Stop hacking attention and start building authority 

If you want to build a business, going viral isn’t the answer. 

Because businesses that last are built on trust, not a flash in the pan. 

Sure, going viral can drive traffic to your profile, your website, and, ultimately, to your offering, but if you don’t have something of substance to support “the moment”, you will struggle to convert that short-term attention into long-term relationships. 

And long-term relationships are the name of the game. 

The foundation 

If you want to make money, you need customers. 

If you want customers, you need to offer something of value. 

If you have something of value and no customers, start by building trust. 

Or, put another way, build authority. 

Authority is just a fancy word that means you know what you’re talking about. 

And this single idea is the foundation for countless success stories in the modern age. 

It goes like this: you have unique interests, and one day, you decide to start talking about those interests online. 

Eventually, others begin to take notice of your work and start paying attention. 

But they don’t pay attention to everything. 

Only some of what you talk about. 

So you lean further into those things. 

You take that combination of what interests you and what other people want and you cultivate a high-value skill around it. 

You get good. 

And because you’ve been exploring your interests online, you also have a growing body of work that establishes your authority in your space, which, in turn, builds trust with your audience. 

So you have a skill, you have an audience, and you have authority. 

Now, you just need customers. 

To do that, you need an offering. 

Attention to dollars 

Businesses exist to make money, otherwise they’re just hobbies. 

If you want to monetize this newfound success that exists at the confluence of your skills, your audience, and your authority, you’ll need to provide something of value that other people can pay you for. 

There are two options here: a product or a service. 

I recommend starting with a service. 

Yes, products scale, but services allow you to connect more deeply with your customers to better understand their needs. 

And this understanding allows you to build better products when the time comes. 

See? 

Each stage informs the next. 

When I stepped out into the world of entrepreneurship, my first offering was paid consultations, which I still offer to this day. 

It’s an easy way to wade into the pool and few things beat solving someone’s problem one on one. 

These consultation calls helped to inform the curriculum for my first course and even showed me a deeper need in the market that we now solve via our agency. 

But it all started with exploring my interests online, slowly and methodically. 

No viral hits. 

No memes. 

No attention hacking. 

Just interest, intention, and authority. 

And I’m still doing it to this day. 

Are there other ways to build a business? 

Certainly. 

But this is what worked for me. 

So if you want to earn a living doing something you love, try exploring what interests you. 

In public. 

Trust me, if I can do it, so can you.