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The Indie Creator🎨 - Issue #4

The Indie Creator🎨 - Issue #4

September 12, 2021

Hey Folks👋

Hope you’re doing good.

Welcome to your weekly dose of insights to crush it in the creator economy.

Today I am talking about a very important topic - Owning your audience.

Let's Go👇

Jack Butcher's Bane

A few months back, this happened -

Jack Butcher is one of the most prolific indie creators I know, his visuals and Tweets are top class. I'm a big fan.

And one random day, Twitter wiped out 4 of his peripheral accounts.

These are niche accounts where he posts very specific type of Tweets.

If you read that thread, you'll see that Twitter didn't have any solid reasons to do this, it seemed more like on a whim.

Eventually he did get some accounts back, but not all.

If that can happen to Jack, it can very easily happen to any of us small creators.

We can't trust these social media platforms.

That's why we must own our audience, we should always have an email list we are adding members to.

Rand Fishkin shares some more reasons -

Rand Fishkin's Advice

Rand Fishkin is an experienced content marketer, he has been writing content on the web for almost 15 years now.

This week he wrote a very important piece.

The incentives to publish no longer reward the web's creators:
My first blog post in a couple months, with a breakdown of why publishing content the ways we used to doesn't motivate us the way it once did.
— Rand Fishkin (@randfish)
8:48 PM • Sep 7, 2021

The essence of his article was that all social media platforms push down any posts with an outbound link. Such posts don't get way less eyeballs than native posts.

This is true for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn.

And Instagram pushes down posts with "Link in Bio" in the description. That sounds so crazy🙄

But they can totally do that.

For us, content creators, this was the most important part

Again the same idea comes back, own your audience, start a newsletter, ask your followers for their email🤷‍♂️

That's why I now write 3 weekly newsletters with 1800+ subscribers across them.

Yes.

I am paranoid😅

Andrey's Story

Did I just say I write 3 newsletters?

This week, in one of my other newsletters, Listen Up IH, I wrote about an Indie Hacker Andrey Azimov.

He didn't know how to code, yet he built a website builder (Sheet2Site), took to more than $10K MRR and eventually sold the company.

That was his 7th startup.

The best thing he did?

He Built all of them in public and had a single email list that people kept subscribing to after every project.

He built a crucial following on Twitter and his personal email list that helped him spread the word about his products.

If there's just one lesson you take from Andrey's story, let be this - Own your audience, ask them for their email.

Looking Back

My best tweet of the week?

This one -

Unpopular Opinion🙄
Life is not lived on the weekends.
Life is lived every minute of every day.
if you wait for Friday all week.
And hate Mondays every week.
That's a signal that things need to change.
It's not healthy🤷‍♂️
— Ayush 🙏 (@ayushtweetshere)
4:35 PM • Sep 11, 2021

This one got more than 1200 impressions and close to 4% engagement rate.

Which is good for a small account like mine.

And it's been just 24 hours to get this result.

Again, this is a signal for the type of content my audience likes, and I would look to double down it.

It's good to look at your Twitter analytics once a week and take notes.

This section in this newsletter is a forcing function for me to do that😅

Time's Up⌚

That's it I guess, that's my 3 minutes.

Let me know what you thought of this issue.

And also what kind of content would you like to see more of in the future?

Just hit reply🤗

Important Housekeeping🧹

I’d appreciate the warmth and coziness of your primary inbox

Make sure you move me there.

And if you liked this issue, please forward it to one friend and ask them to subscribe.

I want to find more people like you🤗

Ciao

Ayush