The Steal Club - 8 tips to get your first 1000 followers

Hey everyone!

We lost the sponsor for this issue at the last minute, so I decided to play a little game over on Twitter and make it a public bid.

It was soooo fun and went way better than expected! 

Huge congrats to Ruben Alonso who won the bidding war. Give some love to his product!

Time to read: 3 minutes 39 seconds

According to the Oxford dictionary (because I looked it up, not because I know it) a "bargain" is a thing bought or sold for less than usual or expected. 

What the dictionary doesn't know, is that in the Telegram channel I've set up I'm getting bargains on digital products and web tools of all kinds that:

1. Have a great price offer

2. You don't need to put any effort into finding them. You simply join the Marketing Bargains Telegram channel and that's it!

Hey, I wouldn't be surprised to see the name of the channel in the dictionary one day...

I’m always on the lookout for the best actionable tips to help people build and grow their audience.

So I asked on Twitter, “For those who’ve grown over 1,000 followers or subscribers, what is the #1 thing you attribute your success to?”

These are the best replies I got:

#1 - Find a lane as soon as possible. People need to have a good sense of what you're about when they land on you. 

Credit: Stephen Moore

#2 - Get the basics right: create a followable profile and interact with people to reach their audiences. 

Credit: Marina Lunes

#3 - Write scarce, specific content that helps people/businesses save money, save time & earn more $. 

Credit: Mike Cardona

#4 - Be yourself. From the beginning … and consistently from that point forward. Celebrate others; talk about the folk who inspire you way more than you talk about yourself (…) Social media NOT sales media. 

Credit: Feastsandfables

#5 - Listen to what others are struggling with and then create helpful content around it. 

Credit: Marissa Goldberg

#6 - Start. Don’t stop. 

Credit: Jay Yang

#7 - Build a circle of support. 10-15 other Twitter newbies who love what I love and share my values. Helping each other, and supporting each other, we encouraged our mutual effort and consistency. 

Credit: Ana Bibikova

#8 - Relentless consistency. I've written 146 articles, released 146 podcast episodes, and sent 146 newsletter issues — for the last 146 weeks. I tweet at least 5 times a day and make sure to interact with interesting people daily. 

Credit: Arvid Kahl

Most of the responses focused on consistency as the key factor. 

And I couldn't agree more.

I've been doing this content creation thing for the past two years, almost every day. 

As a result, many doors have opened for me: being able to create a freelance business, meeting amazing people and the opportunity to try to make it as a full-time creator.

It takes time to create these opportunities online. A very long one.

I'm not talking days, weeks, or months. 

I'm talking years.

During that time, I've seen people grow much faster than me. However, most of them disappeared sooner or later because they got tired or they burned out.

Lesson learned: If you are able to maintain consistency, you'll outpace 99% of people.

If you write a newsletter, you know that improving your email’s deliverability is a must. 

Sometimes Gmail and the other email clients just deliver your email into the spam or Promotion folders. 

This often happens when the account which you are sending the mail from is new or doesn’t have much authority.

That’s the reason why some newsletters ask you on their welcome email to reply to their email. 

There are a few reasons:

• To build a deeper relationship with the audience
• To signal to Gmail o whatever email client you are using that that address is legit

The other day, while reading The Milk Road, a crypto-focused newsletter, I came across this 👇

I wasn't sure if they did it for deliverability reasons, but I found it to be a great way to increase response rates.

Plus, it's fun and makes your audience feel like they are active, not just passive receivers.

The best part? This is absolutely translatable to other platforms. This is how I plan to do it on Twitter and Instagram:

I’ll report back!

The Student Creator is a creator-focused newsletter.

Jay shares 3 lessons, 2 quotes, and 1 short story. Every Sunday.

As well as weekly atomic essays on audience-building, online business, and self-improvement.

Join 430+ curious individuals learning to use the internet to build leverage, grow audiences, learn skills, and get paid.

There’s a type of content that always does well, whatever the platform. 

I’m talking about lists of people.

I’m sure you’ve seen the “top 10 people to follow to learn SEO” or “Follow these 10 entrepreneurs to master startup building” posts.

There are a few problems with these though:

1. It’s easy to become a spammer. These tweets often do well so people tend to overdo them. Which quickly turns into spam
2. They are boring and repetitive. Once you’ve read once, you’ve read them all.
3. And they always tag the same people 🤷‍♂️

So why am I recommending this content format?

Easy. Because I found out there are different ways of making these lists and actually keep them interesting.

Let’s take a look at this example by Josh Spector on Twitter 👇

See what he did differently? Instead of doing the typical list of “People who I admire”, he framed it as “People who I’m jealous of”.

Then he followed up by recommending each of these people and saying what made him "jealous".

At the end of the day, it’s just another list of people. But the framing it’s what makes it different.

Josh took something that’s a bit saturated, added a new twist to it, and made it better as a result.

This shows us that we don’t always need to blindly replicate what works. 

We are allowed to take it and add our own twist to it.

Btw, Josh writes For The Interested, one of my fav newsletters. 

It features proven strategies to help you grow your audience and business based on how others have done so. You should check it out!

• (NEWSLETTER) Join more than 7000 creators and solopreneurs getting the free Business Brainstorms newsletter. Level up your entrepreneurial game and get high-quality paint points, trends, and frameworks delivered straight to your inbox.
• (VISUAL) How to create new ideas.
• (PRODUCT) Want to figure out how to engineer opportunities on the internet? Check out the Permissionless Apprentice.

And this is it for now! 

I want to thank again our main sponsor for today's newsletter, Marketing Bargains. Go check out their amazing offers!

Now, what do you think of today's email?

• 👍 Worth it
• 😐 Meh - was ok.
• 👎 Not interesting to me

Your feedback helps me improve this newsletter!

See you next week!

Alex Llull

Thief Master

The Steal Club

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