Becoming an influencer is pretty straight forward:

The first thing is pursue something that you are so insanely passionate about that you’re willing to outhustle anybody else by a factor of 1000X.

The second thing is use the Internet. Publish your thoughts, your videos, your photos, your ideas, your audio, your artwork, etc. online. Do not use Instagram or Facebook or Twitter; spend 90% of your effort building up your own blog, self hosted on wordpress.org, and 10% of your effort on YouTube.

The third thing is think independently, and create independently. This means don’t create and make things based on what everyone else is doing. For example, the hilarity is that I publish a lot to YouTube, upload a lot of videos to YouTube, upload a lot of vlogs to YouTube, I upload a lot of stuff to YouTube, yet I never look at YouTube. A simple thought to success:

Spend 99% of your time and effort creating and producing and publishing, and only 1% of your time and effort consuming.

The fourth thing is time. I started blogging, uploading stuff to YouTube ever since I was 21 years old. As I write this I am currently 35 years old, I was born in 1988, and I suppose if I do the math, I have been in the game for over 14 years. It took me 14 years to get about 10,000 subscribers to my email newsletter, and I’m still going strong.

The fifth thing is the email newsletter. Even though email is a pretty bad technology, it seems to be the most effective way to propagate your thoughts. For example, I think the average person probably checks their email every two minutes. The penetration rate of email is probably 10,000X of that of social media. Another example, having about 90,000 fans on my Facebook fan page, if I post something organically, only maybe 200 people will see it organically. That rate is atrocious. However if I send out an email newsletter, my open rate seems to be around 30%. Much better.

Create, share and publish that which you’re personally curious about

A really big thing is in regards to things, create share and publish things you’re personally curious about.