How to get your first 1000 followers 👇

Start by taking notice of what people in real life ask you about. Chances are that if your friends are interested in something you're doing, the internet will help you find thousands more like them.
"But what if I'm not doing anything interesting?!"

Almost everyone is. It doesn't have to be anything spectacular. You might be:

- Learning a new skill
- Doing a side hustle
- Going for a road trip
- Remodeling your home
- Studying something obscure
- Losing weight
...
- Living frugally
- Moving countries
- Moving from the city to the country
- Homeschooling your kids
- Growing your own vegetables
- Leaving your job
- Looking for a new job
- Fighting an illness
- Volunteering

And so on.

Work backwards from what people ask you about.
Now, think about the answers you give when people ask you about the thing you're doing. Then write a short blog post answering a particular question. Example:

Title: Why I chose to grow my own vegetables

Body: Explain why, in under 5 minutes.
At the end of your post, invite people to follow you on Twitter (or your platform of choice) to get more updates about your story.

Only put one call to action. Don't ask people to follow you on Twitter and sign up for your newsletter. Pick one.
Now you need to promote your post, and the way to do that is to go where people interested in your topic already hang around. There are tons of sites on the internet with thousands of people continuously refreshing the page waiting for something interesting to show up. Go there.
Which sites are these? You'll have to find them, depending on your topic. A few I used are:

- Reddit
- Hacker News
- LinkedIn
- Quora
- Indie Hackers

You'll have an advantage if you're already familiar with the community, but it's something you can figure out.
Not every post will work, for reasons that might be out of your control (bad timing, getting flagged, etc). In that case, rinse, repeat. Try small tweaks and variations.

If "Why I chose to grow my own vegetables" didn't work, try "Why I don't trust supermarket vegetables."
When one of your posts gets some attention and you start getting comments, make sure you're there to answer every single question you get. Your willingness to answer authentically will be a huge signal that you're worth following.
Keeping doing this until you get your 1K. Sometimes you get them with your 1st post; sometimes it takes a bit longer. But it almost always works. It's not hard to get someone to follow you (it's free!). You just have to be worth following — and the above is how to show them that.

More from Social media

So let's check in on "Newsguard," one of the Orwellian groups (e.g., The Atlantic Council) that totally reliable sites like @voxdotcom and @axios use to decide what is "Unreliable" and "fight disinformation."

One example:

OK, so "The Daily Wire" and "
https://t.co/oEa89coNak" are unreliable. Fair enough, maybe they are (I don't use either one of them).

So let's look into one of our new official arbiters of "reliability," Newsguard!

What's their advisory board look like?

https://t.co/5N8op70VE1


OK, so maybe a few names jumped out at you immediately, like, oh I don't know, (Ret.) General Michael Hayden, former Director of the CIA AND former Director of the National Security Agency in the run-up to the Iraq War in 2003! Google him, he's famous!


Newsguard is all about "seeing who's behind each site," (like how Michael Hayden is behind Newsguard?)

All they want to do is fight "misinformation." That's laudable, right?

Also, Newsguard has a "24/7 rapid response SWAT TEAM!!"

So cool!
https://t.co/EDN3UXvBR9


Ok, I'm not a journalist or a former CIA director, so I have no idea what's true or not unless someone tells me, so hey, Columbia Journalism Review - what do you think of Newsguard Advisory Board Member Michael Hayden?

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So the cryptocurrency industry has basically two products, one which is relatively benign and doesn't have product market fit, and one which is malignant and does. The industry has a weird superposition of understanding this fact and (strategically?) not understanding it.


The benign product is sovereign programmable money, which is historically a niche interest of folks with a relatively clustered set of beliefs about the state, the literary merit of Snow Crash, and the utility of gold to the modern economy.

This product has narrow appeal and, accordingly, is worth about as much as everything else on a 486 sitting in someone's basement is worth.

The other product is investment scams, which have approximately the best product market fit of anything produced by humans. In no age, in no country, in no city, at no level of sophistication do people consistently say "Actually I would prefer not to get money for nothing."

This product needs the exchanges like they need oxygen, because the value of it is directly tied to having payment rails to move real currency into the ecosystem and some jurisdictional and regulatory legerdemain to stay one step ahead of the banhammer.