If I Had to Build My Audience From Zero Today, Here's What I'd Do
The principles I learned the hard way, and how the AI content system I built helps me implement them.
I’ve built a largish personal audience across Substack, YouTube, and LinkedIn. If I had to start from zero today, with AI flooding every platform, here are the principles I’d follow.
These have been learned through years of grinding, and iterating to figure out how to scale a personal audience through content.
Where applicable, I’ve added in skills from my AI content system that helps me to implement these principles.
Craft: What you create
Principle 1 - Say something: ‘Authenticity’ is overrated. Everyone talks about having an authentic voice when creating content. But you can be authentic and create incredibly boring content. You need something to say, a genuinely useful lesson, a real point of view with great clarity behind it. That means you’re not sitting on the fence. I used to feel like I failed if people argued about my ideas online, but now I know it’s a sign that something I wrote was interesting. People want opinions; not corporate jargon.
AI Use Case: One of my favourite skills in the system is post-enrichment. When making a point, it helps to find authoritative quotes, stories, case studies, and other examples to enrich your post and bring your point to life. I have a skill that will take in my draft, pattern match against my audience, and find ways I can enrich that post, e.g., use AI to elevate your content, and add finishing touches. Here’s an example of me running this post through it.
Principle 2 - Be Worth Sharing: Your audience grows when other people talk about your ideas, not when you talk about yourself. The goal of every piece of content is to hand someone else a thought worth passing on. On LinkedIn, it’s a repost; on Substack, it's a restack; on YouTube, it’s sharing the video with others. This is the true mark of content quality.
AI Use Case: You can build a simple AI reviewer that reads your drafts from your audience’s perspective. It can evaluate every idea against the sharing triggers that would resonate with your audience., Examples would be, does this make someone look smart, does it say what they’ve been thinking, give them a framework they can forward to their team, or spark a debate worth having? The purpose is to tell you which moments are “portable”, the lines someone would screenshot and send to a colleague, and flags when nothing in the draft clears that bar. It’s basically an editor who only asks one question: would anyone pass this on? For example, here are instructions you can plug into a Claude project and it will give you feedback like the below example. To make this custom built for your content, simply feed in your content analytics and ask it to adapt the instructions to patterns that exist in your best performing content.
Principle 3 — Use AI to think better, not write faster. Most people use AI to create more content. That’s the wrong instinct. The real value is in understanding more. The first thing I built in my content system wasn’t a writing tool; it was an audience profile. AI helped me map my readers’ pain points, motivations, the language they use, what triggers them to engage, and what makes them scroll past. From that profile, the system builds a content queue, ideas and angles designed around what my audience actually cares about, not what I feel like posting that day. Everything starts with the reader. AI makes it easier to better understand the audience and create an entire content queue of ideas for that audience.
Strategy: How you grow
Principle 4 — Master one platform: Pick one platform at a time. I create content across LinkedIn, Substack, and YouTube. I also want to get back into X. The challenge is, I’ve seen what works across platforms continue to diverge making it hard to just repurpose content. That means you need a platform-by-platform strategy. Given the competition for eyeballs. It’s much better to master one than to aimlessly cross-post across all.
AI Use Case: What works on LinkedIn doesn’t work on Substack. What works on Substack doesn’t work on YouTube. The formats, the hooks, the structures, they’re all diverging. So I built a “winning content profile” for each platform. It’s simple: I feed in my top-performing posts from a single platform, and AI extracts the patterns, what hooks worked, what structures drove engagement, what length and format performed best. Then when I create content for that platform, the profile acts as a guide. The deeper you go on one platform, the richer that profile gets. And when you’re ready to expand to a second platform, you build a new profile for that one. That’s how to use AI to ensure your content is mapped to whatever platform you’re targeting.
Principle 5 — Quality over quantity: A personal brand is not a follower count. It’s an audience that cares about what you say. The quality of the audience is much more important than its size. It took me a while to figure that out. Especially when it’s easy to obsess about the overall numbers. A small list that trusts you beats a huge feed that scrolls past you.
Principle 6 — Be remembered, not viral: Stop trying to go viral. Work to be remembered. I learned this the hard way on YouTube. I got obsessed with creating content for the algorithm. I started creating content that I didn’t even enjoy making. We’re currently rebooting our editorial strategy, focusing on creating memorable content we enjoy making. You can become a slave to the algorithm. You can lose the fun in creating content.
Mindset: How you sustain it:
Principle 7 — It's hard. Accept it. Everything in marketing is hard. This is the truest thing about all forms of marketing today, including building a personal audience. It’s so freaking hard. Every channel is awash with content. It’s hard to find repeatable motions that work. As soon as you think you’ve nailed a content type/format/subject, it becomes old news. And you have to find the next thing. There is no short-cut, that’s why I’ve duplicated this point in two different principles lol.
Principle 8 — Love the grind. You have to love it. It’s a grind. You can have an incredible career without having a personal audience. But, if you want to create one, you have to love creating content, because it’s a super duper grind. Trust me. You will feel like giving up. The only way through is to grind, learn, grind, and learn some more. When things aren’t working, just go back to point 1. Are you saying anything different? Do you have a unique angle? Why should your content win? I talked to a YouTube who most people knows, with a massive audience, it took him 10 years until his channel finally took off. He just out grinded everyone else.
Having a personal audience is one of the most valuable assets you can have when growing your career. It’s a lot of work; but I think worth it.
Until Next Time,
Happy AI;fying
Kieran