Introducing the Creator Habits Podcast: Honing Your Twitter Growth Habits
This week I'm highlighting some of the creators featured in the launch of the podcast!
As I mentioned last week, today is the launch of the Creator Habits podcast! I’m beyond excited. While there are a lot of fun stories in store for you with the bi-weekly podcast, I thought it would be fun to feature two creators who have leveraged their daily Twitter habits to grow, launch, and monetize additional products.
Subscribe and listen to the whole episodes here:
And in the meantime, check out some of my favorite morsels of Twitter advice from this week’s creators!
Edwin Dorsey is the creator of the Substack newsletter, The Bear Cave, which exposes corporate misconduct. His newsletter went from 0 to 6 figures in a matter of months. With over 30,000 total subscribers, Edwin talks about his habits optimizing the flywheel between Twitter & Substack and creating hyper valuable content.
Aprilynne Alter joined Twitter in the last year, hoping to support her startup. But she soon discovered a niche around content helping others grow on Twitter and amassed over 7,000 followers in just a few months. Since then, Aprilynne has been experimenting with diverse product and monetization strategies.
Twitter Habits
On Idea Generation
If I'm in idea mode, I won't actually read people's threads, but I'll read people's hooks. And so then I'll just like keep a tab of hooks that I find interesting that I think that I could write.
[This way] you copy like an artist. You're not copying other people's content directly, but you are copying their topic and then you make it yours and really flavor it with your own personality and your own personal knowledge.
- Aprilynne Alter
On Idea Management
Before [ideas] get put onto the notion board… I will DM myself in slack whenever I get any sort of idea... Honestly, the most productive process that you can have is just the one that works best for you.
- Aprilynne Alter
On Overcoming Roadblocks
On Tweeting Into A Void
When I was starting out, there was definitely the fear: why am I doing this when no one is listening to me?
I like to think about Twitter, like a party. There are a lot of people around and there's you. If everyone is here in the center of the room and you walk over and just face a corner where no one else is and just start talking, of course, no, one's going to listen to you because nobody's in your little corner of Twitter yet. So what do you do? You walk away from your corner and go to where the people are.
-Aprilynne Alter
On Creating Value & Validating Ideas
On Being Concise
You know, my entire job is writing 2000 words per month, at least in the email newsletter world, people might think I need to write a lot. No one in the world wants more email. People want good quality thinking that helps them be more productive. So generally the advice I'd give anyone is write less and just make it better.
-Edwin Dorsey
On Using Twitter To Validate Content
Oftentimes when you're thinking about writing about something, you share a little bit in a tweet and if you can see the reception of that tweet isn't good then you maybe shelve that idea for a future day.
But if your tweets on a certain topic are getting a ton of traction, then you know, well let me turn those tweets into an article, because I know the article is going to get even more attraction.
-Edwin Dorsey
Engagement & Growth
On Growing from 0-1 on Twitter
Follow some of the more influential people in your niche, you know, follow the influencers there, but try to not engage directly with them. Try to engage with the people who comment under them. Reply to the people in their replies, because they are more likely to want to grow their own audience, and are more likely to engage in further conversation.
-Aprilynne Alter
On Following Up After Posting
So I really just focus on one good tweet per day, and it is always scheduled in the morning, which means that I usually write them at night.. And whenever a tweet is posted, I consistently check in on it for the next hour or two in little batches to make sure that I'm replying to everyone.
-Aprilynne Alter
On Personalized Messages
If you write something really good, find the one or two or three people with big audiences that are most likely to like it.
And don't say, hey, can you retweet this. Say, hey, Matt or Jim, or whoever: I think you might be interested in this. I've loved what you wrote about on this topic. Here's an article I wrote that might be relevant. Send it to them and they're probably not going to retweet it, but it just gives you a door open and it's nice and it's polite.
-Edwin Dorsey
On Elevating Others’ Accounts
Focus on generating value and helping other people. Whenever I could I'd make a thread: here's the 20 best people to follow on Twitter or 50 best people in this topic.
And people would love that and some of them wouldn’t be big accounts. It’s better than if I tell people, subscribe to my newsletter. In that case, maybe one or two people would subscribe, but if I say, follow all these other people doing smart things, 50 people subscribe to my newsletter.
-Edwin Dorsey
On Growing Twitter to Grow A Newsletter
My newsletter has grown from 0 to 18,000 people on the free version. And during that time, my Twitter has gone from 3000 to 42,000. So it's a very symbiotic relationship. Most newsletter authors get between 50 and 80% of their new signups from Twitter, which is kind of an incredible fact. The joke I like to tell people is people get as much traffic from Facebook as they get from Duck Duck Go, so Twitter is totally the platform to grow an email newsletter.
-Edwin Dorsey
Launching & Monetizing Products
On Analyzing Platform Opportunities
As great as Twitter is and as great as the audience that I have on Twitter is, it's really difficult to monetize on just Twitter versus something like YouTube. Once you do reach the monetization threshold, you are earning something on every single view & on every single video. So just from a financial standpoint, if I'm already creating content on Twitter, I felt like I could reuse a lot of that same thread content that I've been doing on Youtube.
-Aprilynne Alter
On Launching
I personally Dm’d like 3000 people being like, Hey, I'm launching this. Here's a link to sign up. Your support would mean the world to me, just over and over and over and over and over again.
Like literally, I spent two days of my life just doing that. But that's how you get sign-ups. I mean it's what you need to get that initial ball rolling.
-Edwin Dorsey
On Launching Paid Content
People want to put out free content for too long. Counter-intuitively when you start launching paid content, your free list grows faster because once you're earning money from something, you just dedicate so much more time to it. Start a paid tier sooner.
-Edwin Dorsey
On Pricing
You should be at a price point where, you know, one in 10 people say, “Hey, that's a little high or canceled because it's too high.” If everybody's okay with the pricing, you're priced too low.
-Edwin Dorsey
Hope you enjoyed this little break from heady habit science to some nuts-and-bolts tactics!
Would love to hear your thoughts on the new podcast & what (and who) you want to hear from!
I promise regular programming will return shortly, but early reviews and subscribes make all the difference in podcasting. I know it’s a busy day today, but I would be beyond grateful for your support on successfully launching the Creator Habits Podcast!