The Only 4 Ways To Grow On X/Twitter transcript

Recently, a creator named Daniel Lockyer gained over 20,000 followers from a single post when Peter Levels gave him a shout-out. And I jokingly posted that Daniel had cracked the code to X growth by simply getting a shout-out from Levels. But after making that post, it got me thinking about the different ways to grow on X, and I realized there's really only four. So in this video, I'm going to walk through each of those four ways to grow and how you can implement them on your account.

All right, the first way to grow on X is by receiving a boost from somewhere else. So in the example I just shared, Daniel received a boost from Levels shouting him out. Because Levels has almost 900,000 followers and is a well-respected indie hacker. So by sending a tidal wave of traffic to Daniel's profile, he was bound to gain a bunch of followers. But he gained even more because it came with Levels' stamp of approval.

A massive event like this is pretty rare though, especially organically. So there's a few more ways that you can receive a boost. But before I dive into those, if you're an educational creator who's looking to grow on X, you should check out my free community. Inside, you'll find training that will help you grow your account, a community of like-minded creators, as well as opportunities to work directly with me. So if that's something you're interested in, you can check that out using the link below.

All right, so there's a few more ways that you can receive a boost from elsewhere. For example, when I first started my X account, I ran a little challenge where I documented my journey to a thousand followers. And since I had never built a personal brand before, I followed creators ahead of me and tried to apply their advice to grow my account. One of these creators is a guy called Aaron Williams, and after following some of his advice, I saw positive results.

So I filmed a video where I essentially vouched for his strategy, and then I tagged him when I posted it on X, and he reposted it. And since he has over 200,000 followers, and we're in similar niches, I gained a ton of followers from this. So, the strategy here is to tag a big creator in your niche with a post that makes them look good, and there's a good chance they will amplify it. You can also pay bigger creators to repost you as well.

So, rather than hoping that they see your post and share it, you can reach out to creators whose audience you want to reach and ask them how much it would cost for them to comment or repost your content. And this may have slightly worse results than something organic because people will be able to tell that it's a paid promotion, especially if they're using the paid partnership label like they should, but it's still a good way to get a boost.

All right, this next strategy can be easily misunderstood, so let me be super clear about how this one works. If you have friends at a similar level as you, you can ask them to comment or quote your posts to give them a little boost for the algorithm. So, an example of creators who do this regularly are EP Mackena and Fed. You'll notice they don't boost all of each other's content, but whenever one of them drops an article or a bigger post, each of them will take turns interacting with each other's content.

This helps the post get more initial traction, and because their niches are similar enough, it helps the content get pushed to the right audience. Another example of creators who do this regularly are Dickie Bush and Nicholas Cole. So, if you scroll through either of their profiles, you'll see that they often quote or comment on each other's posts. Now, the reason I said this can be easily misunderstood is some people will hear me talking about this and they'll get funny ideas to try and cheat the system.

If you put together an engagement group with like 50 people in it and then you're all boosting each other's content, you're just asking to get suspended because you're essentially tricking the algorithm into promoting your content. So, don't create large groups or mass engagement pods to try and cheat the system. However, if you have a few friends that you want to comment on your post, that's completely fine. All right, then, the final way to get a little boost is by paying for promotion.

So, X has a built-in feature where you can pay to show your post to more people and I personally have not tried this because I've heard mixed things about it, but I do know of creators who have used this feature to get more followers and to get their content in front of more people. The main downside is that premium and premium plus users are not going to see as many ads, so the majority of the users that see these promoted posts are going to be unverified.

So, I would recommend that you exhaust all of the other methods first and then if you run into a roadblock and you want to try it out, it's worth giving a shot. >> [music] >> All right, so these are all examples of the first way to grow your account, which is by getting a boost from somewhere else. The second way to grow your X account can be a lot less fun and take a lot more time. So, if you haven't noticed already, the key to growing your account is getting more eyeballs on your content and eventually to your profile.

So, if you can't do that by getting a boost from someone else, you're going to have to do it manually yourself. So, this is where the reply guy strategy comes in and I want you to pay attention here because there's a right way to to this and a wrong way to do this. The wrong way to do this is when you spam comments all over the timeline, use AI to write your comments for you, and beg people to follow you. This will definitely get more eyes on your profile, but you are not going to convert many of these people into followers, because people hate when other creators do stuff like this.

The right way to do this is by interacting like a normal person, building genuine relationships, yourself as a well-respected voice in your niche. When you do things like this, each reply serves as a little teaser for your main content, and people are way more likely to follow. Replying all the time can be exhausting though, so ideally, you use this strategy to build a solid foundation and get things off the ground, and then once things start picking up, you can rely more on your content to do the heavy lifting.

And speaking of content, this leads into the third way to grow your X account, which can be very unpredictable, but is also the most powerful. When you first start on X, it can be absolutely brutal, because no one is going to see your posts. In fact, I've even seen some brand new accounts that literally get two impressions per post, and both of those views are their own. However, on occasion, I've seen small accounts that hit the algorithmic lottery and randomly have one of their early posts take off and jump-start their entire account without relying on either of the first two strategies.

One example of this is my client Paul. So, I started working with him when he had around 50 followers, and he'd only made like three posts. [music] So, my first piece of advice to him was to get in the habit of posting every day. So, he did that, and his first few posts got around 100 impressions each, but then randomly one day his post started taking off. It slowly started gaining traction until before we knew it, it had over 2,000 impressions, which was way more than his normal baseline.

But it didn't stop there. We watched over the next 48 hours as the post kept growing. 10K, 30K, 60K, 100,000 impressions. By the time the post finally slowed down, his follower account had nearly doubled to around 90 followers, and the post had over 160,000 impressions. He was then able to double down on that format and get two or three more posts that each got over 100,000 impressions, and by the end of it, he had over 140 followers.

Now, if I could tell you the exact strategy to follow to replicate this, I would. But the honest answer is that sometimes you just get lucky. It does get easier to get viral content as your follower account grows, but if you have a post get over 100,000 impressions when you have less than 100 followers, that's pretty much 100% luck. However, you do have to at least be posting every day in order to have a chance at one of these going viral.

So, that is something you can control. And worst case scenario, none of these posts go crazy, but it helps you scale up your account because when people find you from following the first two strategies, they're going to be much more likely to follow someone that is active. That being said, there is one more strategy that can help you grow that is based on a combination of the first and third strategies. At its core, one of the reasons people come to X is to learn about news and to see the discussion around trending topics.

So, by posting about trending topics in your niche, you can generate traffic from search, no matter how big your account is. For example, I ran a little experiment last year with a sports fan page, where I sent barely any replies, and tried to grow the account solely from content, and it actually worked pretty well. Despite having less than 100 followers, I managed to get multiple posts with tens of thousands of impressions, and one that even got over 100,000 impressions, simply by targeting search terms.

In this case, it was athletes either during or after a big game, because I knew a lot of people would be searching for them. And basically how this works is the sooner you can post about a trending topic, the more people will see your post in search, and then start engaging with it, and when this happens, the algorithm pushes it to more people. So, in the case of this 100k impression post, not all of those impressions came from search.

There was an initial surge as the first few people discovered it from search, but then as excited fans shared it, commented on it, and otherwise interacted with it, that pushed it out to more people's for you page. So, in order to take advantage of this strategy on your account, look for trending topics in your niche, and target them by using specific keywords related to that trend. As an educational creator, you're likely not going to be posting about athletes, but an example that could work for you is commenting on a new AI model that dropped.

So, instead of simply saying, "This new model is incredible," you could say, "Claude Opus 4.8 is incredible." And you're going to get a lot more impressions from that because of people searching for those specific keywords. Now, the last thing I'll say is that search traffic is not something you should be targeting all the time, but when trends do happen, it's a great way to capitalize and get some more traffic. All right, so those are the only four ways to grow on X.

And for more help growing your X account, click the video on screen to learn about the four types of content that will help grow your account.