How To Build Influence, Part 1: Status
Status is a perception, and Substack looks for clues about status.
Alex Hormozi’s podcasts rarely disappoint. The one published Wednesday, ‘The System I Use to Make People Actually Listen | Ep 979’ is an absolute cracker.
In this podcast, Alex describes ‘SPCL,’ his four-element framework to build influence. The acronym reminds me of ‘special’ and the letters stand for Status, Power, Credibility, and Likeness.
‘You have to believe in yourself when no one else does.’
Serena Williams
Each of these four elements deserves its own article. This article drills down on status. There will be three more.
Vignettes
Vignette #1: Fat bald guy
Fat Bald Guy drives off with Girl – in his Lamborghini.
Nice Guy drives home – alone, again – in his Subaru.
It’s status, or the perception of status, that makes all the difference.
Because status isn’t a thing in itself. It’s a perception that someone, or something, has an attribute that we value.
Fat Bald Guy signals affluence with a flashy car. Nice Guy may have just as much wealth but chooses not to flaunt it.
Does Girl care? She probably does, but she made her decision based on incomplete information. Rightness or wrongness becomes apparent with hindsight, but she calls it for Fat Bald Guy.
That’s life. We all live by our decisions, good and bad.
Vignette #2: Substack
Dolly Parton posted her first Substack Note on November 12, and it got 27,000 likes.
How many likes did your first Note get? A few less, I would guess.
Dolly brings her history to Substack. Her profile as a popular performer, her understated philanthropy, her general ‘nice person’ demeanour – these things pretty much guarantee she starts as a Substack star.
Dan Koe first posted on Substack on May 2. He brings his status as an incredibly successful one-person brand, developed on X over many years. He currently has 203,000 subscribers (I am one of them).
Justin Welsh followed soon after, first posting on May 5. He built his reputation on LinkedIn and bolstered it with 3 immensely popular courses. Substack is not his main channel but it’s still 30,000 subscribers strong. (Again, I am one of them. I also bought 2 of his 3 courses.)
Where does status come from?
Fat Bald Guy uses material possessions to get what he wants. It doesn’t matter if he’s mortgaged past his eyeballs and the Lambo is two days off repossession; he still gets to take Girl home.
What would happen, though, if Girl was herself a Bugatti-owning billionaire? Or knows someone who is? Fat Bald Guy would be ignored, for sure. Girl looks for other status signals, and Fat Bald Guy looks elsewhere for his jollies.
Dolly, Dan and Justin use the status of their off-platform success to give themselves instant Substack fame. That fame may or may not be relevant to Substackers but nonetheless, lots of us pay attention to their work.
It sure does work, doesn’t it?
Substack’s long tail
According to one survey1, 82% of Substack publications have less than 1,000 subscribers. And 45% of all publications across Substack post less than once a month.
I guess these authors lost interest in their publication. Or, at the very least, the enthusiasm that drove them to start on Substack is less than it was at the beginning.
This wouldn’t happen (again, I’m guessing) if there are thousands of active subscribers clamouring for the next article. Those authors would write like Gary Vee on crack, pumping out content like their lives depended on it.
But for most of us, that’s not real life. The truth is that our potential audience doesn’t care enough about us, or our writing, to get their clamour on.
How can we build status?
We’re normal folk.
We don’t have a public profile like Dolly, Dan and Justin.
How can we overcome this apparent weakness and get ourselves on our preferred audience’s radar?
We must create our own status. Three simple tactics increase our audience’s perception of status.
Tactic #1: Publish often
I worked at Andersen Consulting for a time, before they rebranded to Accenture. Back then our communications platform was Lotus Notes, and internal interest groups formed and disbanded as clients and strategies came and went.
I remember one note in particular. A partner I worked with was prolific in multiple groups and one day I read, “Carl, you are everywhere.’ And he was. His personal reputation was formidable, partly due to the endless notes, comments and suggestions to people at every level of the organisation. Everyone knew Carl. He was the ‘go-to’ guy.
Tactic #1 is exactly this. Publish often. The same survey I mentioned above asserts, ‘The more frequent the publishing schedule, the higher the paid subscription ratio is.’ This implies that publishing more means more attention, more eyeballs, and more interest.
Tactic #2: Publish everywhere
Substack garners 47,600,000 monthly readers2. Sounds a lot, doesn’t it? Yet Google clocks in at 5.6 billion searches a month, which means Substack accounts for just 0.8% of the total requests for information. That’s just 8 out of every 1,000.
This is not a flickoff to Substack, they’re doing great, but a reminder there’s more demand for information that Substack is not yet meeting.
A core TBS tenet is to publish content in more places. It’s an experiment that’s in its early stages but you should know that TBS will soon have a www home, and a presence on each of Medium and Beehiiv to augment Substack’s discoverability.
Tactic #2 is to publish on additional platforms. At the least, on Medium (with links back to Substack so you capture subscriber data). I highly recommend @Burk’s downloadable guides to show you how.
Tactic #3: Utilise your network
If you’ve been active on Substack for more than a few weeks, you will have already formed a loose network of authors and publications you gravitate to, and who gravitate to you and yours.
It’s a natural thing. Just like in real life.
Tactic #3 is to utilise your network. Ask/ don’t ask if they can link to your articles, and you link back to theirs. Ask/ don’t ask if you can provide a guest post and accept a guest post from them in return. Ask/ don’t ask if you can record an audio interview and make it available for them to use on their publication.
The benefit here is the mutual links you create within your network. Everyone wins with this tactic because the Substack algorithm sees a cluster of excellence – you and your network – and promotes it via the Substack app. Nothing to lose, everything to gain.
A closing though on status
Substack looks for clues about status. Its algorithm is a piece of code that can’t understand the nuance of status, so it relies on proxy metrics. Things like likes, comments, incoming and outgoing links. And, of course, the content and context of your article.
These are how you influence the perception of status.
Next
Over the next few days, hopefully before Christmas, I will publish companion articles to cover the other three elements of Alex’s ‘build influence’ network – Power, Credibility, and Likeness.
Meantime, listen to the podcast (and take notes).
https://newslettercircle.com/substack-report/.
https://www.similarweb.com/website/substack.com/#overview.