How I built an audience of over 100,000 without going viral

I have been writing online since 2015.

I’ve never had a viral moment. No post breaks the internet. It won’t happen overnight.

I still have a huge audience.

I tell you this because the model most people have in their heads is wrong. They believe that the audience is established at a certain important moment. A viral video. One article took off. A lucky break changed everything.

So they waited. They post something, watch it get fourteen likes, and then decide they failed. Then they quit.

I pretty much did the same thing.

My first few years were quiet.

Like others who start writing online, I started with 0 followers and subscribers.

Anyway, I’ll be posting an article every week. Some weeks, the number was close to zero.

I’ve seen other writers post content that exploded in growth and attracted tens of thousands of views in a single day. I don’t have anything close.

I’ll tell the truth. I want a viral hit. I studied the blasted posts and tried to reverse engineer them. It never worked. The harder I chased peaks, the worse my writing became because I was writing for algorithms rather than people.

So I stopped chasing it. Instead, I made a decision.

Anyway, I’ll be posting every week. Good week or bad week. Large numbers or single digits.

This decision is the whole story. Other than that there are no secrets.

Virality is a peak. The audience is a slope.

This is what most people miss.

Viral posts are a spike. It will rise and then fall back just as fast. Most readers never come back. They see one thing and move on. The spikes feel great and barely change anything.

The audience is different. The audience is a slope. You can appear as the same person over and over again, slowly building up one reader at a time.

Psychologists even have a name for what this phenomenon does. it’s known pure exposure effect. The more times a person encounters something, the more they trust it and like it. A great post doesn’t win trust. You can get it by going there again and again until a stranger becomes a regular reader.

This is why consistency trumps virality. Going viral allows you to be seen once. Consistency will make you remembered.

Epictetus, the Stoic philosopher who was born a slave and later taught a generation of Romans, understood this more than two thousand years ago.

“Nothing great is created suddenly.”

It’s great to have an audience. It was not created suddenly. You build one week at a time.

How to build an audience without going viral

If you were starting from scratch, this is exactly what I would do.

1. Choose a publishing schedule and don’t miss out. Once a week is enough. The schedule is more important than the size of each piece. Your readers need to know you will show up. Reliability is the product.
2. Write for a person, not an algorithm. Imagine a real reader encountering a real problem. Write a letter to help that person. Posts built for virality feel hollow. Posts are created to help someone get shared because they actually help.
3. Go where your readers are already. Don’t sit in a corner of the web waiting to be discovered. Post where your audience is already gathering. Build your own audience Starting from scratch would take years. It’s faster to borrow an existing one.
4. Get better in public. My early articles were not very well written. I improved because I kept shipping and kept figuring out how to write articles People actually want to read. You don’t get better privately and then post it. You get better by publishing.
5. Measured in years, not days. An article tells you almost nothing. Judge your progress in twelve months, not twelve hours. Every day numbers are noise. Annual trends are signals.

boring truth

People always want tricks to attract an audience. Not one.

I built over 100,000 readers by writing one article a week and refusing to quit when progress was slow. That’s it. That’s the whole approach.

Very boring. This is also the only reliable method.

You don’t need to go viral. You need to go again. And then again. And then again.

Starting this week. Then publish the next one.

The hardest week is the first week

Everything I described above only starts to work once your platform actually exists. A page with your name, a way to collect emails, and your first post. The first week is something most people never complete.

That’s why I built Launch in 48.

The course gives you a simple framework to implement everything in one dedicated weekend: your brand, your page, your freebie, your welcome email.

I just updated it with new courses on growing your brand and making your first income, as well as Darius 2, an AI trained on my private content that you can ask any questions you want as you build.

The course is open until June 30. We’ll kick off with a live workshop on July 1st.

Join 48’s Launch here.