- [Ali] My most important weekly habit
has been key to building an audience online,
which is one of the most game-changing things that I've done
for my personal growth and enjoyment of life.
From becoming financially independent,
to making friends with some really cool people,
building an online community has made
all of these things possible,
but I wouldn't have been able to do any of that
if it hadn't been for this one simple habit
that I've been doing for the last five years.
But before we talk about that,
let's talk about why building an audience
is one of the best things that you can do
for your personal life and career.
So firstly, relationships are the most important
things in life, as we all know,
and building an audience lets you connect
with so many more people, infinitely more people
than you would if you didn't have
some sort of presence on the internet.
It's really cool
because when you put your stuff out there online,
when you share your work,
then that work will resonate with people
who care about the same things,
and then those people real will reach out to you,
and then you might end up being friends on the internet
because you like each other's work.
Then you might end up meeting in real life,
and you might end up sort of having this
like blossoming friendship from someone across the world
that you would never have met
had it not been for the sharing stuff online
and trying to build this audience.
Secondly, if you care about having an impact,
then building an audience means that you can magnify
whatever impact you want to have as an individual.
So for example, for me, I enjoy teaching in real life,
but there's only so many people that I can teach
physically in person, even though that's quite fun.
And so instead, if I build an audience
and do teaching on YouTube or through my blog or email,
whatever, Instagram, TikTok, anything like that,
that means that my personal impact as a teacher
can be magnified because of the audience aspect of it.
If you're a surgeon like Atul Gawande,
then yes, you have an impact on the individual patient
that you're operating on
because you're operating on them,
but if you write up your findings from surgery
and checklists and all this kind of stuff
into a series of books,
then you have an impact on many, many, many more people
because now it's not limited
to the person that you're operating on.
It's like everyone because you've built that audience,
and you've put stuff out there into the world
that other people can check out,
and that has an enormous impact on,
well, Atul Gawande has had an enormous impact
on healthcare and a bunch of other fields as well.
Let's say your Kiley Jenner
with however many followers on Instagram.
Like if you care about something,
if you care about a social cause or anything else,
than the fact that you've got an audience online
will mean that so many more people will also know
and possibly care about that social cause
than if you were just an individual without an audience.
And thirdly, one of the benefits of the audience
is that you can monetize that audience,
i.e. sell out as some people like to say,
further down the line, if you really want to.
And there's this famous essay by Kevin Kelly called,
"1,000 True Fans," which talks about how,
if you want to make a full-time living,
you don't need millions or tens of thousands of people.
All you need is 1000 true fans.
And he defines a true fan
as someone who will pay you, on average,
$100 a year for the thing that you're doing.
So let's say you're a musician or an artist or something,
and you want to build that audience.
All you need is a thousand true fans,
a thousand people who every year will go to your show,
will buy your limited edition album,
and you can sustain a full-time living
off the back of those 1000 people,
and that's pretty cool.
The fact that that exists,
mostly thanks to the power of the internet,
means that there are so many more careers and career paths
that are possible compared to what it was
maybe a decade or two ago.
And that means that you don't have end up
doing a career that you might not enjoy.
You can carve your own career out there,
and by virtue of building an audience,
you can, hopefully at some point,
make enough money from that niche thing that you're doing
to be able to do that forever.
And then that's great
because then you're doing the thing
that actually matters to you,
and then you're not like working a job
that you'd might not enjoy.
You're doing the thing you actually want to do
and not being kind of shackled to employment
if you're not into that.
Let's now talk about how you actually build
this audience online,
and that is where the habit comes in,
and that is the habit of showing your work.
I first read this book by Austin Kleon in 2016,
I've talked about it on the channel before.
This is one of the books that's most changed my life,
and it only takes about like 20 minutes to read
because it's like very short,
and there's lots of cartoons and stuff.
But basically, the weekly habit is to show your work.
In some capacity, the thing that you're working on,
you want to document and you want to share on the internet,
however you like.
And so there's really three principles
that we want to follow here.
The first one is we want to be providing value.
And the way that Austin Kleon describes it
is that there's no value in sharing a photo
of your latte or your lunch,
unless you're like a food blogger or something,
but there is value in showing your work,
showing the thing that you're working on,
documenting your process of learning something,
and then sticking it on the internet.
And crucially, you're sticking it on the internet
without asking for anything in return.
A mistake a lot of people make is they think,
well, if I post stuff on the internet,
people should pay me for it.
Like, no, people should not pay for it.
The way you build an audience
is by giving people value for free,
and then over time,
after a few years of doing this consistently,
then people will maybe start paying you for it,
and that is exactly how it should work.
Secondly, you want to show your work,
but you want to do it consistently if at all possible.
Everything is better when we do it consistently.
You know, you get more Hench when you work out consistently.
You live longer when you eat healthier consistently.
You build an audience more effectively
and you just have more fun when you are
showing your work consistently.
And thirdly, you probably want to start
by picking out something fairly niche.
You know, if you're just getting started out,
then sharing kind of your productivity hacks
or something like that
probably isn't going to go garner you much of an audience
because there are zillions of people doing that same thing.
But if you're just starting out,
and you have a very niche interest in a very niche thing,
like I don't know, the economics of StarCraft II
or something like that,
then writing about that, showing your work and stuff,
that will be far more likely to get you an audience
in the short term.
Like I started my YouTube channel based around
helping people to get into medical school
at Cambridge University.
It's a very niche audience.
There's only like a few thousand people a year
who apply to that.
But then over time, my audience has expanded to be
more like productivity and tech and money
and entrepreneurship and that kind of stuff.
So basically, moral of the story is start really niche.
If you think it's too niche, it's probably not niche enough,
just like niche down as much as possible,
and like show your work when it comes to the quirky
and weird things about you.
So now that we're in this weekly habit of showing our work,
the next question becomes, where do we show our work?
And at this point, you've kind of got a few options.
You could go down the social media route.
You could make an Instagram account,
or you could make a YouTube channel,
and you could show your work on Instagram or YouTube
or TikTok or LinkedIn or Facebook
or things like that, and that's fine,
and a lot of people have built an audience
off the back of that.
But the difficult thing about building an audience
on a social media platform
is that you really don't own that audience.
The platform owns the audience.
So I've got 2 million subscribers here on YouTube,
but actually, I have no way of contacting
those 2 million subscribers here on YouTube.
They're not really my audience.
They are an audience that I've borrowed
from YouTube temporarily.
You know, I could make videos,
and those videos don't even go out to everyone.
They barely go to subscribers.
Some people have the notification bell on,
but then the algorithm changes.
And at any point, YouTube could make a change
that would mean that my audience of 2 million on YouTube
is worth not very much.
And so as much as I like to encourage people
to start YouTube channels or go on social media
or make Instagram pages or TikTok pages or whatever,
once you've kind of done that for a bit,
you kind of want to transition your audience
into, unsurprisingly or perhaps surprisingly
if you're not familiar with this,
you want to transfer your audience into an email newsletter.
Now this is going to sound really weird
if you're watching this and you don't use email a lot.
Like if you are under the age of 18,
you probably don't use email that much.
If you're right university, maybe you do,
but like certainly when you working a real job,
the whole world revolves around email.
And so having an email list
and having like someone's email address
is the only guaranteed way of being able
to contact that person.
And so basically what everyone says is that,
yes, it's okay to build an audience on social media,
but you've got to recognise you're building an audience
on borrowed ground.
It does not belong to you.
It belongs to the platform.
You want to try and get them onto your email list
as well as you possibly can.
There's all these people like Noah Kagan and Tim Ferriss
and Ryan Holiday and James Clear
that sing the praises of having an email newsletter
or having a mailing list
because, like I said, it is the only guaranteed way
that you can actually contact your audience.
And so the thing that I recommend to creators of all sizes
is just start an email list and start collecting emails.
It might not be relevant for you right now.
Maybe you might not even send a newsletter very often,
but at some point,
you're going to be really glad you have an email list
where you can have that direct line to your audience.
And then, you know, the cool thing about
sending emails to people
is that people actually reply to those emails.
I've managed to connect with so many people
who just were subscribed to my email newsletter,
and then I send something out, it resonates with them,
they reply, it goes straight to my inbox,
we can have a bit of conversation,
and I've actually made friends in real life
and kind of business contacts
through just kind of replying back and forth
to email newsletters.
What does an email newsletter?
I don't like the word newsletter
because newsletter sounds like, you know,
something from 2002,
but really it's sort of an email that you send
on a regular basis.
It could be weekly.
It could be every other week.
It could be every month.
And it just has a few things in it.
I've got a few friends who send weekly newsletters,
and in those, they just share links.
You know, Tim Ferriss has,
I'm not saying Tim Ferriss is a friend.
One day, fingers crossed.
Tim Ferriss has this Five Bullet Friday,
where every week he just sends a list of five things
that he's been enjoying that week.
That's pretty cool.
I mean, David Perell has his Monday Musings
and his Friday Finds newsletter
where he sends a few thoughts that he's been thinking about
and then links to articles that he's found useful.
I mean, Nat Eliason has his Monday Medley,
I think it's called, where he just sends, again,
links to stuff that he's enjoyed that week,
books, blog posts, music, anything interesting like that.
And that strategy of curation is very good
because right now we're living in a sort of
the abundance era where there's just
so much stuff out there,
whereas if you sign up to someone's newsletter
where they are curating interesting things for you,
and then you're following links to those interesting things,
that's actually a really valuable service
to be able to offer to people.
And that's what I did with my newsletter,
you know, every week, Sunday Snippets, mostly every week.
I just send out, you know, I'm reading this book.
It's interesting because of this.
Oh, here's a blog post I really enjoyed.
Here's a bit of music that I've been listening to,
along with some general thoughts about life,
stuff I've been thinking about that week.
And it doesn't take too much effort on my part to write,
you know, when I can actually get around to writing it,
because I'm just documenting or curating the stuff
that I've already done that week.
I am basically just showing my work.
I'm not trying to create something
particularly special from scratch.
And so if you're interested in starting a newsletter,
what I would recommend is you go down this approach
of just write a paragraph
sharing something that you've learned
or something you've been thinking about that week,
and then a few links to interesting things
that you've read or listened to or watched,
anything like that works really nicely
as an email newsletter.
You can send it out to your friends and family.
It's kind of nice.
I kind of keep up to date with some of my friends
because they've got newsletters,
and it's kind of nice to see what they've been up to.
It's sort of like an Instagram story,
just a little bit more like highbrow
and a bit more intentional than that.
So you can easily start an email newsletter like that.
And so if you're sold on that,
the next thing you need to do is figure out a platform
to write your newsletter on.
There are two free options that I would recommend:
Substack and Revue.
Substack is very good.
I know a lot of people who use that.
Revue is very good.
I've been using that for the last three years.
Recently, we switched over to ConvertKit,
which has also very good.
ConvertKit is I think free
for the first 1000 subscribers in your list.
So if you want, you can start with that.
And it's just more powerful,
and it has a bunch more features than Substack or Revue do.
But to be honest, take your pick.
Any of those three platforms are fine.
All of them are completely free.
ConvertKit is free for the first thousand subscribers.
Substack and Revue are free forever.
And you can just start getting emails in a list.
It's kind of fun.
Like everyone I know who's started a newsletter
has been like, oh, this is actually quite a fun thing to do.
Like it gets you into the habit of writing something weekly.
It gets you into the habit of like reflecting
on how your week's gone and what you've learned.
And it gets you into the habit of showing your work
and sharing stuff with people.
And it's not that hard.
Like you don't have to get fancy cameras
and start a YouTube channel.
You don't have to put yourself out there
by being one of those people
who posts photos of themselves on Instagram.
You literally can just send one email every week
or one email every month that has like two paragraphs in it
and a few links,
and that is a great way of getting started
with building an audience on the internet.
If you enjoyed this video,
and you'd like to find out more
about how having this writing habit
can genuinely change your life, click that video there,
which is "How Writing Online Made Me a Millionaire."
Bit of a clickbait title,
but it's got some really useful tips,
and people have been finding it really helpful.
So thank you so much for watching.
Do hit the subscribe button if aren't already,
and I'll see you in the next video.
Bye-bye.