You don't need to an "influencer"

There are a lot of people on the internet who really, really dislike me.

It’s just kind of an unavoidable thing that as your audience gets bigger, the amount of weird, annoying people also gets bigger.

Let’s assume that 5% of people in general are annoying. If you have 1k followers, that means you have 50 annoying people in your audience.

→ 100k followers = 5k annoying people

→ 1 million followers = 50k annoying people

Source: I have 1.1 million followers, and 50k actually feels low to me 😅

To be clear, I’m not complaining. Building an audience that size opened doors for me that had been closed my whole life and I made a life-changing amount of money from it.

It’s been very, very good to me. But in hindsight, I might have done things differently.

I might have built an audience that was more about QUALITY than QUANTITY.

Why am I telling you this?

Aren’t I supposed to tell you that you need a huge audience so you’ll feel inadequate about your current audience and pay me to help you get more internet points??

Maybe, but I’m dumb so I’ll just tell you the honest truth:

In most cases, you don’t have to be anywhere near “internet famous” to get life-changing results.

I’ll explain:

Broadly speaking you can think of your audience in two dimensions: Size and intent to buy from you.

→ Small audience/low intent aka “The Zone Of Pain” isn’t a sustainable business

→ Large audience/high intent is statistically less likely than winning the lottery

Which means that you effectively have two viable options:

→ Option A: Large audience with low intent (100k+ followers)

This makes sense if you want to sell a low-ticket offer with broad appeal (t-shirts, beauty products, food, etc), or if you monetize via ads.

Or if you want to be internet famous (which I don’t 😅)

This is what I did on YouTube: I have 130 million total views, but they’re from videos about music— something that doesn’t really have anything to do with my actual career.

To be totally honest with you, I didn’t take that direction as some kind of calculated choice. It’s just the only way I knew how to think of Youtube back in 2017.

I said “I’m gonna get my name and face in front of as many people as I possibly can, then figure out how to turn all those eyeballs into opportunities.”

And again, I’m not complaining. It worked out great for me.

But with the benefit of hindsight, I realize that building the biggest audience you possibly can isn’t the only way to do things.

So if I was gonna do it all over again, I might go with option B.

→ Option B: Small audience with high intent (1k-100k followers)

If you have a very targeted, relatively high-ticket offer, you do NOT need a big following.

Let’s say you have 5k high-quality followers, and your offer is a $5k consulting package. Out of those 5,000 people, can you find 2 a month who will buy that?

Hell yes you can.

And that’s $120k a year— a solid living for most people.

(if you painted yourself into a corner by moving to San Jose where you pay $3500 for a studio, that’s on you 😅)

In fact, a bigger audience is kind of counter-productive. What’s the point of adding another 1k followers if they’re not your ICP? All that does is add noise to your feed… it’s pointless.

So here’s my point:

If you want to have a huge audience and reach millions of people, by all means go for it! It absolutely will change your life and create incredible opportunities for you, just like it did for me.

But it’s not the ONLY way.

So if the idea of being internet famous sounds awful to you, don’t worry— there’s almost definitely a path where you can focus on QUALITY over QUANTITY.

And then you won’t need to worry about random strangers on Twitter calling you the worst things you can imagine because you don’t like their favorite band 🙃

—

And SPEAKING OF OFFERS, I have a new one: On-call content consulting.

To make a long story short, for $1k USD per month you get 24/7 access to me via text or email plus a 1-hour Zoom call.

Ask me anything about your content, offers, business… whatever you want (more info here).

These chats are so valuable because the details MATTER. Something as simple as the right headline could be the difference between a post that does OK, and a post that gets you a DM from your dream client!

→ Is it really unlimited? Yes.

→ Can you text me at 6 AM on Christmas morning? Yep!

If you’re interested, reply to this email or just set up a call here!