It's been a while

It’s been a while - things got busy!

Back in April, I went to Las Vegas for a conference. After COVID shutdowns and lots of time with my head buried in mostly online marketing, it was nice to talk to so many people face-to-face.

Around this same time, I started focusing a lot on business development at my day job. This resulted in even more conversations with people, and I found myself energized.

All of this stuff felt fun, and I’ve always felt that any time you can have fun at work is a good thing; we spend an awful lot of our lifetime working.

That leads me to the first topic I’m going to discuss this week: throwing out the rules and seeing what happens. I’ve been doing a bit of this over the past few months and want to share some thoughts. Let’s go!

-Mike

P.S. You can follow No Budget Marketing on LinkedIn, too.

Sometimes you throw out the rules

You’ll hear a lot in content creation about how you should pick a niche and stick to it if you want to build an audience.

But that can get pretty boring after a while. That’s what I found happening with marketing; I was working in a marketing job all day, posting to social media about it and writing this newsletter. It was all marketing, all the time.

So I started thinking, what if I posted on social media (Twitter/X specifically) about the things I enjoy and built my audience that way?

Maybe there are even some no-budget marketing lessons here you can apply to your own business or situation.

Let’s start this story back just under a year ago…

In September 2024, I wrote an article and a Twitter post about how I generated one million organic impressions on X (Twitter) in just over a month. To unlock ad revenue on that platform, you need to generate five million impressions in three months, so this was a nice start.

But I never quite reached that magic threshold…until last week, when I received a payment from X for $125.43.

And it was a change I made a few months ago that got me there.

My strategy for getting monetized on X

In a nutshell, my plan for getting paid on X is to generate an average of at least 50,000 impressions per day, and I don’t worry too much about how I get there. I don’t have to post about marketing if I don’t want to.

I’ve been focused on three things:

1. Posting a few things throughout the day, trying to stay on topics that might be of interest to those who normally engage with me, but I don’t worry about it too much.

2. Keeping an eye on my “For You” tab for posts I can comment on that might get a high number of impressions. Sometimes this can come from making a joke or saying something insightful.

3. Checking my impression numbers late each day to see if I have more work to do through a final push to closer to 50,000 daily impressions.

Most of this work involves replies, as noted in number two on the list above. It’s rare that one of my own posts on X generates thousands of impressions; most of my traction comes from the things I comment on other people’s posts. So this is what I’ve made my main focus.

I’ve built my daily goals around the things that were moving me closer to hitting the ad revenue-sharing threshold rather than sticking to my niche and hoping to get there someday.

Be an activity generator

Measurement in everything I mentioned above is important.

But, you also need to be an activity generator.

You have to drive things that appropriately grow the numbers you’re tracking. Sometimes, this means running towards what’s working and doing more of it. Most of the time, all that activity generation will cost you is more of your time; it’s a great no-budget marketing tool.

Rather than sticking to my niche, I decided to change things up, have fun replying to everything that seemed interesting, and go after ad revenue-sharing. What’s something similar you can do in your marketing work?