🦅 How I Got 40,000 People to Read My Writing...

How I Got 40,000 People to Read My Writing

Over 40,000 people read my emails. I still find that strange, because I don’t consider myself a writer, and for sure I never tried to become one.

1) The 1 Skill That Made One Hour of My Time Worth $2,500

I built my first websites in high school. But the real shift came after I quit a banking job I hated and landed at a digital marketing agency in 2008. That's where I discovered SEO.

I started applying it immediately. My first side project was a proxy website for anonymous surfing. The traffic was massive (I ranked number one in Google for “anonymous surfing” in Dutch). But almost nobody clicked the ads, and server costs ate through the revenue.

So I built a new one. A finance website about savings rates and loans, using the banking knowledge I'd picked up at my previous job. People who search "best savings rate" are ready to open an account. That website was profitable almost from the get-go.

I kept going. At a certain point I had hundreds of websites working for me. Some I spent maybe 4 hours creating, and they've netted me $10,000 over the following 5 years. That's literally $2,500 an hour.

But in the long term, the real dividend turned out to be mastering one skill: SEO.

2) The First Growth Engine Behind Hypefury

When I joined Hypefury as co-founder, I applied the same SEO approach to our website.

We wrote content targeting the questions creators were already typing into Google. How to grow on Twitter. How to write better threads. How to schedule content effectively.

The blog grew to 45,000 organic visitors per month, people actively looking for answers in the space we served.

No ad spend. No growth hacks. Just useful content, placed where people were already searching. That quiet engine still runs today. It brings new users to the product every day.

3) The Compounding Effect of a Single Skill

When I started posting on 𝕏, I had about 600 followers and my tweets were, honestly, not very good. I knew digital marketing inside out, but I had no clue how to write for social media.

Here's what most people miss, though: I wasn't starting from zero.

Hypefury’s blog was already bringing 45,000 visitors. Some of them looked up who was behind it. They found me on 𝕏 and decided to follow. Thanks to SEO, my starting point was warmer than it looked from the outside.

On top of that, I asked experienced creators for feedback. I studied what worked. I used Hypefury to stay consistent. Within a few months, I went from 600 to 5,000 followers.

Then I started creating free resources: ebooks, templates, free courses. Things that were genuinely useful to creators.

I'd post them on 𝕏, ask people to comment a keyword, and use Hypefury's autoplug feature to automatically DM them the download link. The comments boosted the post's visibility. The DMs created a direct connection. And every download captured an email address. One post could drive engagement, social proof, and subscriber growth all at once.

So, here’s my recipe to get over 40,000 without being a writer.

You master one skill (for me it was SEO, but it could be copywriting, or anything else really), then you apply it consistently over time and across multiple platforms.

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That’s it for now, everyone! We’ll meet again next week to discuss more of this!

Don’t forget to try Hypefury (for free) if you haven’t yet.

Feel free to reply to this email. It goes directly to me.

Cheers,

Yannick Veys
Co-founder and CMO of Hypefury