Make your First $1000 on Social Media (No Bullsh*t Guide)

Today, I will run you through how to make money from social media the same way I did (without showing your ******* for $5).

I don’t have anything to sell you. Let’s get into it.

Skills and Goals

This can be done easily as long as you have a skill or a goal you’re working towards. (And we’ll get into why I prefer setting a goal later.)

When we’re talking skills, I mean ones that benefit people in wealth, health, or relationships, because that’s what people will happily pay you for. But there are exceptions for art and music.

Since the world is full of a lot of unique people (and a lot of fucking weirdos), so is the internet. You can have skills from:

• Fitness
• Running an online business
• Having a stable, healthy relationship
  

All the way to

• Becoming a Discord mod

And I can honestly say that this is the best way to make money because if you’ve cared enough to learn a skill, you must enjoy it to a degree (and it’s miles better than selling bullshit water filters on Instagram).

If you don’t have a skill or don’t think you have achieved something of value (which is nearly impossible), I want you to pick a goal. Maybe it’s something that you have been putting off, like getting in shape, or just something you think will be fun, like building a fundraiser, which is what I’m doing right now.

Choosing Your Platform

This skill or goal is going to become the basis of our content on social media (which we will get into creating soon). But you should already have an idea of what platform is best for you.

Even though a lot of people are successful on Meta platforms (Instagram & Facebook), I think they kinda suck.

I have two recommendations.

X: This is by far the best for text-based content. Keep in mind that because X is constantly evolving, it feels a little experimental (like the algorithm sucks right now in terms of reach), but if you have long-term faith in Elon, then X is a good choice.

YouTube: I don’t need to tell you how good it is. I also understand that posting here is daunting for a lot of people.

The growth strategies are different depending on the platform. On X, your focus should be on making friends and building relationships. On a YouTube platform, it’s about giving out as much information or being as entertaining as you can.

So, pick a platform that suits your personality type, too.

Setting Up Your Profile

I don’t need to tell you how to make an account, but here are some tips for you to follow:

• Keep your profile as clean as possible.
• A clear profile picture with your face; I’ve had this conversation with a few people that I would struggle buying anything from a person if I haven’t seen their face.
• I think using your real name or a variation of it is kinda key. Naval had a great quote about this: “Embrace accountability and take business risks under your name.”
• And just write a clean, easy-to-understand bio. Chances are you’re going to constantly change it. This is mine on X:
  

“I want to make cool things and make people smile. Made 150k online. I help you make a living doing what you love.”

Pretty basic.

Feel free to copy that structure:

• What you want to do
• What you’ve done
• How do you help people

Don’t spend too much time on any of these. They will keep changing and evolving just as you do.

Creating Content

Now, we’re going to talk about content. (I will talk about specifically what to write in the next section.)
But just some advice: I want you to be honest with yourself if what you’re making content about—or even making content in the first place—is something you love doing.

Because just to set expectations, it will take a while to get going. Even now, I am at over 500 subscribers, and sometimes my views aren’t that great. But it doesn’t worry me because I love doing it.

And if I didn’t love it, I would have stopped ages ago.

Since we’re essentially building a personal brand, injecting personality into your content is what’s going to separate you from other people. And remember to keep working on your life outside of social media; that’s what’s going to give you experience.

And to take full advantage of them, as boring as it sounds, you need to learn writing (such a shame school made it fucking boring).

It’s the fundamentals of everything you see: tweets, blogs, videos, everything. The sooner you put your attention to writing, the easier your life is going to be.

There are some great resources out there, specifically from Dan Koe, and he has a great blog post about his writing structure.

Just remember this is the most important skill you can learn.

The better you write, the better you speak, the better your content, then the better you can communicate your ideas.

Common Pitfalls in Online Business

Before we bring all this together,
I want to talk about some diseases that have infected the online business space.

1. Coaches: teaching people to become coaches to coach other people. I hate it; I think it’s dumb.
2. Courses: are sometimes dumb, especially courses that tell people how to sell a course—that’s a thing.
3. Gurus: Who sell people dreams by teaching them a skill they have never done before.

Everywhere you look, there is going to be someone who fits into one of these categories, or a combination of them.

That’s why I think growing on social media is simply a by-product of doing something cool.

That’s why it’s so important to have a skill or a goal that’s underpinning your growth. And just use social media to display what you have learned—that’s helping bring you closer to your goal or improving your skill.

I spend a fair bit of time on X in and around the business space, and there’s so much talk about constructing an offer (which is what you’re going to sell people), and I don’t think you should bother too much about this, and I’ll tell you why.

The truth is a lot of people on social media don’t have anything of value to offer you.

I just finished reading Steve Jobs, and something that stood out to me was that he hated business plans and finding ideal customers—he was under the impression that if you just create something cool, people will buy from you because they didn’t know they needed it.

And I sort of adopted this philosophy—I am not comparing myself to Steve Jobs, so just chill out.
But that’s exactly what I did to make my first money on social media.

If you have been around for a while, you will know that I started all of this by documenting my journey of building a web design business.

In order to do that, I had to learn a lot of skills, so I would post what I learned, like how to write better outreach, how to find people to outreach to, and when people are trying to do the same thing (and what I am talking about is so specific to them), they will pay you to implement it for them because you have done it.

And that’s what happened.

I was posting on X the positive responses I was getting from outreach and what led me to get them. I didn’t even prompt people to message me; they just naturally did, and they wanted to pay me to help them do what I did—and that example is so specific to online business, but I’ve seen it work for everything.

You have people posting how they overcame skin conditions; people will pay to get the same protocols, same with working out to get bigger legs, or even knitting. If you can do something desirable to people, they will pay you to implement it with them.

And that’s why I am so big on setting yourself a goal.

Like I mentioned earlier, so many people are selling something they haven’t done before, and it’s so fucking frustrating.

Trying to offer growth services from an account with 15 followers, helping fitness coaches reach 10k/m without doing it themselves, it just doesn’t make any sense to me.

And I wanted to be different from them; I was self-aware enough to realize that I didn’t have any skills that were valuable to people.

So, I decided to give myself the goal of raising money for abandoned dogs by selling hats (which are being manufactured right now; they look perfect, btw).

And from that, I’ve had to learn to build an e-commerce site. I learned how to design a product and to source it, copywriting, and producing content to grow a following to put the products in front of people.
This has meant I have had to upskill a lot, to the point where I have skills that are valuable to people, along with the proof that I can deliver because I have been documenting it all on social media.

That’s the route that I would 100% recommend right now, and that’s the reason I have started my blog: to help people like yourself build things online.

I also started a free community on X (we’re up to 5 members now, yay!), but the idea is that we help each other build out these projects online. Also, remember to subscribe if you want to see the abandoned dog fundraiser come to life. And I will talk to you soon.