Creator Q&A - Influencing 1 Million People

This blog is a conversation I had with a creator over text the other day about how to grow an audience, and which platforms are best for audience growth. It has been lightly edited for clarity. Enjoy!

Creator

Hey Reese, I have a question for you. I want to influence people. How would I approach that using my video talent? I feel like I have been able to do it already on a micro scale with a few people. Theoretically, shouldn’t I be able to do it with one million people? If I understood the concept better?

One more thing: I feel like it’s harder than ever in this moment of time to create a large, loyal fan base without using YouTube as a base platform. Every other platform, like Instagram and TikTok, feel like users move too quickly between different accounts. You never actually get a real audience. On the other hand, I see all these YouTubers with lifelong loyal audiences. Take Sam Kolder, for example. I feel like a lot of his success came from YouTube. And it was the same for other big creators. To me, it seems like YouTube is the place where you would ideally want to create a fan base, and then they will eventually move to your other profiles. 

Reese

My first question and statement is: do you want to influence people or do you want to be famous? Because if you really want to just influence people, you can go to school to be a teacher. Do you see what I’m saying? It’s okay if you want to be famous, or grow an audience, or have a following. These are awesome things. But you need to start by getting real about what you really want. 

Maybe it’s a bit of both? Who wouldn’t want to have a loyal audience online? It’s an amazing part of our current culture. But maybe you also want to do something specific–to encourage or inspire a specific audience to do something? What are these specifics for you?

YouTube definitely is a better place to grow a loyal audience, for one reason only: the videos are longer. If you had 50 TikTok videos that were all 30 seconds long, your audience would only have 25 minutes of your content to watch. But you could make two YouTube vlogs or videos that are over 25 minutes easy. And the more time people spend investing in something, the more meaningful it becomes to them. So YouTube really would be the place to do it. 

One note about audience growth: nobody is guaranteed a million followers. It’s largely a luck thing. But I think anyone can get 10,000 followers. And it’s better to have 10,000 very loyal fans than it is to have one million fans who don’t care about you. 

The reason I say this is because you grow an audience by serving specific content to an underserved niche. Whatever niche you’re passionate about should be who you create content for. Some niches are big! Most are pretty small though. 

It’s pretty tough to grow an audience by creating inspirational travel content right now, because that niche is so saturated already. That’s where luck came in for Kolder and Jacob Riglin and Rory Kramer and Jeremiah Davis. They were into that stuff before it was cool, and then they rode the wave when it came. 

So what are you passionate about? And who do you want to serve and inspire? And what do they like, and what content do they need? Answer those questions and you’re on your way to finding the people you can influence.

Good luck! 

If you have a question, I’d love to take a crack at it. I have a subscriber-exclusive “ask me anything” form available here. The conversations we’re having through this form are wild and rich and amazing. I’d love for you to jump in.