet today? Let's do this thing. There has never been more appetite to build an audience on the internet because there's never been more proof of how powerful it is. My co-founder Austin Rief tweeted out earlier this week a screenshot of all of the different creator businesses that have launched in the last 7 days. There were 12 new product launches ranging from Rihanna and Ariana Grande launching new beauty products to Dude Perfect collaborating on a footwear brand. Then on top of that, you have countless examples of, let's call it, more accessible creators that have either left their 9-to-5 jobs to go full-time on the content game or entrepreneurs that have launched new businesses using their audience as their best marketing channel. We have examples like Justin Welsh, who went from being a sales executive at a health tech company to making $5 million a year as a solo creator, or Nick Huber, who is a self-storage entrepreneur by day, but now he moonlights as a Twitter and LinkedIn creator that has built up a massive following, and he has launched a dozen adjacent businesses to his real estate business to drive his followers to. With that, I actually had Nick Huber on recently for a guest Founders Journal episode where he talked about this empire he wants to build and this holding company of all these businesses that he's launched and that he's promoting to his audience. So in the show notes, we'll link to that guest journal episode. So these success stories that feel accessible to you and I, combined with the accessibility of tools to create content and monetize your audience, has made the dream of being a creator more popular than ever before. But getting started down this path can be daunting as hell. There are so many questions to answer when you want to be a creator, like, what is my goal? What should I create content around? Who should I create content for? What differentiates good and bad content? Where should I go to create my content? And then once you answer those questions, you may naturally start to have these self-defeating thoughts that naturally start to creep in. Things like, do I have a good enough story to tell? Why will people listen to me? Will I embarrass myself? I'm just shouting into the void and no one's listening. Why is it worth it? So here is what I'm going to do. I'm going to give you a recipe, and this recipe contains ingredients and steps to make a finished dish. And that finished dish is a complete content strategy that you can execute on to start or to accelerate your part or full-time career as a creator. Let's hop into this thing. 5 steps. You're going to walk away with a content strategy. Step 1, define your goals. I cannot tell you how many people I speak to who want to build a massive audience, but when I ask them what their specific goal is, they have zero idea. This is so important because you can't decide what content you're creating or who you're creating for unless you know your primary goal. And if you don't have a goal, it's worth asking yourself, are you just trying to be a creator because other people are doing it and it is currently the sexy thing? Further, would you do this? Would you be a creator if it was unsexy? Because in reality, creating content is unsexy. It's a ton of work. It opens you up to serious costs like phone addiction and comparison to others on the internet and social media. And the act of putting content out into the world is something you have to love or or else you will burn out. It's like being an entrepreneur who isn't passionate about what they're building. They will burn out. So start by defining your goals. And people have all sorts of reasons that they create content online. There are intrinsic motivators for creators like self-expression or educating and entertaining others or a love for playing the game. So for example, I think the founder of AngelList, Naval Ravikant, he uses his social media for the purpose of self-expression, Whereas someone like MrBeast, I believe, is doing it as a love for playing the game, or at least that's why he started creating on YouTube. And then you have the obvious extrinsic motivators for creating content, things like making money or making friends or building a network or generating opportunities or creating awareness. Force yourself to pick one of these goals. For me personally, it's generating opportunities, personal and professional. My audience has done everything from generate opportunities to talk about Morning Brew on podcasts, to helping me find my CEO and my first employee for my ghostwriting business, StoryArb, to being able to play a top 10 golf course in the country. That's probably the best opportunity that I've gotten out of my social media is the golf opportunities. And I view my audience as a compounding asset that stays with me throughout my career and offers me opportunities to the extent that I continue to nurture it. That's step 1. Step 2, build your content pillars. So you have your north star, and now you have to answer a simple question. What are you going to talk about? There are several exercises that you can go through to answer this question. My friends Nicholas Cole and Dickie Bush have an exercise called the 2-year test. With the 2-year test, you can run it backwards or forwards. If it's the 2-year test backwards, you simply reflect on all the things you've learned over the last 2 years, or in some cases the last 2 months or 2 weeks or even 2 days, and then you start writing for the version of yourself back then before you knew what you know now. If it's the 2-year test moving forwards, you just write about the things that you're currently learning, or you want to write about something totally new, like a hobby or a personal interest, which means instead of writing for the version of yourself 2 years ago, you're writing for the version of yourself 2 years from now. So that's one way to go through this exercise of figuring out what you're going to talk about is go through the 2-year test. Another option is something that my buddy Justin Welsh uses, which is this system of topics and subtopics, where you write down the main topic that you wanna create content around, and then all of the subtopics that you can go deeper on. He uses the example of a marketing agency. So like, let's say you're an entrepreneur and you are starting a marketing agency specifically for small creators. If you want to build an agency for small creators, maybe your subtopics are branding, networking, SEO, analytics, and copywriting. And so these would be the different pillars that you start writing content around because those are subtopics of your main topic, the main topic being building marketing agency for small creators. Now, I think these methods are awesome and you should definitely test them out. And Justin and Dicky and Nick are experts in the world of building audience online. But there's a method that I've developed for myself that I have just found to be most organic and simple for me. And I call it the deep dinner test. Here's how it goes. Imagine you have a deep dinner conversation with a new connection. They're awesome to talk to because they ask you lots of interesting questions. And they care deeply about what you have to say professionally and personally. Assume the dinner goes for 3 hours so you can talk about all of the major highlights, lowlights, moments, and deep interests you have in your life, both professionally and personally. With the deep dinner test, I want you to list out all of the headline topics that you would likely talk about with this person at dinner, and then below all those headline topics, list out all of the good questions that you could imagine this person at dinner asking you because they want to dig more into each of these topics. And so I'll give you an example of what that looks like for me. One topic I could imagine talking about in the deep dinner test is growing Morning Brew from 0 to 9 figures. And then I could imagine 3 example questions that this person would ask me are, what mistakes did you make as a first-time CEO? How did you grow your newsletter to 1,000, 10,000, and 1 million subscribers specifically with what specific tactics? And how did you sell advertisers on your newsletter? How did you go about pricing ads? What was the story you told? Now, those are just 3 questions, but you could imagine like another 30 questions that I could list under this main headline of growing Morning Brew from 0 to 9 figures. One other topic as an example, losing my dad. That's a headline that I would probably talk about with someone if it was a really deep conversation at dinner. Now, the questions that I can anticipate them asking are, what happened to your dad? Were you there when it happened? How did you process your dad's loss emotionally? What are your best memories of your dad? What lessons did he teach you? And so what's happened once you go through this exercise of the deep dinner test is effectively you have this laundry list of all of the professional and personal topics that you either have experience around, expertise around, or personal interest in. And you have all of the subtopics, meaning if you could imagine individual posts you would write around this topic, because every question that you list below the topic that you could imagine this person asking at dinner is probably a question that if you answer it makes for good content. So now you have the major and minor content buckets. You have a sense of what your North Star is for your content. Step 3 is picking your audience. And picking your audience is about matching up your goals and your content pillars in a way that you believe you can achieve content market fit. And all that content market fit means is it's similar to product market fit in the sense that you are creating great content for the right audience where your audience is requesting more of your great content. And step 3 is about defining Who is that right audience? I personally think the best and easiest way for you to start figuring out who your right audience is, is by filling out a very simple sentence. And I'll give you examples, so don't worry if it doesn't make sense at first. The sentence goes, by creating content about A, I am helping B solve the problem of C, which will allow me to achieve my ultimate goal of D. Okay, I'm gonna say it one more time. By creating content about A, I am helping B solve the problem of C, which will ultimately allow me to achieve my goal of D. So here's my example. By creating content about content and building an audience, I am helping entrepreneurs solve the problem of knowing the importance of distribution but not knowing how to build it, which will allow me to achieve my ultimate goal of launching new businesses where I am the distribution and my co-founder is the operator. Let me just give you one more example, and I'm just picking a random example I could imagine one of my listeners having. Let's say you're someone that has been doing brand strategy at Pepsi and your ultimate goal is to go full-time on your own brand strategy consultancy, specifically for consumer growth stage companies. But you don't have enough clients yet in order to go full-time on it. The way that I would think about completing the sentence and picking your audience is with a sentence like this: By creating content about brand strategy from mission to messaging to design, I am helping growth stage consumer founders solve the problem of standing out in a sea of noise, which will allow me to attract new consulting clients so I can ultimately go full-time on my agency. Now complete this sentence for yourself, and in doing so, you will naturally pick an IFP or an ideal follower profile, basically the specific audience you want to get in front of. You'll pick not only who that person is, but also the problem that you will solve for them. And in doing so, it will lead you to achieving your ultimate content goal. Now, before I get into the last 2 steps, we're gonna take a quick break to hear from Okay, so before the break, we talked about step 3, which is defining your audience by answering a very simple sentence. By creating content about A, I am helping B solve the problem of C, which will allow me to achieve my ultimate goal of D. Step 4, after you've decided who your audience is, what your content pillars are, what your goal is, is to now think about what are the platforms you are going to be creating content on. And there are 3 simple questions you need to answer to figure out what platforms you should be creating content on. Answer when picking your platforms. Question 1: What content best aligns with your skills and gives you the most energy, text or multimedia? Text content means you'll likely be posting on LinkedIn, Twitter, Threads, and email. Multimedia means you'd be most likely posting on podcast, TikTok, IG, and YouTube. Answer that question first. For me, the answer is text. For others, it's multimedia. Second, where does your ideal follower profile or target audience most show up for the content you're going to give them? Let's say you're creating content around strategies for commercial real estate investing. The answer to that question is probably Twitter and LinkedIn. But if you're creating content around wellness hacking, from what you put in your body to how to exercise effectively, the answer is probably IG, TikTok, and YouTube. So answer that question for yourself, which is where does your ideal follower profile most show up for the content you're gonna give them? And the third question you need to answer is, do you want to build a rented, owned, or monetized audience? Now, I could do an entire episode on just this topic, so I'm just gonna break it down quickly. Quickly. A rented audience is a social media audience. The pro of building a social media audience is that it can grow quickly because platforms are built for virality and they're easy to quickly create content on. The cons are that you don't own your audience, the platform does, and they can change their algorithm at any point, which can change how easily your audience sees your content. An owned audience is an audience built on a platform that doesn't have an algorithm sitting as a gatekeeper between you and your ideal follower. A podcast audience is an owned audience. An email audience is an owned audience. A Slack or Discord community is an owned audience. The pro of an owned audience is you don't have to worry about someone flicking a switch and your audience no longer sees what your content is. The con is it generally takes longer to build an owned audience. It took us, you know, 4 or 5 years to get to a million subscribers for Morning Brew, where I've seen people get to a million followers on Twitter in less than 12 months. And finally, a monetized audience is an audience that you charge directly. Monetized audiences can come in many forms: paid course, paid community, paid merch, physical product, a paid event. And the general rule of thumb that I would give you is that you should start with a rented audience to test and grow quickly, but you should try to start funneling your rented audience to an owned email or owned podcast as soon as you hit a point of critical mass, which I would say, you know, roughly is a few thousand followers. And the final step in this beautiful recipe for your content strategy is step 5, which is creating content that sings. You have your North Star, you have your content pillars, you have your intended audience, and you know where you want to create content. Now, the last and possibly most important piece is how do you create good shit? Every step in this process could probably be an entire week of podcasts on their own, but this one on making content sing definitely could be. So what I'm going to do is give you 90/10 tips, basically a few content tips that I think get you 90% of the way there to try and create great content that gets noticed. First, let me start by saying there are 2 major buckets of, let's say, strategies around creating great content. And I'm going to give you a tip in each bucket. The first bucket is what I call psychological triggers. Psychological triggers are emotional reactions that you are looking to elicit from your audience. So you design your content with a specific trigger and emotion in mind. I love the way that Sean Puri thinks about emotions anytime he writes a piece of content. Basically, anytime he's writing, he has a list of 8 emotional reactions at the top of his document. And he asks himself, which reaction is he going to drive? If he can't point to at least one of them, he won't post the content because he knows it won't get enough of a reaction out of the audience to get them to like or share. The 8 emotions that he writes at the top of every document are NSFW, not safe for work, with that's crazy. Basically, if something's NSFW, he wants to elicit the reaction of that's crazy. LOL, he wants to elicit from someone that's hilarious. Oh, he wants to elicit, oh, now I get it. Wow. He wants to elicit, That's amazing. Aww, he wants to elicit, that is so cute. Yay, he wants to elicit, that's great news. WTF, he wants to elicit, that pisses me off. Generally refers to political content or very contrarian content. And the 8th one is finally, and he wants to elicit with that one, someone has finally said what I've been thinking. And so I just wanna give you one example of how Sean designs content with a specific emotion in mind. One example is a viral thread that he wrote at the peak of Clubhouse. If you remember Clubhouse, when everyone thought it was going to be the next Facebook, and he took the approach of channeling the reaction finally, right? Finally. The whole idea is when you channel finally, you want to get someone to feel as if the content creator is saying something that you have been thinking forever, but you've been too afraid to share yourself. And so what basically Sean wanted to say was he believed that Clubhouse, unlike what everyone else thinks, At the time, everyone thought Clubhouse was going to be a massive business, the next huge social media platform. Sean basically wanted to state his view that he actually thinks Clubhouse is going to fail, and he wanted to phrase his hook in a way that would elicit finally, meaning for the people out there who also think that Clubhouse is going to fail, this is speaking to you. But also for people that don't think it's going to fail, it almost hits on the WTF that pisses me off because it's a contrarian view that people will get angry about. And so he started his thread with, so everyone seems to think Clubhouse is the next big thing, but I think it's going to fail. Here's how I think it all goes down. And that is an example of leveraging psychological triggers. Again, I can go on and on about this, and you want to know more about how Sean thinks about psychological triggers, in the show notes I'm linking to an article by Sean on basically each one of these emotional triggers. Now let's talk about the second bucket. The next bucket to create content that sings are tactics. And I'm going to share with you 3 tactics that have an outsized impact on your content performing well. Tactic 1, write like you talk. And if you don't know how to write like you talk, literally record yourself on your phone with a voice memo talking through some content idea and then just transcribe it after the fact. Tactic 2, write with rhythm. The best way to have rhythm or to have flow in the way you write is to vary sentence length. And I'm going to link in the show notes to an amazing example of David Ogilvy who is obviously the GOAT of copywriting and advertising, showing an example of what it looks like to write a paragraph with sentences that are basically all the same length, and then write a paragraph with sentences that are entirely different in length. And you'll see as you read it how different it flows. And the third tactic is your hook is the most important thing. It is the first sentence of a tweet or the first line of a YouTube video. It allows someone to decide in 3 seconds whether your content is worth their time or not. If you spend 1 hour studying good writing, the first 45 minutes should be dedicated to studying the hook. And brainstorm 5 hooks before picking your favorite. Before you go, I want to share a few proven formulas for good hooks. So these— the next 5 things I'm going to share are formats that you can use to create a hook that has been proven to perform in the past. The first: share a contrarian view. The world believes X, you believe Y, and you're going to show why you are Number two, share a David and Goliath story. Everyone likes against all odds stories. Number three, demystifying a complex topic people don't understand or explaining a timely topic that people don't have the time to research themselves. Number four, promise an exciting and realistic outcome like a business idea that could earn you $100,000 in a year, but call out an obvious objection that people may have. Like maybe an obvious objection is I have a full-time job. How am I going to be able to do that? And in the hook, you would call out that this is a business idea. Idea that through these 7 steps you could monetize to $100,000 in revenue in a year doing it just on nights and weekends. And the 5th hook format is using eye-catching numbers and specific and odd lessons or steps. So the example here would be, I left finance and built a 9-figure newsletter business. I have never been more bullish on newsletters than I am right now. There are opportunities to build 8-figure newsletters all over. And I'm going to tell you in 8 steps how you can find that opportunity and how you can build it for yourself. Okay, I'm going to stop there. I've given you so much information to process. I am sure you have tons of questions. So if you have any questions about audience building, figuring out your content niche, or any of the 5 steps that I've outlined, shoot me an email to alex@morningbrew.com. I'll either answer your question over email or I'll maybe just combine a lot of these questions and turn it into a future episode where it's just a Q&A, but specifically around the content game and building an audience. As always, thank you so much for listening to Founders Journal, and I'll catch you next episode.