How to build an online audience with David Perell and Anthony Pompliano
“Write of Passage” creator and writer David Perell held a value-packed interview with Anthony Pompliano, founder of Morgan Creek Digital. You can watch the video here and read the show notes below:
“Audience is the new currency.”
Pompliano has built a media empire brick by brick and channel by channel.
Today he hosts a Podcast with five interviews per week biz / tech / finance
He writes a newsletter with 50,000+ subscribers. Writes the newsletter himself each morning.
He hosts a daily YouTube show with 250,000 subscribers.
All his media efforts are driven by his Twitter account, which was his first focus starting in 2017 when he had 2,000 followers. Now he has over 330,000 followers.
“My best piece of advice: Don’t try it.”
If you’re going to try to build a large audience, know your why and know what success looks like.
Make sure you have the time and energy to attempt it.
If you can talk yourself out of it, you never would’ve been successful anyway.
Pompliano’s key principles
Principle #1: Persistence is the most important thing.
Persistence wins. It takes time.
Principle #2: Productize yourself.
Every hour is something he dedicates to another product: one hour for newsletter. One for a podcast, one for a video, etc.
He optimizes for every hour invested the most amount of content he can create to monetize later.
He creates five pieces of content per day.
Creating more pieces of content gives you a better chance of being selected by a content algorithm (Facebook, for example). It’s not about number of entities competing for slots, but number of pieces of content.
You must choose between high frequency “good enough” quality, or less volume and higher quality.
Difficult to predict what will work, so volume improves your overall chances of success.
Principle #3: Focus on one platform at a time.
Anthony focused on Twitter for 18 months, then added the newsletter. YouTube came later.
Being successful on one platform helps you build the second platform audience faster.
A lot of the big names (Gary Vee, for example) have large content teams who work all the time. Ignore them and maximize your time and energy on one channel at a time.
Over time, like weightlifting, you build the muscle memory, endurance, and strength to develop and deliver more content by optimizing your day.
Principle #4: More content is better than less
Anthony grew Twitter by: finding every person who might be interested in the content he was creating.
He Tweeted until he couldn’t think of anything else to Tweet
Anthony wasn’t comfortable being himself in 2017. So every hour he would take a major media story, pull an insight out, and then Tweet it. 10-15 times per day.
The high volume provided feedback on what worked and what didn’t
Through high volume, he created a magnet for people who liked what he was saying.
Be like Netflix: create as much content as you can and let the audience pick and choose what they are interested in.
For example: Marginal Revolution creates 4-5 posts per day. It’s actually a destination site. People want to come and see what is new.
Principle #5 Create once and publish five times
Example: Podcasts.
Audio is a podcast
Zoom is a YouTube, including cuts of highlights
Tweet out links to podcast and video
Anthony creates 8-10 pieces of content out of one hour of his time
A blog post could be a Tweetstorm summary, a podcast reading, a YouTube reading, and an email newsletter snippet
Principle #6: You owe the audience everything
Anthony spends multiple hours per day responding to YouTube comments, Twitter comments, email replies, etc.
Obsessing over the audience is the boss
It sucks—it’s hard. But he can get through 150 YouTube comments in 20 minutes.
He has pre-baked responses. “Thanks for reading,” or thumbs up emojis, etc., interspersed with more customized responses.
It does become unscalable at some point. Now he focuses on the YouTube responses with the greatest support and also the least supported at the bottom.
Analog case study: Watch the Garth Brooks documentary on Netflix. Brooks would stay for hours after small shows in the early 90s, spending time with fans until 4-5 AM. His dedication to fans was returned to him as his popularity grew.
Your relationship with your audience is a dance. You get feedback, and move forward in a larger way. A popular Tweet becomes a larger blog post, for example.
Creators can make one of two mistakes:
“I’m publishing what I want and I don’t care,” or
“I’m going to do what’s popular”
You need a synthesis between the two. What surprises people, what engages them, what do they come back for.
It comes down to authenticity. Anthony knows that one day he will just stop. Because of that, he wants to do it his way. He will not compromise on the big things—he’s doing what he wants. But he will work to improve audio issues, video quality, etc.
The audience gives you the best feedback on the details. They are not as good on the big picture.
Actionable Ideas for Twitter
If you think you are creating a lot of content, then double it
10+ tweets for day
Use spacing and punctuation to improve readability
Lists increase virality
Links hurt virality — you’re armoring users leaving the platform. If you want to link, share your top three things in the Tweet. Compressing info works and will give you boosting.
Hijack viral tweets / accounts — he turned on Tweet notifications fo Trump, for example. He would race to respond as fast as possible. He would respond to trump, hey to leanr abt this sign up fo this email. Others would sign up.
Reply to everyone
DMs are the real LinkedIn. People are very responsive. Most people are reading their own accounts.
Set your profile up for success. Where do you want people to go? Here’s the kind of content you’re going to get.
A good gif is worth 1000 favorites. Multi-media is doing well on twitter.
People want to learn and they don’t want to spend a lot of time on things.
More complexity doesn’t necessarily mean more value.
Actionable ideas for email newsletters
Consistentcy wins. Set a schedule and stick to it.
Build your free list - give more than you extract - email is an invasion. Give loads of value.
Don’t be afraid to ask people to subscribe. Know what you are worth and don’t be shy
Find like-minded audiences and do link swaps in emails, do live-streams, etc.
ID inflection points an promote them in advance - he knows when something will be received well. He’ll promote it in advance, “Hye I going to write about X, then subscribe.”
Use email as distribution point for all content - bottom half of his email is distribution for everything else. Has a template he uses daily.
Passive links pay off - see above
Upsell, upsell, upsell - delvier value and ask the audience to help yo win some way. Share it, tweet it, etc.
Actionable ideas for YouTube
Use the banner to explain what you cover and how often
Don’t be afraid to ask people to subscribe
Create more videos
Optimize the video title descritopi, and thumbnail for SEO - YT is world’s second largest search engine
Use the description for passive links (link to social, email, etc.)
Pin a comment to top of comments with top link (single best thing to do on YT. He promotes his email newsletter with link)
Create an outro with each video (thank you for watching, subscribe, leave a comment and I’ll do my best to respond)
Use search trends to your advantage
Leverage guests with large audiences - when guests share content, you’ll benefit with more subscriptions
Anthony makes decisions based on optimizing his time. Email is just him, nothing else to rely on. Podcasts, etc. have more moving parts and reliance on people and things outside his control.
He believes if the content is good, people will find it.
Actionable ideas for Podcasts
Set a frequency and don’t miss an episode
Target guests with large audiences
Authors with new books are always looking to promote. Their work - great way to start the flywheel of getting great guests
Record via Zoom to get audio and video
Good mic and good lighting is important
Use micro content to promote individual episodes
Transcripts and show notes for SEO - works well for lesser content schedules (once a week or so). Hard to do with a daily show.
Closing ideas and questions
How do you think about revenue splits?
Ideally he would not deal with an advertiser and be 100% subscriber based.
He wanted to be profitable but not squeak out every last dollar.
Balance optimization between revenue and the largest audience he can have.
In Silicon Valley, people build audiences and become angel investors (Tim Ferriss in Uber, etc.)
You also get paid in access, in influence, in education.
Where is he going?
All of the audience and distribution is a gateway drug.
“Audience first products:” Businesses will build the audience first and then the products will follow. He will know they already have product / market fit.
20th century: Tide example. Built it first, then build an audience through traditional advertising. Now we are seeing an inversion. The person who has the relationship with the customer wins. If you control the relationship with the customer, you can avoid Facebook and Google advertising.
Write of Passage: all growth with zero paid advertising. Audience first and the product followed.