A Momentum "Hack" to Grow Your Audience

Back in 2018, I had a hypothesis that getting some attention online would be helpful in my solopreneur journey.

So when it came time to create, I picked LinkedIn (update: turned out to be an awesome decision)

I did this for no other reason than I knew a few people who were growing their audience successfully on that platform.

Back then, Twitter was still a place where I got updates on the news and looked at random trends.

Fast forward to October 2021, and I decided it was time to add a second content platform. So I made a commitment to take Twitter seriously.

At the time, I had around 125k followers on LinkedIn, and I had been able to support 2 different revenue models directly through it.

But, I still had a relatively small email list (~3,700 subscribers) and a smallish Twitter following (~8,500 followers).

So, when I started this newsletter, I wanted to focus on creating a content web that acquired both Twitter followers and email subscribers.

2 birds. 1 stone.

It would rely on three components:

• Inward momentum: Taking a pre-built audience (LinkedIn + my small email list) and pulling them inward into a new platform (Newsletter).
• Compound attention: Sharing content inside of that newsletter that was hosted on a different platform (Twitter) and encouraging those people to interact with that piece of content.
• Outward momentum: Using that compound attention to push it outward to new people on that new platform (Twitter).

This was one part of a larger plan that I executed to add over 44,000 followers and 9,000 new email subscribers.

Let's break it down.

Step 1: Start by creating a long-form piece of content, which was my newsletter.

This piece would act as the center of the entire web, but the newsletter issue itself does not acquire email subscribers or Twitter followers simply by existing out in the world.

The next step helped start my momentum machine.

Step 2: Pull inward, a large number of people from pre-built audiences to that newsletter issue. This creates "inward momentum."

I would send my newsletter issue out to the 3,700 subscribers I had and also post about it on LinkedIn, to my 125,000 followers.

Here's what would normally happen:

- 2,400 opens on the email version of the newsletter from subscribers.

- 2,000 to 3,000 visits to the website-hosted version of my newsletter, from LinkedIn.

Inside of that newsletter article, I would share a Tweet (or Tweets) that are relevant to the newsletter issue and encourage the 4,400 to 5,400 people to engage with it.

Step 3: Inside of the newsletter are several embedded Tweets that allow the user to like, comment, or ReTweet. This creates compounding action on a new platform.

Step 4: The compounding action creates outward momentum for a new audience (Twitter), and drives new email subscribers.

Because of the engagement and Retweets on my Twitter content (and because Twitter was a secondary platform for me), most of the exposure I got was to people who had never seen my content before on Twitter. That helped me grow a new following pretty quickly.

I leveraged the inward momentum of pulling in my pre-built audience (LinkedIn & email subs) and then turned that into outward momentum by creating compound action on the Tweet to grow and collect new Twitter followers and newsletter subscribers.

After introducing this (and other tactics), I grew my email list from 3,700 subscribers to over 12,000 subscribers in just 6 weeks.

So what are you waiting for?

Get out there and start using inward momentum, compounding action, and outward momentum to grow a new platform.