Welcome to UpGroves!

Your go-to newsletter for making money online, building an audience, and learning from real-life cases.

Without further ado, let's dig in.

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Lessons learned from getting 200 new followers on X in a single day

Last week I gained 200 followers on X from one single tweet. It might seem small for many but if you consider last week I had 1,000 followers, that's a 20% increase! That means 200 people interested in what I have to say. It's mind-blowing.

I like hanging out on Twi-... X. But I've been skeptical about paying for X Premium ever since it came out. Paying $8 a month to Mr. Musk for more visibility? It seemed shallow.
This is why I decided to take X more seriously. I studied so that I could understand how it worked and beat them at their own game.

I started to create more content that resonated with my current followers, prepped my bio, and added relevant links. Here's when the magic happened. My breakthrough post was about how I decided to stop working as a freelancer to become a full-time indie hacker.

This is not my most viral tweet, but it's the one that has got me the most followers of all. And here's what made it work:

• I included a photo of myself to make it more personal and authentic. I'm usually hesitant to share my pics, but I remembered that "everything you want is on the other side of cringe."
• I posted content that I knew my audience would enjoy. As a maker myself, I get inspired by the stories of people who take the plunge and go all in to make the things they want.
• I used a keyword that was relevant to my audience - in this post, I added "indie hacker".
• I replied to EVERY SINGLE COMMENT as fast as I could. This gave an additional boost to that tweet hours after I posted it.
• I reposted the tweet after 12 hours. I always get a couple of likes each time I repost one of my tweets. Maybe it's because people are in different time zones and the algo sometimes fails to show a tweet.
• I prepared my account for virality by:
  • Updating my bio, mentioning the topics I discuss, and links to my projects.
  • Shared plenty of content I believe my audience would find interesting. This increased the chances of gaining more followers if they visited my profile.

In summary, my takeaway is: think about who you are speaking to and prepare yourself to get lucky.

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This Week’s Picks

Stories From The Trenches

• ​How 1000 tools crossed $2K MRR in just 45 days
  ​Making something profitable in the first few months is not an easy feat. In this thread, David Gutiérrez takes you through his journey from the beginning on how he built 1000 Tools, a manually-vetted tool directory. He shares his product and audience-building strategy and how he planned his PH launch.
• ​How Marc Louvion grew Ship Fast to $43k monthly revenue in 2 months
  ​Marc Lou managed an "overnight success" by launching a NextJS Boilerplate... after shipping 17 products in the past two years! This article explains the factors that helped him achieve this (SPOILER: there's a lot of hard work involved.)
• ​How Ben Collins Built a Successful Business With Google Sheets Tutorials
  ​This article explains the six growth levers that let a forensic data scientist grow his audience and reach six figures in revenue a year selling courses about Google Sheets in 6 years.

Bring Me the Money

• PR: How to get journalists to talk about you
  ​People that don't know you don't care who you are. That's why you need to grab their attention and earn their trust as fast as possible. In this short video, Duolingo’s Former Head of Growth Gina Gotthilf shares how to get journalists to write about you by crafting an impressive one-liner.
• LEAD GENERATION: How to set up a chatbot to automate your website's lead generation process
  ​As a solopreneur, time is scarce. That's why you should try to automate as much as you can. In this thread, Shushant explains how to automate the lead capture website by setting up Chatsimple on your website.
• SEO: How to speed up your website and optimize for SEO
  ​A digital marketing specialist offers valuable SEO website reviews on TikTok. In a recent video, he explains how to speed up your website and optimize it for SEO, tackling technical issues and implementing strategies like the EEAT framework for a news publication site.

Audience & Content

• AI CONTENT: My experience trying to write original, full-length human-sounding articles using Claude AI
  ​Have you tried to use ChatGPT to write articles? If you have you might have noticed that the output is - almost always - super cringey. This tutorial shows how to write original, full-length content (blog articles) with AI.
• AUDIENCE GROWTH: Here's your roadmap to your first 10K TikTok followers in 3 easy steps
  ​Shawn, a personal brand strategist, condensed all he learned over 1 year of posting on TikTok on one single page. It shows the basic formula and cadence that you can use if you want to start on the clock platform.
• CONTENT STRATEGY: Optimising Your Content Strategy To Find Clients
  ​In this podcast, Samuel - founder of Jupiter and the Giraffe, a company that creates immersive website experiences for businesses - talks about Starting a YouTube channel, content creation, and niching.

It's All About You

• ​Being a solo founder is incredibly hard and lonely - How do you cope with the second-guessing and feeling of overwhelm?
  ​Being self-employed can be hard. This thread has loads of good advice on how to cope. Some of my favorite answers from the X thread:
  • Join or build a community of other founders
  • Take a short nap or break, then get back to work
  • Do Bachata & Kizomba
• ​Focus to Win
  ​Learning how to say no and narrowing your focus will get you more and better results. Often, it's more important to look at what you are NOT doing than what you need to do. This article says why focusing is the best thing you could do to move forward.
• ​Branding for Solopreneurs 101
  ​Justin Welsh is the role model for many solopreneurs. He has perfected his personal brand. He shares what he has learned in his journey on this topic. After you read this you'll realize there's much more than showing up and being yourself.

Sweet Sweet Candy

• Sometimes, feedback from your users can be hard
• GPT-4 Vision to create property descriptions Airbnb and villa listings is so easy​
• ​Day in the life of a Startup Founder​
• ​100 Most Asked Questions on Google In 2023 (number #3 will blow your mind!... just kidding)
• Beckham doesn't buy your role as a solopreneur​

Re-Sources

• CHEATSHEET: Content Marketing Cheatsheet for 2024 by Tim Hanson, Founder of Penfriend, an SEO AI article writing tool.
• TOOL: Passionfroot is a tool to handle sponsorships, collaboration requests, bookings, and payments
• RESOURCE: Loaf, a collection of animated SVG icons

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I would love to hear your feedback! Which pick did you enjoy the most? Is there something you would take off the list? Reply to this email and let me know.

Stay humble,

Paulina

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