Neil Patel and Eric Siu explain how to build an audience online: pick one niche and post consistently, usually daily, to escape the platform sandbox. They share a story of someone whose YouTube Shorts exploded after months of high-quality work, and stress that unique content beats copying competitors.
The way you build an audience is you do something that they haven't seen before.
They make these excuses around, oh, I just don't have enough time.
You're not standing out. You're not giving a reason for people to follow you. There's no formula to going viral. A lot of it is luck, and it's a big hit or miss.
So we're going to talk about why you don't have an audience, and we're going to give you the tips that you, that you should do if you want an audience, because it's helpful to have the reach, because the reach is what helps you get the business that you desire at the end of the day.
The big issue with people who don't have an audience is if you look at the content that you're posting, it's going to be content that's similar to your competition. It's going to be content to what's similar out there on the web and that's working for other people. But here's the issue with that. People have already seen it from other accounts that have a lot of followers. So when they look at the content you're posting, it's just regurgitated information or similar types of content. The way you build an audience is you do something unique, new, fresh that they haven't seen before. This is not content you can create from ChatGPT. This is content that you're going to have to go out there and create something that's brand new, fresh, and never been talked about before. That is the biggest key to creating an audience. It really does start with the content. Yes, promotion is important, but the big mistake that people are making is they're creating content that they think is amazing, but it's just the same regurgitated information that everyone else is talking about. You're not standing out. You're not giving a reason for people to follow you. You're not giving a reason for the algorithms to push and promote you.
You know what's interesting? So Neil, I don't know if you've seen this, but there is, there's a gal, I forgot what her name is, but she's a very normal person, but she does a podcast where she's very abnormal. So she does like a podcast interview with Drake, like under the covers or like with Mark Cuban.
I saw that, you showed it to me.
Yeah. And she did an interview with Mark Cuban. It was just really weird. It's like, so, can you give me a billion dollars or something? And she acts really weird, right? But that is a unique angle that helped her get the reach that she wanted. And in the last episode, we talked about Sam Sulick. It's like, okay, that's what's unique to him, right? And so, even for this podcast, what's unique is that Neil and I are both not just marketers, but we're both operators as well and we can share those experiences. And we travel the world a lot too to speak at different conferences and we like to share those experiences. So, one is be unique, obviously, right? But 2, understand that building an audience, you're usually not going to hit lightning in a bottle. We have a mutual friend. He sold his company for a lot of money, hundreds of millions, and he started making YouTube Shorts. And the Shorts, they were really high quality. He was telling a story in every single one and they just were not getting anything for the first, I don't know, I'd say 8 months, 9, 10 months or so. And he's probably spending like, you know, a good chunk of money each month on the editing. And he was getting like 100 views per video, 200 views per video. And that's like nothing for Shorts, right? But then like 8, 9, 10 months later, you see a video, 2 million views, 11 million views, 4 million views. It's like sometimes it takes, not sometimes, most of the time I should say, it takes time to get out of that sandbox, which we've talked about, right? And then also, you have to be very consistent. So he's posting every single day, right? If you want to get out of the sandbox, if you want to grow on these channels, you have to become an employee of these channels. And that means that you have to look like you're not only consistent every single day, but you're consistently talking about some, like the same thing. You can't keep talking about different things because the algorithm's not going to know what box to put you in.
What Eric's talking about is you need to be an expert on that subject. They don't want you to be like the Wikipedia of content creation where you talk about everything. They want you to focus on one vertical. Doesn't have to be a niche, but a vertical, and only create content around that topic, e.g., makeup or beauty or marketing. And then you also have to be willing to try new things. There's no formula to going viral. A lot of it is luck and it's a big hit or miss. But if you don't keep trying new things and you don't keep experimenting, it's not going to do well. And you also need to try to be as unique as possible. For example, as recording this podcast, I posted something a few hours ago about my ChatGPT experience and how we created 1,000 articles and found 186 of them are duplicate. I then went into details on what is considered duplicate, how I found out if it was duplicate or plagiarized content. And then I talked about what you should do to do well if you want to use ChatGPT to create content. But I was coming up with data and insights. Talking about ChatGPT isn't unique. Everyone's already knows about it. It's one of the most popular websites in the world, but talking about it from a different angle, like, hey, you can't just rely on it to create content or else you're going to have a lot of issues. That kind of stuff stands out and it starts getting traction. You got to be unique somehow and you got to test a lot of stuff to figure out what's hitting and what's working versus just being like, okay, I'm going to be unique and I'm going to just do this one type of thing. Well, you may love it, but if everyone else doesn't, it doesn't matter.
Sometimes, let's say you're starting out. Let's say you're 18 years old and you're watching this right now or listening to this. And you're like, okay, well, I don't have much experience right now. Well, what you can do is you can share your journey and that is something that's unique to you. And then as you start to get better and as you start to pick up more experience, then you can start to share those learnings and you can start to make more how-to videos. That's how you can get going. But I think most people want to absolve themselves of the responsibility of being excellent. So they make these excuses around, oh, I just don't have enough time. I don't have enough experience, blah, blah, blah. But everyone started from that. Nobody really had a lot of experience going into this stuff. Some people had more work experience maybe, but you know, that's an example of how you can start to document first before you start to focus on creating. Yep.
So cool, that's it for this episode. Make sure you rate, review the episode, give us 5 stars. We really appreciate it. See you tomorrow.
