Build Your Own Luck

I’ve partied on a boat with Instagram models, held a 1:1 zoom call with the President of Mars Wrigley North America, and had dinner with Dakota Robertson.

I have tons more experiences similar to these and people often tell me how lucky I am.

Look, I grew up in poverty in the poorest state in the U.S.

I promise you: Luck ain’t got sh*t to do with it.

Okay, maybe a tad bit. You have more control over your luck than you think.

There are 4 types of luck (I’ll let you look them up on your own), but I’m referring to Luck from motion.

The more you move around and bump into people, the more opportunities you create for yourself, i.e LUCK.

Everything I did in that 1st sentence is because I created the opportunity for myself by traveling, emailing, or DMing.

If you’re afraid to ask your role model to grab a meal or reach out to the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, then enjoy feeling unlucky.

Or as we say in the South: “Closed mouths don’t get fed.”

Remember, you’re one bump away from creating your own luck.

Marketing Tip: Use Twitter DMs

Build your luck in the DMs.

Networking on Twitter is a powerful way to market yourself and grow your personal brand.

Steal my DM template to network with others on Twitter:

Hi [name of person],

I’m [your name], [who you are].

Your content on [topic] has helped me understand how to improve my [skill] in this space.

You’re a [compliment] & I appreciate the knowledge you share everywhere across Twitter [& other platforms you follow them on].

I’m hoping to [share your objective that relates to them].

I have one question.

[Create an engaging, yet simple question] ← this should provoke a simple answer.

Best,

[your name]

Okay, I know I told you to steal this, but don’t follow the template word for word. Add your personality to it, so you can stand out in the DMs.

Creator Tool: Twitter Analytics

Don’t overcomplicate your Twitter data as a creator. I don’t need fancy bar graphs and pie charts.

I keep it simple and use Twitter analytics.

It shows you how your audience responds to your content. You can look at your impressions, likes, retweets, comments, profile clicks, follows, and other data points.

Every week, I go through Twitter analytics to learn the highest and lowest performing content. And I can check my growth on a monthly basis.

As a creator, analytics tell you a story.

For example:

In December, I had 23.1k profile visits with only 268 followers, so I changed my bio and banner. In January, I had 12.4K profile visits with 338 followers.

What can I assume?

I have a better profile AND I’m doing a better job of attracting my target audience.

Start using Twitter analytics now! It’s 100% FREE!

Weekly Test: Degens pay it forward

This past week, I helped 12 content creators & 4 NFT brand founders, slightly more than I promised.

How does helping others grow my brand?

I build more authentic relationships.

To grow your personal brand, help people without any expectations of you receiving anything. In fact, those that help others (givers) achieve more success than takers, according to Adam Grant in his book Give & Take.

Let’s dive into the pain points most creators have:

1. Lack of systems

Most creators didn’t know how to crank out consistent content.

My advice: Create a simple framework, homie.

Without a system, it’s impossible to stay accountable, create quality content, and monetize your product or services.

Here’s two aspects of my system:

a.) Content Idea Bank:

When an idea pops into my head, I write it in my Apple notes app. It’s simple. Every piece of content you read from me starts in my Apple notes. Every creator needs an idea bank because you’ll never run out of content ideas.

b.) Repurpose content:

Create 1 long form content every week and repurpose it into next week’s content. My newsletter gets repurposed into my tweets and threads.

In the future, I’ll share my full system, but these 2 are all you need to be consistent.

2. No social proof

Most of the creators never made a dollar from their personal brand. In fact, they didn’t help anyone at all yet.

You can’t expect someone to hire you if you have no proof that a.) you’ve done this work before and b.) people love your work.

My social proof to earn clients was my work and experience working at a Web3 unicorn. My social proof to help creators was the $5k I earned.

If I decide to charge creators to coach them, my social proof will be all the “Thank You” DMs I received after these free calls.

Build social proof.

3. Poor monetization strategy

Creators believe you need 10k+ followers to make serious money. I’m here to tell you that’s all a LIE!

The tech industry pioneered the “grow your audience, then monetize” model. And creators try to follow it as well.

Monetize as you grow.

Through these 1:1 calls, I made a new friend, Jack Friks, who has almost 30k subscribers on YouTube and almost 30k followers on Twitter. For the past 2 years, he’s focused on YouTube to earn money from ads. But it’s inconsistent, so he has been creating a course on content creation to sell.

I gave him a better idea.

Instead of charging for a 6 part course, a better strategy is to sell each section as mini-products. Now he can sell 6 mini-products.

Later, he can bundle them and sell them all together.

This Week: DM 3 people per day.

I’ll spend time building more of my luck by DMing 3 accounts per day.

GOAL: Network with accounts larger than mine.

Next Tuesday, I’ll share my results!

See you then Degens! 🫡

Thanks for reading! If you haven’t already, join The Degen Lettter here and level up. Follow me Twitter and Linkedin.