How to Grow Your Audience!!!
No, wait, come back.
I’ll be honest. I wrote a previous draft of this where I fully committed to the emoji heavy, nothing-behind-the-eyes smile and relentless upbeat voice of the people who make money (or so they claim) by writing about making money from writing online. I fully dived into the satire of it, I used all of the cloying phrases and filtered-down-from-Silicon-Valley-evangelists podcasts words like ‘learnings’ and ‘shipping’ and ‘content creation’ and all the rest of it.
But I couldn’t keep it up. Even as a joke I’m afraid I couldn’t fully go ahead with it. Because even though my days of caring about my audience numbers and open rates and churn are long gone I still have my standards. If anything my personal standards have only refined and become even more entrenched which is probably why the numbers aren’t taking off like a rocket ship1.
And so this piece took a cynical turn. But even though we do nosedive into the depths initially here today, I do inevitably pull up2 on the joystick before we smash into the ground. This means that even if you have discovered this article by chance and are actually sincerely interested in ‘growing your audience’ you may actually still walk away with something beyond the classless, short-term hacks that are normally peddled in articles that share the title with this one.
But anyway. Onwards…
Content Creation Learning For Maximal Internet Growth Number One: Lower Your Standards.
If you really want to grow your audience as much as possible then by definition you have to appeal to as many people as possible. People in the trade call this the Lowest Common Denominator. In a time when everyone only looks at the internet due to pre-existing behavioural addictions and a lingering sense of learned helplessness, this means you have to paint with a broad brush. You have to assume the audience is stupid. Think of the stupidest person you’ve ever met. Now think of someone about 20% less intellectually curious, culturally adventurous and freethinking than that. THAT is the level you need to pitch you ‘content’ (never think of it as art, you’ll start getting too fancy and the growth will slow down) at. Learn to suppress the lingering queasy feeling in your gut and the voice in your stomach that tells you that the ChatGPT listicle you have just ‘authored’ is beneath you. Because if you don’t post that dross then someone else will.
Content Creation Learning For Maximal Internet Growth Number Two: Lower The Audiences Standards.
As well as lowering your own standard, you need to lower the audience’s standards too. You need to both participate in and also contribute to the culture of dumbing down. And the way you do this is to bombard the online world continuously with your shit. Don’t spend weeks- or even days- pouring over your words and refining your prose. And certainly don’t spend any time away from screens thinking. If you do that you will inevitably, tragically3 find yourself pondering why you want to grow an audience in the first place. The answer probably won’t be pretty to tell you the truth. And it will probably terrifyingly contradict the nice guy or gal image that so many audience-building project/inflict on the world via their socials4. I’m sure psychologists have a words for this. The thing to remember is to just keep the shit slopping down the sluice at a steady stream, or preferably at a torrential flow if you can.
Content Creation Learning For Maximal Internet Growth Number Three: Keep Your Relatable Stories Robotic.
Very important. Whether via an email a podcast or a video you need to tell relatable anecdotes that make you come off as human. Or at least capable of passing the Turing Test. But not too much. Again, if you express any genuine idiosyncrasy or particularity you are going to cut your potential audience reach off at the knees. If you state a love of a particular thing then you are going to lose all of the people who are not into that thing. Some refer to this process as ‘niching down’ which is a phrase as elegant in sound as it is poetic in sentiment. Of course, if a ‘niche’ is suitably large and/or lucrative you can go down this road but you have to tread with caution. As a rule of thumb you can’t go wrong with blandly championing the contemporary mainstream and acting as an apologist for pop culture. See how this dovetails into points 1 and 2 above?
If you want to be something to everyone you can’t be anything to anyone.
Content Creation Learning For Maximal Internet Growth Number Four : Encourage your Audience to be Parasocial.
Remember the lowest common denominator idea? Well, the flipside of that is that the remaining people who have sufficient attention span, taste and refinement to appreciate unique and thoughtful online art and writing probably spend most of their time offline. Those who have figured out how bad the mainstream internet is (because of the mass following of rules one and two) are more than likely reading a book or off in the woods or something. So those that are left- and there are tons of them, so don’t worry- are the bored and the lonely. If you can attract them by offering a simulacra of friendship they will cling to you and do a lot of the legwork of spreading the word about your ‘Content’. Their shrieking, sycophantic, lost-all-sense-of-proportion presence will act as both a free marketing team and a seal of approval that you are on the way up. Look at Taylor Swift or Mr Beast or Elon Musk or any other deified mediocrity whose names instantly dates this article. Do what they do, but on a smaller scale. Milk the vulnerable, the unhinged and the underparented by offering a cardboard cutout version of friendship and relatability.
Content Creation Learning For Maximal Internet Growth Number Five: Don’t be Afraid of Repeating Yourself
Have I made essentially similar points to this article in several other articles over the years? Are my long-suffering core audience possibly sick to death of hearing it? Do I care?
You see, if you want to grow your audience as much as possible you have to stop seeing them as individuals with lives and histories and desires and fears and dreams. You need to see them as a fuzzy, amorphous blob, as a fictional online mass that somehow drops just enough money into your bank account to buy groceries each month5.
You need to not value their time, nor respect their intelligence. You need to- if writing an article like this one- not care that you initially started by picking on a particular kind of earnest teaching-writers-how-to-write type figure and have jackknifed erratically to ranting about influencers and online culture more generally. You can’t let such concerns slow you down. The Blob doesn’t care for coherence. As long as the numbers keep going up, who cares?
Content Creation Learning For Maximal Internet Growth Number Six: Post Graphs and Charts. Never Mention Luck.
Which brings me to the next point. You need to keep logging your progress. Save screenshots of audience figure charts and post them liberally under the guise of marking milestones. The lonely who want to cultivate a parasocial relationship with you love it when they can share in your subscriber count reaching an arbitrary round number. And those who are playing the same Attention Olympics love to congratulate you so that they can attempt to latch onto you like a remora fish or a barnacle or some other kind of needy but pragmatic species of marine life.
The game is the game.
Content Creation Learning For Maximal Internet Growth Number Seven : Bombard People With Calls to Action.
The Blob- which you have created remember, you cultivated this, you wanted an audience- doesn’t have feelings. It doesn’t- in the aggregate- get annoyed by buttons and links and other calls to action.
You know, things like this:
Or this:
So keep rolling the dice. If you don’t ask you don’t get. And though it’s seemingly getting closer to the ground each month there is still a lot lower this limbo bar of online culture can go. Are you going to miss out by not maximising your audience of people who skim-read your listicles while on the crapper or waiting at the post office? Are you going to allow yourself to miss out on a life behind a screen writing garbage and the opportunity to make literally tens of dollars?
Well?
The Actual Sincere Conclusion for Those Who Have Made It This Far.
If writing, as Hemingway said, is a question of opening up a vein and bleeding then I think what you just read was an example of a fed up man opening up a larynx and bleating. My apologies.
But I hope you were able to discern the message behind it all, the subtext to the sarcasm. And that is that deliberately endeavouring to consciously grow an online audience is a losing game. It always has been, but it’s even more so the case today. There are too many bots and too much fakery for one thing, and the social media platforms only still exist because of monopolistic practices and cultural inertia, not because their is a renaissance of bottom-up creativity going on. See, when everything is dictated by algorithms then dumb luck becomes the name of the game, frankly. Dumb luck after slavishly pandering to what you think it is that this non-human sorting device wants. And that way leads only to madness, surely. It certainly isn’t conducive to human creative flourishing.
So if this is all a game that you can’t win6 then the move is simply not to play it. Play a different game. Do the exact polar opposite of the rules above. Assume the audience is intelligent and discerning and give them art (yes, art) that is based on that understanding. Ignore what everyone else is doing. Ignore the internet entirely outside of your private online groups of friends. Post as infrequently as you like. Make your posts and stories as gargantuan as you like. Actively try and repel those who have been dragged down to the lowest common denominator level. Or drive yourself insane trying to elevate them. Be not only specific but be a tangle of contradictory specificities that makes no sense at all to anyone, even to yourself. Don’t humblebrag about ‘the journey’, just make something. Or don’t.
The rulebook from online growth was never too helpful and it’s downright ludicrous to follow it today. Just create for fun. If you want to. And if you don’t that’s fine. Or don’t publish it. Something can exist just for you. Not everything has to be monetised and there is nothing wrong with doing something purely as a private hobby.
It’s against many people’s economic interests to tell you that, but if true all the same. Not everything is about growth.
I mean look at how often I’ve been posting recently. This is not the prolific work rate of a go getter hungry for online fame, lets be honest. And look at some of the weirdos and their wonderful, beautiful work that clearly has absolutely zero mainstream commercial appeal.
Or is it push down?
Of course I say this from experience but sadly for my bank balance I have always been possessed by the naggings of conscience that make me question the ethics of a vocation/ get rich quick scheme I am about to embark on. Of course it is this and not a lack of the requisite brains/stamina/courage/connections that has stopped me becoming a mega-rich ethically flexible corporate legal mastermind.
‘Socials’ might even beat ‘learnings’ in the contest of words that make my skin crawl.
Or to allow you to buy things on layaway that give that same amorphous mass the false impression that you are doing really well which you are so humbled by, you guys.
And even if you do win you lose. Do people with big online audiences strike you as happy? Well-adjusted? Free?
Agreed. I just can’t play by the “rules”—so boring and predictable. I seek out tiny ‘stacks because I know that’s probably where the most creative work is hiding.
" the way you do this is to bombard the online world continuously with your shit. " 🤣 Excellent. Have you noticed what seems to me to be a relatively recent phenomenon, what I call the anti-humble brag? It involves explicitly stating that you're not going to crow about something because you know how annoying and obnoxious that is, and then proceed to talk about it without naming it. It's so needy that it's sad.