 So on January 1st, 2020, I made a goal to start building my audience online. And my goal was to build an audience on YouTube, in a Facebook group and on my email list, showing people how I've made a full-time income online since 2016. Well, today marks my 100th YouTube video and now my audience size across all my different platforms is right around 35,000 to 40,000. There's some overlap between the platforms to 35,000 to 40,000 people. Now, building an audience has been, hands down, one of the best things that I've done, not only for my personal growth, but for my financial growth and my business growth as well. So in this video, I want to share the six most important lessons or tips that I learned as I grew and built my audience online that will hopefully help you if you're building your audience as well. So before I begin, make sure you subscribe and hit the bell icon. Doing that lets me know that you're enjoying the content, also helps to share it to other people who can benefit from it as well. And it helps to keep me motivated to make these videos for you. So make sure you subscribe and hit the bell icon so you don't miss any of my future videos. With that said, let's jump into these six tips or these six lessons right now. Now, tip number one is stop trying to build an audience. Now, I know that sounds counterintuitive, but hear me out. What you want to do is document, not create. Document, not create. And if you look at the people who have the fastest and most engaged audiences, a lot of the time they're not trying to build their audience. Their audience just grows as a byproduct of what they're doing in their daily life. So if you look at the people like the Paul brothers, right? Jake and Logan Paul, they grew because they were doing all these crazy stunts and these pranks in real life and people thought it was funny and they followed them because of that. And nowadays they're both boxing, right? So Logan Paul just boxed Mayweather a few months ago, Jake Paul just boxed two UFC fighters and they're getting a ton of attention because now they're training to be boxers. If you look at Gary V, one of the biggest personal brands online, he started off by documenting his journey of building his wine company. And if you look at a YouTuber like Ali Abdaal, he was documenting his journey of building a YouTube channel and going through medical school at the same time. So some of the biggest creators online with the biggest and most engaged audiences just started by documenting their journey. They weren't trying to really create content. They were just documenting what they were doing in real life. So this could be anything from learning a new skill and sharing the journey, doing some crazy or funny pranks or stunts, building a business, creating a product, or maybe just vlogging your daily life or some hobbies that you're into. So that's the first and probably one of the most important tips on this list is stop trying so hard to build an audience. Think of it as documentation of what you are doing in your life. Tip number two is to build specific knowledge. And I first heard this statement in a Twitter thread by a guy named Naval Ravikant. You might know him very popular on Twitter. And he had this thread called how to get rich without being lucky. And he says to arm yourself with specific knowledge, accountability, and leverage. And that specific knowledge is found by pursuing your natural curiosities and your passion rather than what is hot right now. So if you go to Naval's Twitter, I think he still has it as his pin thread, the how to get rich without getting lucky thread. You can read through that. But that's where I first heard this building specific knowledge concept. Now for me, I've always been curious and interested from a very young age around financial freedom and making a lot of money without having to put in a lot of time. I was also interested in good at writing as I grew up. So I won a couple competitions around writing. And it's always been something that I was interested in and good at. Another thing that always interested me growing up was the idea of books where somebody could write a book. And I thought authors were rich at the time. All authors are rich. But that's not always the case. But you could write a book and it could be read by millions of people, even if you only wrote it once. So that idea of financial freedom and making money in a leveraged way was always something I was very curious about growing up. So what I did in my adult life is I followed that curiosity and that passion for writing and financial freedom and making money in a leveraged way. And that led me to copywriting and email marketing. So with copywriting and email, you can write one email or one piece of copy, like a sales page or a blog article, a piece of content. And it can be viewed millions of times, even if you only wrote it once. So that's what really drew me to copywriting and email marketing. And now because of my natural curiosity and because of the specific knowledge and skills that I built up around writing and copywriting email marketing, I'm able to make money in a leveraged way or I'm writing one to many, right? I write one email or one piece of content and thousands, potentially even millions of people can view that. And you become a really interesting person as soon as you start to build up this specific knowledge and specific expertise. So that's tip number two is to build up specific knowledge. Now tip three is to start with one platform. Don't do what I did, which is try to grow three different platforms at once, right? I try to grow my YouTube channel, my Facebook group and email list all at once. And I am convinced that if I just focused on one of those channels, I would have grown 10 times faster. And the reason is every platform is different. There's a different algorithm. There's different content styles. There are different details that make certain pieces of content stand out and get traction. So if you're trying to jump on three different platforms at once, it's going to make it very hard to build an audience. So the best thing to do, if I were to go back and start all over, I would start with one platform or one channel, do that for eight to 12 months, and focus on building up a big audience there or a very engaged audience there. It doesn't need to be big. And then using your success on that one platform to send people to other platforms. So for example, what I did now was I used my email list and my YouTube channel and my Facebook group to help me grow my Twitter profile by just talking about my Twitter profile and some of my other pieces of content on the other channels. So once you build one channel or one platform up, it's a lot easier to use the people who have started to follow you there and tell them about the other platforms that you're building an audience or creating content on. And this is exactly how a lot of the influencers on platforms like TikTok, Instagram and YouTube have done it, right? There is years ago, there was a platform called Vine where you can make short 15 second videos and a lot of these current influencers today got really popular on that platform. They had millions of subscribers and followers and they took those followers and they directed them once Vine closed down to other platforms like Instagram and YouTube and now TikTok. And they took the people that they built an audience on that one platform on Vine and used it to build multiple different audiences across different platforms. So that's tip three, start with one platform first, build an audience there and then eight to 12 months. If you want to add a second one, it's going to be a lot easier to send people from one platform that you already built an audience on to that second one. Tip number four is to get hobbies outside of work. And no, Netflix does not count as a hobby. So what I found with hobbies outside of work is it opens a totally different side of my brain. And I meet people and communicate with people who give me new ideas and new stories and new perspectives and insights. And I document a lot of those things and it makes me a much more interesting and relatable person to follow. If I was just all business all the time, just talking about my business had no hobbies outside of work, didn't hang out with anybody, didn't have any friends or anything that I did outside of business. I feel like I'd be a lot less interesting, a lot more boring and a lot less relatable. So a few of my hobbies are watching and training mixed martial arts. I like to surf when I'm home in Hawaii. I like to golf. I like to go out drinking with my friends. And some of my best stories and email ideas and business ideas come from these hobbies outside of work. So get hobbies outside of work. It's going to help you build your audience a lot faster. And if you have a business, it's going to help you build that a lot faster too, because you're going to be more interesting and relatable to the people who follow you. Tip number five is to be a story collector. So if you are working on cool projects, you're documenting the journey, you're building specific knowledge and you have hobbies outside of work. You are guaranteed to have stories that are interesting. So I have a notepad doc on my phone that has literally over 700 different story ideas that I can use for emails or content or for sales promotions. And what I do is every day I take one thing that happened to me and I just add it to this notepad file. And I don't use everything as a story, but I have this running doc of hundreds of different ideas and hooks that I can use and stories that I can use in my content and to help me build an audience. Now by doing this exercise for yourself, just taking out a notepad and adding things every day to this notepad stories that happen to you, you're going to realize two things. Number one is you're a lot more interesting than you think or than you thought. And number two is you have an endless list of ideas for things you can document and create content around to help you build your audience and help you build your business. All you have to do is tie those stories back to what you're working on or to what's relevant to your audience. These don't have to be crazy or wild or super shocking stories either. For example, one of my best selling emails is a story about a local butcher shop that I went to and I went in with the intention of just buying one steak. This butcher was so good at upselling and cross-selling me. I ended up walking out of the store with double the amount of steak that I thought I would buy. It was the top tier steak, the most expensive steak I could buy. And I had sausages and chicken and all these other things that I didn't intend on buying because the butcher was so good at sales and upselling me and cross-selling me on the different meats that they had in the shop. And I tied that story about the local butcher back to marketing sales funnels and it helped me to sell a copywriting product that I have and became one of my best-selling emails of all time. And it all came from a story that most people just overlooked. They wouldn't think to tell it or note it down. But as soon as that happened, I added it to my notepad file, wrote an email about it the next day and it brought in thousands of dollars in sales. So that's tip five is to be a story collector, collect anything remotely interesting that happens in your life. Even if you don't think it's going to be super interesting, just note it down, keep it in the notepad file on your phone. And whenever you need a new story to write about or to create content around, you'll have a running list of all these different things that happen in your life that you can write or create content around. The sixth and final tip or lesson is that consistency will make or break you. So the most successful people, they're not always the best at what they do. They've just been doing their thing for longer than anybody else and more consistently than anybody else. And people get bored very fast today, right? The attention span I read is less than that of a goldfish. It's less than six seconds and people will get bored really quickly. So if you're not shown up consistently over a long period of time, you can easily be forgotten. And that's why consistency is the most important thing, the number one most important thing when building an audience. I would rather be the guy who posts one video a week on YouTube for two years versus the guy that posts five times a week for six months and then stops. And I need to get better about this too, but the more robotic you can be with your schedule, the better. So what I mean by that is if you think about a TV show, it doesn't just switch times every week. It's on the same day at the same time every week. So whether you're writing emails or posting content on social media or you're making YouTube videos, you want to make your schedule as robotic as possible so that people are programmed to tune in at a certain day or time to watch your content or consume your content. So that's tip or lesson number six is that consistency super important. It can either make or break you. And the most successful people I know aren't necessarily the most talented. They're just the most consistent over a long period of time. So that wraps up my six biggest lessons or tips for building an audience online. I can't promise you any specific numbers of how big your audience is going to be if you're posting content over a certain period of time. But I do know that these six lessons or tips that I shared with you today will help you grow a lot faster than trying to piece it together on your own. So if you're trying to build your audience online, make sure you save this video, go back through it a few times and start applying this to your life as you start to build your audience. Now for those of you interested in building specific knowledge, one of the tips on this list, around email marketing and copywriting, go to email rainmaker.com. That's going to take you to my free Facebook group and my email list where you can join and learn exactly more about that. And that's it for this video. I'll see you in the next one. Take it easy.