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Question for Michael Lin on Content Creation - Non-FAANGMULA Engineer - How do I optimize long-form text content for my following?

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Senior Software Engineer at Taro Community2 months ago

Question: What other ways can I try to segment my knowledge/info from my long-form content (capture somehow in the short form) that can still be engaging but less exhausting and intensive that can help with channel growth / sales? I'm a Substack creator, writer/author.

Background: I feel like a lot of your successful engineering examples came from people who worked at household name startups and FAANGMULA companies that had bigger followings. Because I never worked for a big household name even if I am considered a market leader/authority in my field, my following is still smaller than I prefer.

I released a book on my subject matter expertise a few years back, feel I did a less good job at marketing after publishing was at over 2.5K followers (I'm at about 6K now on LinkedIn, Twitter and less on IG/FB Fan Pg and haven't broken that 10K mark on any channel which frustrates me), I haven’t seen a ton of growth.

All my friends who broke 100K-1M followers either all have worked at FAANGMULA, or have been asked to model/act professionally so I feel this is at my disadvantage to a degree as I dislike showing my face and objectifying myself further to society’s physical image standard. Some of my Gen-Z friends have lifestyle IGs with 50K+ followers with a lot of engineering memes (short vids) and while I admire them to a degree for their ability to capture a large following, I find that my posts are always much longer form and easiest with Substack, Medium or the written word. For 4 years fans have asked me to livestream, release a podcast, or start a YouTube, all of which is a ton of work, energy, has some value, but I feel a ton of pressure to edit pixel perfect content, be “on” for a performance or get propositioned for dates. Do you have examples of content creators that don't show their face on screen that are able to scale?

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Discussion

(2 comments)
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    Ex-Netflix • Engineering Consulting for VC-Backed Startups
    a month ago

    What I've noticed is that influencers with explosive growth all have 5 things in common:

    1. Value-add content
    2. Post consistently
    3. Clear target audience
    4. Clear differentiator
    5. Are part of a growing market

    From what you described, it could be that you lack 2) and 5). For an example of a channel that executes all 5 well (and is faceless too!) check out this instagram account about AI/ML that grew from 0 to 35k followers on IG in 4 months:

    https://www.instagram.com/finding.mlllll/

    Good luck!

  • 1
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    Tech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course Hero
    2 months ago

    So I almost never share a picture of myself on LinkedIn and I have 117k+ followers. LinkedIn is very short-form though. I'm planning to make a course about how to grow on LinkedIn, but in the meantime, there's this: [Case Study] How I Get 500,000+ LinkedIn Post Views Per Week

    For Substack, I highly recommend networking with other Substack creators to include you as a recommended newsletter. Substack pushes related newsletters very aggressively, and that's a huge growth component of many Substacks. One of the core reasons Jordan Cutler's High Growth Engineer is so big is because he put in the effort to network with many other Substack creators so all their newsletters link to one another. I think 30%+ of his new followers come from this feature.