How To Build An Online Writing Business On Twitter
The Mastery Letter #9
Let’s get right to it.
You’re probably frustrated. You started with another few creators and they have 5x your followers. What the hell are you doing wrong?
You’re seeing other people’s threads pop off and you don’t know where to even begin.
You don’t know how to write content, what tools to use, or what to focus on.
It’s chaos.
You’ve come to the right place.
I’ve taken multiple courses, and about 2 months in to building my brand.
I am distilling everything I learned so far on my short journey so you can get at least to where I am at and avoid the mistakes. The goal is to help expedite your beginner’s journey.
This will include:
Principles: 80/20 rule, less is more, double down on what works
Priorities: Engagement, content creation, networking
Tools: Tweethunter, Analytics, iPhone notes, Notion, Canva, Pixelcut
Starting tasks: Profile, bio, niche
Daily habits: Content creation, engagement & networking
I am going to create a free course later on that will include way more depth to this that includes full on demos of my process & the tools I use.
Principles of mastery
Do way less stuff and don’t stop doing that stuff. Yep that is my entire philosophy. Newsletter over, goodbye.
Focus on a few things and master them. Don’t overcomplicate things. You need to train yourself to do things daily, for long periods of time. Being able to deal with little results for months.
Muscle takes years to build
Relationships take years to build
Wealth takes years to build
Business takes years to build
All of the things in life worth building for long periods of time experience a long delay for results. You must be patient to get the compounding effect.
There is no secret or shortcut. Billionaires just hyper focused on one skill for decades and didn’t get distracted with the next big thing. You must focus and be consistent.
80/20 rule. This applies to brand building. Don’t spend 80% of your time getting the perfect profile pic and bio. Don’t obsess over a landing page or newsletter like I did early on. This will not move the needle. You need to focus 80%+ on engagement to actually get leads/followers to see your content.
Priorities
Here are your priorities based on follower count. Remember, this course is focused ONLY on 0-1000 followers, as show in bold below.
Drill this into your thick skull asap: These are your priorities 0-1000 followers from a TIME standpoint:
Engagement 75%
Creating content 20%
Networking 5%
Imagine this..
You wake up, look in the mirror and you’re handsome as hell. You’ve got thick wavy hair and you’re marbled like a Greek God.
You walk to your computer to start working on your new brand because you saw a post from Dan Koe and Ross Harkness on Instagram and it inspired you.
You saw he had a cool landing page, so you spend the next week buying a domain, building a website, etc. You also fuck around with your bio for hours.
You’ve watched 2 youtube videos on blogs & newsletters.
Weeks go by.
You send 3 comments saying “Agreed!” and “That is badass!” on two people on your twitter feed the entire day.
Now let’s talk about your friend.. we can call Joe. You started with joe, and he focused entirely on engagement. He sits for 5 hours a day and posts valuable comments on random creators, ranging in size from 5 followers to 250k followers.
He has 500+ followers in 3 weeks.
You have 42.
The 42 follower guy was me.
I think you get the point.
Engagement is mainly what we care about for this course, as you go above 1000, content creation gains more of a priority, with engagement behind it.
When you get to the 10k+ range you want to focus a bit more on content + community building and so on.
i’ll cover that in a later course when I am in that stage of my journey.
Tools of the trade
Guys, keep it fucking simple. Please. You do not need 10 different tools to do this. KEEP YOUR SYSTEMS LEAN, especially early on.
Content Creation tools:
Tweethunter (Critical) - This is a godsend early on because you can schedule tweets ahead of time and it allows you to get multiple days ahead and focus on engagement, which is your primary focus early on. You can always plug your newsletter later on
Setup your queue. I like to do 8am, 10am and 12pm personally.
Load the gun with tweets
Check analytics for progress
iPhone notes - Create a folder labelled “Writing”. Create a folder within it named “Tweet ideas” and another “Notes” folder. Anything that brings you inspiration, books, podcasts, etc drop it in your tweet ideas. I get 50% of my content from books/YT/Podcasts and 50% from my own comments during engagement. Notes is for any content from courses, mentors, creators etc.
Notion: OPTIONAL FOR NOW - iPhone notes does the job. FOR NOW. I will likely start using this soon to systemize my content structures to save time from writing from scratch. Try it out, if it works for you, use it.
Bio building tools: DO NOT SPEND MORE THAN 30M ON THIS. YOU CAN ITERATE IT OVER TIME.
Pixelcut - use the free trial to remove backgrounds on your bio pic and add color. Psychologically, blue builds trust, which is why so many large corps have blue logos. I went with a turquoise. It doesn’t matter much.
Canva - create a header pic for the top of yoru twitter profile, don’t take more than 30 minutes. something simple and related to the value you will bring to your audiance. Your unique personality. This is not a priority.
Analytics tools:
Twitter Analytics - You can check out your follower growth, impressions, top tweets etc to see what works and what doesn’t
Starting tasks
Profile pic & bio
Choose Niche
Find 3 large creators in your niche
Obsess
Profile Pic & Bio
A great profile has social proof, unique branding, a clear offer proposition and a call to action. It’s early for me, so I focus on what value I provide and a call to action towards my newsletter. This will change over time.
Your bio should eventually, after many iterations and experience, be able to answer:
What’s the most impressive thing about you?
What’s in it for the reader?
For your profile pic, just stand in front of a window in the sun, set up your phone with 3 seconds delay and take a good picture. use PixelCut free trial to remove the background and add a color.
Niche
They say to choose 3 pillars, but if you can’t, then just write about shit that interests you. Your curiosities. Your unique experience through life. You can be your niche, as Dan Koe always says.
Try to add your unique experience and perspective to things to add value to other people’s lives.
My niche is mastery, focus and optimizing performance. I splash in health and fitness as well. It’s still early for me so I am still analyzing which tweets do the best and going from there.
This is all about adjusting, adapting and double down on what works.
Write a simple bio that describes what value you are bringing to the table.
3 Creators
Find creators in your nice, few 50k er’s, few 10-50k, and a few under 10k.
For me, it was:
Dan Koe
Ross Harkness
Dickie Bush
Justin Welsh
Naval
Kieran Drew
Tim Denning
Why? Because they are in my dream state. They’ve achieved freedom. They write 3 hours a day making anywhere from 10k-6 figures a month, from anywhere. I like their content, and they are balanced between health, wealth and relationships.
Follow them and some creators they follow. This is where you find smaller creators that are in their coaching/course programs that are a few steps ahead of you.
Find a couple new folks in your niche and DM them.
Having a team on your journey.
Shout out to my guy Steven Green who I started with back in November :)
You can retweet eachother stuff etc.
Obsess
Find 2-3 you like the best and mimic them. I Set notifications for them so you can be the first to comment. This helps maximize engagement.
These will be your northstar.
Creep on their bios.
Creep their profile picture.
Subscribe to their newsletters.
Read ALL their tweets for the last few months.
OPTIONAL: If one of them really tickles your curiosity, buy their course. You will know. Courses are trade $ for time. They simply condense lessons from everywhere on the internet into one place for you to quickly get the TLDR. This saves hella time and I recommend it.
Your required daily routine
Engagement - 2hrs/per day minimum. 25-50 quality comments/day.
Content Creation - 3-5 tweets a day & 2 threads a week
Networking - Couple DMs a day
OPTIONAL weekly newsletter: I built a newsletter early via substack and drop 1 every saturday morning.
Engagement - 66% - ~2 hours/day
Figure out a way. I grind out 2 hours in the morning to finish it early. Then throughout the day I will pepper in bonus comments.
I hate engagement, so I have to really force myself to follow a routine here. I wasted a lot of time on a landing page, newsletter, bio etc early on while engaging only like 20 minutes a day.
This was a large mistake that I learned from.
A friend I started with back in November is already at 700 followers because he focused on engagement 5 hours a day HEAVY from the get-go, he didn’t BS around with a newsletter, writing content or landing page.
You want to get to the big creators’ tweets first and craft a valuable comment. This comment SHOULD BE TWEET WORTHY.
At least 50% of my comments after I write it I will think to myself “Damn thats good” and copy it to tweethunter for a tweet.
I currently have 3 tweets scheduled every day for the next 5 days, easy.
Engage like a mofo.
Slowly increase volume so you don’t quit early.
Couple of my comments that generated 11k impressions, again, not crazy good, but all tweetable in their own right.
This should be the aim of your comments. Not “Agreed!'“ and “That’s fire bro!”.
Content Creation - 28% - ~45min/day
There are 3 pillars to content creation.
Growth
Authority
Relationship building
You don’t need to be rigid or understand this fully early on, but definitely work towards ensuring that every one of your tweets falls under one of these three pillars.
Growth content is going to help generate followers which you will use as leads for a service/product. Posts about your wins, posts with awesome hooks, tag creators etc.
E.g: 27k impressions for these two within my first 4-6 weeks of starting.
Authority content will be your ability to show mastery in your niche. Why should people listen to your ass?
Relationship building is obvious, build trust with your audience by being funny, charming, unique, asking questions, asking your community to introduce themselves etc.
Make sure your tweets have purpose aligned with the above
Next, we want to ensure that each tweet follows a structure that comes from a skill called copywriting.
Don’t freak out about this for now.
Just try to start thinking about the idea of some of these concepts when writing tweets.
Hook
Lead
Value
Summary
Call to action
What the hell does that mean you ask?
Hook is going to bring them in. Use specific numbers, % etc. Tweethunter will tell you if its high potential or SHIT.
Lead is what leads into the value
Value is what is the tweet offering, lists, bullets etc work well
Summary is going to summarize the above, usually in bullets or lists
Call to action tells the reader to click on a newsletter, course, product, etc. GET SHIT DONE. TAKE ACTION.
Example: Dickie Bush, 300k+ followers, amazing copywriter.
Hook = Looking to start writing online in 2023?
Lead = Then kickstart the year by writing & publishing every day for 30 days!
Value & Summary = Bulleted items
Call to action: He plugged his Ship30for30.com course.
Another example of this structure executed perfectly from Joey Justice:
A Great HOOK - Who wants to be unmotivated, lifeless sack of shit?
Lead - This pulls you into the value part seamlessly by going for your emotions. Everyone can relate to being tired in the morning and being annoyed by the alarm.
Value - He’s showing you how to get momentum with specific actionable steps
Summary + Call to action: He is listed out every tip he added from the tweets. Then calling you to action by inviting you to follow him, like it, RT, etc.
I like to schedule 3 tweets in tweethunter per day and add 1-3 bonus tweets that I come up with while i’m rock climbing, walking or lifting.
How do you come up with ideas, you ask?
Reading books, watch podcasts, etc. Feed your brain with content around your niche.
Let the ideas distill in your brain.
While you walk, lift, go throughout your day, other ideas from your experiences in life will connect with it.
You will have a light bulb moment for a tweet. Write this in your tweet folder.
You will move this to tweethunter later.
Networking - 3% - ~15min/day
DMing
@Tagging (NO HASHTAGS)
Join Discord channels
DM creators and talk to them like a fuckin human. Bring up a thread or tweet or how it’s impacted you. DO NOT ASK FOR ANYTHING.
Use the law of reciprocity. Do a favor for a person and they will likely do something in return. Don’t expect anything, because you’re getting experience regardless.
Tag them in valuable posts that support their course, or how they impacted you,
E.g. A tweet that generated 13.1k impressions in my first 2 weeks of starting.
Buy courses to get access to the creators + discord communites for feedback & coaching
Join a course that his a discord like Ross Harkness’s BrandBldr or Dan Koe’s Modern mastery.
You can get live feedback from your content and also network. If you do something great for them, a project of sorts with value, you can send it their way FOR FREE.
If they like it, they might retweet and help your networking/growth. I personally haven’t done this because I don’t really have graphic design skills and i’m too lazy regardless.
(OPTIONAL) weekly newsletter
I built a newsletter early via substack and drop 1 every saturday morning. If you do this, it may be wise to wait 6 months for more followers. Focus on 400-600 words. Keep it lean if possible unless it’s a long form ebooky thing like this.
Pros: No one to read your shit content, trains your writing skills early. You build momentum and the habit early.
Cons: You waste time writing things no one reads when you could be getting followers/leads from engagement volume.
RECAP:
Now you know:
Principles and mindset (do less stuff and don’t stop doing the stuff)
Priorities so you don’t make the same mistakes as me.
Tools for your journey to mastery
Starting tasks, mistakes to avoid and exactly how to spend your 3 hrs/day
Daily habits for engagement, content creation & networking
That’s it peeps.
Smell ya’ later.
-Brandon
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