- [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.
