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Online Business, Content Creation
February 18, 2024
Why Social Media is NOT Your Real Business
When I first started building my business on X, there’s one piece of advice that almost every creator on the platform knows:
- Tweet every day.
- Show up every day.
- Grow your followers.
But this advice can sometimes stress creators out due to the daily deadline of tweeting and engaging consistently.
Many quit because they don’t understand the purpose behind these daily actions.
People burn out not because of hard work but because of meaningless work.
I talked about the algorithm change on X with my friends, (it’s commonly understood that networking plays a significant role in growth rather than the algorithm itself) many of them faced similar experiences:
Growth stagnation happens to everyone.
At the very least, it’s a sign that if we don’t iterate, the results will remain the same.
To test my theory, I conducted an experiment where I didn’t show up for one week (I just take a break, but let’s call it an experiment) from around December 25, 2023, to January 2, 2024, to see the consequences of ignoring the advice.
Surprisingly, there was no change in my growth during this period.
Here’s the summary of my experiment…
Social Media isn’t Your Real Business.
The answer why you have to show up every day is to:
- Build your writer habits
- Keep your account alive
- Create your own deadlines
These actions aren’t about moving the right lever, they’re just about maintaining your business.
The fundamental principle of business is traffic and offer.
As you know, building on X is about generating traffic, but I found an interesting fact about Dan Koe’s income proportion.
“If you have 1 million views on YouTube, why don’t you send that traffic to your product instead?” Dan Koe said
More than 80% of his income doesn’t come from YouTube, TikTok, or X monetization programs but from his products and services.
The significant proof of this theory is that if you forget the 2 previous tweets that you read or the tweet that you wrote yesterday, that means your audience also forgot what you said.
Social media is a traffic driver that hooks people into the depths of your funnel, where your real business begins.
The 3 key components of online business are:
- Social media: This is where you start to drive traffic.
- The email list is: This is where your authority is built.
- The offer: This is where your money is made.
If you want to make money from your creator business, you need to bridge the gap between your product and your audience.
And this is how you can do it…
Grow Your Email List
“Build distribution, then build whatever you want.” – Jack Butcher
When you create content on social media, you don’t own your audience, you rent them (from the platform).
But when you get their email, you own your audience.
Here are a few reasons why building your newsletter is important:
- Longform content prioritizes depth and authority.
- You can turn your newsletter into a
- YouTube script, product, or shorter form of content.
- You can download your audience (with a CSV file), which you can’t do with your followers.
- You’ll develop ideas faster than people who only write short-form content (as Dan Koe has mentioned).
- A newsletter or blog post acts like a 24/7 salesman because you can plug your offer at the bottom of your content.
Personally, I love weekly newsletters because:
- I can see the progress on my blog archive page.
- It’s fun to share what I’ve discovered with my friends (it’s like my public library).
- Newsletters feel like a letter to my friends, so I write each one with my heart.
I want to create content that’s worth my friends’ time to read, so I need time for collecting information, synthesizing ideas, writing, editing, and publishing.
I don’t like to pitch to my audience every day.
Some say, “You should email every day, and if there are unsubscribers, don’t worry about it. If they want to buy from you, they won’t unsubscribe.”
But, in my opinion, I sometimes unsubscribe from those who email every day because it fills my inbox and makes it harder to find important emails.
Most of these emails are just pitching their offers, and I feel annoying from notification
One quote that I always keep in mind is:
Creator business is based on content marketing.
Although content is a traffic driver, traffic is useless if you don’t…
The Heart of Your Business
If you don’t have any offers, you’re not doing business.
You “just write” contents
For months, I wrote on X without an offer. I don’t know why I have to build an audience.
Until I realized my mistake:
I skipped important steps:
Pick one skill.
Many struggle to come up with an offer because they skip this step.
As a result, many creators turn to growth coaching and ghostwriting.
Their offers often revolve around engagement guides, DM guides, or content writing guides because that’s the only skill they have.
But I didn’t have significant results in growing my audience, and my growth rate wasn’t fast. (You can check your growth rate by seeing people flexing their growth, like “I grew X in Y months,” and then self-comparisons begin.)
And most importantly, I don’t want to be a growth coach. I want to help people build their personal brand.
So, I decided to pick a skill I loved spending time with: funnel building.
Start by picking one skill and then evolving your offer:
- Create a lead magnet.
- Start your service business.
- Turn your system into a product.
- Expand your offer.
Creator business is based on skills.
Pick one
Learn it.
Pick another one.
Stack your skills.
Grow.
To recap what I’ve said so far,
“Just writing” on social media doesn’t build your business.
- The principle of business is traffic and offers.
- Grow your email list and build your distribution.
- Create your offer from scratch, then evolve.
Thanks for reading so far.
I hope you have a great weekend.
See you next week!
Bell
My name is Natchapon Promprasert, and I’m a nuclear scientist.
I help 9-5ers to building a personal brand business alongside their main job so that they can quit their job and live their dream life
My expertise lies in building workflows, digital marketing funnels, and content marketing.
"To inspire people to design their lifestyle
So that they can achieve their goals as their best selves."
People have the potential to achieve any goal, as the universe is abundant.
But “you’re not reaching your goal. you fall into your routine.”
What really matters to us is “How You Live.”
Become the best version of yourself.
Join my newsletter to get actionable advice about creator business, lifestyle, and productivity every Sunday at noon (Bangkok Time Zone).