# Using No Code to Build Your Audience

Channel: Rob Walling
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaUJpkTbCQI
Duration: 27 min
Language: English
Words: 5012
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/zaUJpkTbCQI

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[0:00] so in a minute i'm gonna welcome jake klaus to the stage he's a writer he's a podcaster and a community builder he hosts creative elements which is a narrative interview podcast exploring how your favorite creators make a living with their art and creativity he created the tweet 100 which is a hashtag hashtag tweet100 as a side project to help people build their audience on twitter and in his talk today he's going to be talking about using no code to build an audience who's going to share how we built a free challenge that led to more than a thousand new subscribers in a matter of weeks so let's give a warm

[0:35] microconf welcome to jay class hey thanks for having me rob excited to be here i'm it's great to have you man thank you so much for doing it and i'm gonna duck backstage and let you take it from here sounds great sounds great hello everybody uh thrilled to be here at microconf and i know i'm the last thing sitting between you and feeling like you completed this conference so i hope to make this worthwhile um and and really share with you some of the things i've learned using no code this year and how it's helped me to build a little bit more of an online audience as rob said

[1:05] my name is jay i host a podcast called creative elements talking to high pr high profile creators about how they make a living from their art and creativity i write a newsletter i created this challenge which has taken on a life of its own and was really intended to be a true side project this tweet 100 idea it's really simple the idea is you just come in i help you stay accountable and tweet more consistently because the more you tweet the more your following grows on twitter so it's really just a simple landing page at least that's how it started where you can opt in with your email

[1:40] address you tweet using the hashtag hashtag tweet100 it counts your progress and scores you on this leaderboard which is public it's all automated it happens in real time and it calculates how many days have you been in the challenge how many days how many days have you tweeted and what is your success rate it even shows some fun things like the number of followers that you've gained over time what that is as a growth percentage it's really fun and it's a totally free thing for people to participate in in just a couple of months there's over a thousand members i checked this morning there's actually more than 30

[2:18] 000 tweets sent now and just shy of a hundred thousand followers gained as of this morning so huge results for a lot of people it grew really quickly and really just came from me sharing the challenge on twitter i don't push it all that hard but there's kind of a natural virality to it when people see the hashtag they find their way to it they join it it's been really really crazy to see we have a hall of fame of people who have finished the challenge so if you have a perfect 100 out of 100 score here in the leaderboard which is built in air table you get added to the hall of fame

[2:52] page and you can see here there's some crazy results uh people have grown as many as 4 000 followers in their 100 days some of them are growing at like hundreds or thousands of percent growth uh which is easier obviously if you have a smaller number to start with but it's been really really impactful for a lot of people and there's been just a lot of love a lot of people saying this has been incredible this is how it changed my my life my twitter following crazy but why did i make this in the first place so i have this podcast creative elements that i was telling you about

[3:25] it's been featured on stitcher in pocketcast and castro and apple podcasts i've been able to talk to really cool people like seth godin and james clear uh ollie abdul vanessa van edwards pat flynn it's the best thing that i've ever made like i'm more proud of this podcast than anything else that i've ever made but podcasting has a discovery problem it is so hard to figure out how to get people to find your podcast because there is not the user behavior of search the way we see on google or youtube platforms like that so i had this problem i have a podcast i have a funnel that i want people to

[4:06] enter so they can discover the podcast like how do i get people to figure out that this thing exists and to give it a shot i thought about this for a while and tried a bunch of stuff tried paid ads tried guesting tried cross promos some of that work to different degrees but where i've landed is i've added a step on top of the podcast funnel which i'm calling for the sake of this presentation the jfunnel if people discover you they can discover your product and that's what i want you to take away here if you have a product where you feel like i want more people to know that

[4:41] this thing exists how do i get it in front of more people you can use yourself as the top of the funnel for product discovery so now you know i have all these ways into the the j funnel the me funnel i have my writing i have communities i'm a part of i have podcasts that i can go be a guest on i have my social media accounts like instagram and twitter uh youtube channels if i want to go guest on someone's youtube channel i've chosen to focus a lot on twitter because in my opinion there's still more opportunity on twitter than just about any other platform unless you want to do

[5:18] short form video but that kind of creates this new problem of okay i'm feeling like top top top of the funnel with social followers people who know that i exist people who are looking at my writing on twitter but how do i move them into email subscribers how do i move them into the podcast funnel these these areas of my world as a creator where i can reliably communicate with them so it kind of brought me to thinking about okay what are the opt-ins that i can create what are the lead magnets that i can create to get people to sign up for my email list

[5:56] and traditionally the advice for lead magnets are things like checklists resource guides case studies ebooks none of that stuff works anymore it worked once upon a time and it was great it was a golden age but just about none of those kind of like quick hit downloadable pdf type things work anymore consumers know the game we expect more in return for our email list there are some lead magnets that still do work notably email courses challenges quizzes free community membership i've tried and utilized all of these things um this is where i see opportunity right now and of course tweet 100 falls into the challenge category but let me talk about

[6:45] all of these as an example and if we take a step further you see examples of people like neil patel who you know he is all about audience growth all about marketing what he does is he actually creates full-on software platforms as lead generation for his paid products he knows that if he creates a free software platform that is a competitor to a paid software platform he will get a lot of people who will trade their email address to use that platform seo analyzer is one ubersuggest is one ubersuggest is a competitor of hrefs and uh semrush and when you search your domain he puts you know right in your face

[7:32] create a free account you get these things it's a lot more compelling than hey get a 11 point checklist of how to do this type of thing that you want to do brian harris is someone else who also does this really well he has a company called growth tools and they offer mostly high ticket coaching actually it's like 10 000 a year or something to work with his team to help you build a digital products business but he actually has this suite of software products that are free that again to get access to it you just have to sign up with your email he has looks like nine

[8:11] drip scripts attract go viral list goal and they're all actually really really good and really useful you can kind of do this you can build your own products that people trade their email address for using no code it doesn't have to be super super in-depth you guys are all sas people so you get it you get the the value prop of all of this but you can build kind of a scaled back product or experience using no code that people are more likely to trade their email address for than you know a simple pdf this is the stack that i used to build the tweet 100 challenge

[8:45] you subscribe you opt in using convertkit we add you to an airtable database using integromat we track your tweets and we add you to that database the whole website is built on wordpress and we have a community built on circle all of it 100 of it is no code it's all stuff that i built out with a little bit of help from a couple of consultants um notably integromat was new to me i used to use zapier sorry zapier but zapier got really expensive really quickly we can talk about that in the q a if you want integromat was much more cost effective for the number of

[9:22] automations that i was running so i want to share a couple of examples for each of these things that still do work just to get your ideas kind of rolling your brains flowing email courses this has been very easy to implement it's a huge unlock and you really only need one tool you can just use whatever ems you prefer convertkit drip mailchimp whatever you prefer you can create a sequence that can be really high impact really high value and the great thing is if you're delivering information via email to start the relationship with somebody and they're opening those emails it's training their inbox that they want to

[10:02] hear from you which is just really great for the ongoing communication that you want to have with these people i do this on my freelancing school website super easy super simple it's just a convertkit form on the web page it's the most active and highly performing landing page and form that i have in my business every day dozens of people go through this enter their email get put into a sequence at the end of the sequence it upsells them on a paid course and that converts at a certain rate similarly literally this morning before i came here uh i got an email from fabrizio who is a founder of typefully

[10:42] really great tool for twitter and he was just saying hey we have this new email course for how you can get better on twitter and i opted in right away i'm pretty stingy with my email address to be honest obviously he already has my email because i'm on this list but even if i saw this on you know in a tweet or on product hunt this is a very clear value proposition it feels like something i can complete and get value from immediately so i opted in challenges work really well i've done this within the uh freelancing school community this is obviously the tweet 100 inspiration you can do this also

[11:21] very very simply with just your ems uh you can add on circle if you want to have kind of like a community component or any community tool but challenges often work better in a group so if you can have some sort of way to have people interact or maybe you do like a weekly zoom call so people can chat with each other that type of thing performs really well too this is what we have now built on the back of the tweet 100 challenge if you go through the free challenge and you want to have some extra accountability you can join our community the tweet 100

[11:56] social club to get a little bit of an extra push and that is built totally on circle quizzes are something that i'm really really bullish on haven't had a chance to like really put one together that i'm happy with yet but there are several tools that help you do this really well several no code tools outgrow interact even write message can be used as a tool software if i was going to make a choice i would probably start with interact right now that's what uh people like tori tori dunlap use she built her her content business her first 100 sorry her first 100k just this past you know few years

[12:36] and i had her on creative elements it hasn't aired yet but she was telling me that her quiz literally drives like a huge percentage of her business because when she has some sort of media opportunity or she has some sort of piece of content go viral the clear call to action is hey go take this quiz and a large number of people do that because it tells them something about themselves if they want to self-diagnose hey here is the pathway that you should take forward here's what you should do next a quiz is a really great way to assist that we've seen it with buzzfeed for a really long time people love to

[13:15] take a quiz get results know something about themselves and not only that but then share those results as well and that can create a really great social viral component to your content so quizzes are something that i really really recommend looking into and these tools once again outgrow interact and write message help you do that really easily right out of the box and then community community can even be used as a top of funnel or opt-in sort of lead magnet exercise i have that with circle i use circle but you can use discord you can use mighty networks getting access to a community of people where i can build relationships where i

[14:00] can get support ask questions to offer that for free is also very high value i've been doing that with freelancing school for a few years now and it's been really really really effective because freelancers come in they have questions they want support they want to learn from other freelancers but they also don't have a ton of disposable income so making the community free builds a relationship gets them on my email list i can offer them even a promo code for being a community member to go into one of the paid courses but you know it's high value and they can get that for free so the question that i think you should

[14:43] be asking yourself if you're trying to build your audience or get more people to discover your product or give you the opportunity to talk about your product what experience or outcome can you make that is worth paying for but then you make it available for free if you can do that that's going to outperform any of the old lead magnet or opt-in pieces of advice being able to create something that's worth paying for but then offering it for free is a huge opportunity people love that people share that they opt in for that so in conclusion here when discovery for your product is hard consider using

[15:19] yourself as the top of the funnel use your voice use your social media platforms use your ideas get them into your sphere and then try to move them through the funnel down to your product i would recommend selecting a social media platform that you really like and dedicate a disproportionate amount of your social energy to that one platform it's really hard to do a bunch at once so pick one get really good at it use that as your you know tippy top of funnel and then you can focus on converting those followers into subscribers or customers leverage stronger lead magnets for that conversion stronger than the typical

[16:01] advice would tell you courses challenges quizzes communities that is what i would recommend and strive to create a product experience or outcome that you can provide for free even though you think it might be worth paying for that's it happy to do some q a here to answer some of your questions about this or dive deeper into any of these areas that you're interested in if you are on twitter and you want to get better or spend more time there you can join tweet 100 for free but otherwise connect with me there and i'm happy to chat about this further awesome thanks so much jay we do have a couple questions that uh

[16:40] have started coming in if you're watching this and you have more questions for jay please please weigh in so the first question actually the both of them are about integromat and i'm actually curious about this too because i before last week i had never even heard of it you know and i've been using zapier since i don't know 2013 or something so um the first question what was the approximate price difference between integromat and zapier it was pretty huge um within a couple of weeks of launching the tweet 100 challenge and having it being completely zapier based my zapier bill was up to 300 per month

[17:14] uh trending towards 400 per month in previous to that it was like you know 40 or something like it was it was sub 50. so it was a drastic increase in tegramatt uh you pay for operations in bulk so i was basically moved to a 49 per month plan and taking care of the same volume um they have a 99 plan that's still more than i need right now what's great about integromat is if you are above the 49 plan but you don't need the 99 plan you can buy extra operations for eight dollars like all a cart so i'm paying about sixty dollars a month right

[17:57] now um on a tiger mat got it and i mean aside from price are there other reasons to use in ticker mad or is it kind of a lower cost zapier um it's a good question i haven't run into any issues of like not having a no code tool supported by integromat in total like if i'm a sas company i'm probably going to support zapier first but the issues that i run into with integromat are sometimes they don't have a trigger so a lot of their their automations are based on i don't know if it's a polling but you basically say like run this automation every six minutes or however many

[18:38] minutes you want to set and there's some levers because then you have to set like a limit of how many records to comb through when i run this automation so we had a period of time in the beginning of the the migration from zapier to integromat where we had to pull these levers to see like what is the frequency we need to run this to make sure we're capturing everything but we're not you know paying for the same record to be operationalized multiple times over and over again got it now that's interesting yeah seems like a tool worth worth checking out at a minimum um there's a comment thank you

[19:13] for the presentation jay great background by the way your studio looks awesome it's like you're a professor like you're a professional yeah um there we have a question about the circle conversion would you say the circle conversion from free to paid is worth your time for the free offering does that make sense well so yeah the thing i love about circle is it's really modular so you can really set permissions to have free areas of circle and then have locked gated paid areas of circle i haven't done that configuration as purely a community product you know to say like hey come experience the product for free the community for free

[19:52] but if you want to get access to the paid areas of circle here's the pa how to pay for that i've only done completely free circle instances or paid circle instances i i would say however that it's probably worth your time to go from free to paid if you're willing to do the work that is necessary to do community well which is like a huge amount of work it's it's very difficult to do community well and to build a community that's worth paying for over the long term and is i mean i've heard of circle and i heard you know i know the basics but um

[20:26] maybe i don't even know the basics i know it's a community platform is it like is it forums is it live chat like i think of slack and discord is one thing and then you know the old well not the old but like discourse i believe is the is the forums i mean where is it on that container yeah in my mind the continuum is chat based versus forum based and circle is definitely in the forum based camp it feels like a more modern discourse it has almost in the original version of it it felt kind of like a facebook group feed feel but you can have multiple

[20:57] spaces within it i'm really really bullish on that product in that team they need to continue to make strides to have more synchronous style communication feel natural and native to the platform but they have the use case of content creators of people like you and i rob in mind and it's the first platform that i felt like really confident is going to solve this issue of online community spaces that support both chat based communication and forum based communication got it very good another question came in does twitter work for b2b marketing i think twitter works for anything um i mean you know your people better than i

[21:33] would of course dear asker but if the people who are operating in the b2b marketing space are on twitter then absolutely because twitter i think is unparalleled in terms of forming relationships if those people are on twitter access is just so easy there is more organic growth and like discovery and impressions of your profile than any other platform right now i will say like linkedin probably has more opportunity than people give it credit for especially in the b2b space um so i i wouldn't rule that out for your use case but if your people in that industry are on twitter then absolutely it wouldn't be worth your time

[22:13] yeah and it seems to me like obviously tech both like silicon valley tech and then outside of silicon valley tech like the bootstrapper spaces on twitter the press especially tech press but even not tech press is on there and it seems like there's a lot of makers and creators you know the indie indie makers like yourself do you that's my impression of like okay those people are on there my parents my brothers my family's not on there even like you know my wife sherry who's tech adjacent right she's a coach and consultant she's like kind of only on there because she thinks she needs to be

[22:47] but it's not sure she doesn't like actually you know she's more on instagram that's just where she goes goes to um in your opinion are there other segments that you've seen that are are on twitter and engaging that's pretty dead-on there are a lot of people in uh entertainment on twitter also which probably isn't super relevant to this audience right but uh yeah tech finance money i do see a lot of arts on there education is really strong on there uh i think that there's a lot of like speaking and you know other types of business performance but it is pretty business heavy in my experience but i'll

[23:24] tell you what i've been really blown away by this year as i put more energy into twitter i've spent years building my email list and that's been an incredible asset to build but i've probably generated more income from a few tweets that you know caught attention that were related to a product i was selling then i have through my email list this year it's interesting it's pretty wild yeah i wouldn't expect that usually it just seems like that audience um is willing to pay for things that they want more so than other platforms like i wouldn't expect i would have that same success on tick tock

[23:56] yeah no i would agree were the things you were selling on twitter were they like courses and ebooks and such courses to some degree but mostly like workshops um i i've changed a lot of my digital products strategy this year from giant in-depth course that i spend months developing and then you know uh charge a couple hundred dollars for to um more specific in-depth dense hour to two hour long workshops that i can charge a fraction of the price for so on a unit by unit basis it's really easy for me to say yeah this is going to be worth forty dollars for your time you're gonna get a ton out of this and

[24:34] at a level of scale it can be even more impactful to me as the creator if i'm getting that in front of enough people that's fascinating yeah i have um a lot you know i'm such a proponent of email lists i mean one of the reasons that i built drip was because there wasn't a great tool out there i mean mailchimp was fine but it didn't do what i needed it um and i had always found that you know email engagement is is more than social but to your point there are instances where especially if you get some virality where it just outpaces far outpaces the the built-in reach that

[25:07] you have it's very it's very public and a lot of times um it's a momentum game so if if you build a name for yourself in a space and i've built a little bit of a name for myself in the community space so when i shared hey i'm doing a workshop on uh a community building crash course a lot of people were like oh this is awesome i'm in and you can see all these people saying i'm in which just i don't know if it creates hype or fomo but it's very public and people see it and so they they also want to enroll in that journey

[25:35] uh whereas email someone would have to go out of their way to share on social publicly the fact that they enrolled in this thing which of course you want them to do but they're not going to do it in as much numbers as social right because the switching mediums anytime you ask someone to switch mediums this is why like facebook ads don't work i say don't i've never seen or heard of them working for to grow your podcast right that's something you and i both want to do is grow a podcast and i look deep into how to do this even if i need to throw money

[26:05] at it and if someone's on facebook they're just not going to click that and then open their phone you know it just it really doesn't happen in the numbers that you need it similarly like you're saying someone's reading an email it's solo it's in their inbox versus if they're reading it on twitter they know they're in a public space and the the tweet 100 challenge has been kind of a gift for the podcast because i know the people opting into that care about twitter so i can serve up in my sequence a couple of episodes that are very twitter centric to say okay you obviously care about twitter here's a

[26:34] conversation i had with david perrell here's a conversation i had with tiki bush of ship 30. um and it's a very easy like oh yeah i do want to listen to that because it's aligned with my interest right now and that's been a really good thing for the podcast this year more so than i expected to be honest very cool well thanks jay folks want to keep up with you creative elements dot fm of course your podcast is called creative elements and they can follow you on twitter at j klaus c-l-o-u-s-e thanks so much for joining us at microsoft today thanks rob

[27:10] [Music]

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