How To Monetize on Twitter, Chat With Art of Purpose

Yasi: Welcome to the fast track podcast. And may I call you Art of Purpose or by your name?

Aop: The art of purpose is fine. You can. Okay. Yeah. Or AOP, everybody calls me AOP.

Yasi: Okay. Let an audience know. Where are you based right now? Um, I’m based out of Texas. Um, I’m in the North Texas area. Um, I’ve lived all around the country.

Aop: I’ve been many places, but as of right now, I’m living in, in Texas. And tell us a little bit about yourself. How did you start the Artel purpose? Why did you start it? Okay, so, um, I had this on my website too. If you go to my website and click start here, it’s there. Um, my whole story about why I started the art of purpose.

And basically this is what happened in a, in a quick summary. Um, I was one of those people who is in the FII fire community, building up money, building, building, building. And I went on like a seven year journey of taking my net worth from zero to a million. And once I actually hit a million dollars, this happened all over during the coronavirus as well.

Uh, what happened was the market took a dip and I threw all of my money down right when it was at the bottom and it helped propel me. Two over seven figures in net worth. I keep track of my net worth on mint. I use an app to track my net worth. Um, I know many of you may do that as well. And one day in may my net worth, instead of six figures from 909, it went to that seven figure, um, number.

And I literally got there and I was like, Okay. It’s one of it’s you build it up in your mind that you’re going to become a millionaire and hit a certain number and things are just going to happen. But I literally got there and I was like, okay, what am I going to do next? And, um, I thought about what to do.

And I thought about like, What’s the point. Maybe I had to find my own purpose. That’s why I named my character, the out purpose. And it’s just like I had to, I had to think about, what’s the point of getting all of this money? What’s the point of accumulating it? So I decided to, uh, it was coronavirus time and people weren’t allowed to go out and.

I was just consuming a lot of media and I’ve been playing like stupid video games because you couldn’t do anything else. So I thought, well, I hit a million dollars. I’m looking for something to do. I’m going to turn, I’m going to start a social media brand. And instead of playing video games and consuming, I’m going to actually start creating.

And so that’s, that’s where the art of purpose came from. It’s just a concept that I came up with during the coronavirus, where to, uh, and just get away from just sitting there and consuming information instead of get out there and actually start creating it.

Yasi: And  art, because, um, I, when I sat down.

Aop: Ah, that’s a great question. I sat down to come up with a lot of people ask me, like, how did you come up with this concept? And I literally sat down for an hour. I studied a lot of in the past few years of persuasion. Uh, I’m big in the Scott Adams and dr. Robert Cialdini, I’ve read all of their books. So when I was putting together the concept of a character, I wanted to just take all of the best things.

And just combine it into one. So I was like, okay, so what would be a good profile picture? Okay. Brad Pitt, because everybody loves Brad Pitt. Right. So why would you not use him as your picture? So, um, I also thought I also, you know, realize that tweets with pictures get higher engagement. Right. That’s a well-known fact.

So. Why not tweet with pictures all of the time. So that’s literally what I thought I said, if I’m going to tweet, I’m going to use every advantage I can. So I’m going to take high quality pictures, beautiful pictures, and make that part of what my personality is online. And, uh, it happens that I’m in the field of art as well.

So I have an advantage there. So it’s also leveraging a strength of mind. So that’s, that’s how I came up with the concept.

Yasi: My next question is you mentioned that you increased your personal network from zero to 1 million in seven years. And how did you do that? Like why did you decided to work on your net worth from a moment hours?

What triggered you?

Aop: I think net worth is the most important metric when it comes to defining whether you’re wealthy or not. So I look at everything from a net worth perspective. Um, literally I started, I came across all of those financial fire blogs around 2012, 13, like mr. Money, mustache and go Curry, Cracker, you know, a lot of the big names, JD Roth.

I started reading there’s the information there. And I had read some Dave Ramsey before. And that helped me get out of debt. But once I found out how to invest, I became like addicted to it. So this is interesting. I decided to get rid of all of the things I didn’t need. So I used to have a Mustang convertible loaded with leather interior back in 2012.

And literally the first thing I did was I decided to sell it and I traded it in for one of those electric cars, those small Nissan Leafs, electric Nissan leaf. And I literally took a. Uh, a loaded convertible, swapped it out. I started changing my whole lifestyle into consuming less. And then when I did that, it was kind of like a symbol.

To everyone that I’m making serious changes in my life because you know, when you start doing that, people are going to be like, what in the world is going on. So I decided to make, I decided to make huge lifestyle changes and I don’t really, I didn’t really care what anybody thought, but by me taking the lead, I was able to get other people on board because if I’m making that big of a move, it makes sense that like it’s, it’s.

It’s easier to do when you just plunge into it. So I started working on my net worth doing some side hustles, uh, working extra time, working side jobs and investing my money, uh, in sound financial investments, like the Vanguard total stock indexes that a lot of people talk about. And also when you mentioned to bring other people on boards, who are the other people.

Okay. So, uh, I don’t know if you’re married, but you know, when you have a spouse,  if your wife or your husband is not on board, that you might as well not. Uh, even bother, right. Because, and you’ll know this, a lot of people they’ll have a wife or a spouse, and this is how regular people work. It’s like somebody buys something in the household.

Right. And it’s like, Oh, okay. So they got a treat now I need to buy, right. Oh, I got a car now I need to get the car. Right. So when I decided to take that plunge and it was. My wife is like totally supportive behind it. And when everybody’s on the same page and knowing what’s going on, it’s so much easier too, when you’re working together.

Um, it’s so much easier to. Make progress. Yeah. I told you, I agree. And also not just, not just about spending, if you want to keep a budget, but your partner is not onboard with you and into them, they overspent and they don’t think is a big deal, but to you, it’s a big deal. Right. But since I made the, I made the biggest sacrifice, like right from the get-go, like I had this Mustang convertible and it was so sweet, but I was willing to part partway there’s ways with it to help better, uh, you know, my family’s lifestyle.

It was more important to me to see my family succeed rather than me drive a nice car. Does that make sense?

Yasi: Yup. Yup, totally. And. Talking about you made it lifestyle change, but early days, what are the biggest money mistakes you have made?

Aop: Okay. So I made the mistake that, you know, a lot of Americans make this mistake, right?

So they go to college. I went to school, I went to school on scholarship. I didn’t have some debt though. Um, cause I had to pay for living, but right out of college, I was the person that. Went out and bought. I got my first landed my first job. So what did I do? I went out and bought my first car and I spent like $30,000.

I know I just talked about a Mustang, but like I bought like a really nice, um, Honda accord, like, you know, spending 30 grand on the leather interior loaded. Um, because once you start getting that first paycheck out of college, it’s like, Oh wow, I’m making so-and-so per month. I can spend five, 600 on a car per month.

Right. It’s a huge mistake. And I regretted that. Uh, I remember all of the salesman at the dealership were congratulating me. Right. But they’re probably like, you know, they’re congratulating themselves. They just got another college kid to another. They’re all like, you know, I never, I never get the people who congratulate the.

When you get a car, it’s like, congratulations. I just transferred my money into a depreciating asset. What am I getting congratulated for? So it doesn’t make any sense.

Yasi: And you mentioned that you improve your personal networks from zero to a million within seven years. And I’m very curious, how did you do it?

Aop: Okay. So, uh, first we. Got rid of all of the excess, like I changed cars, you know, when you go into all these fire communities, they make you very aware of what you’re spending. Okay. So you need to be aware of how much you spend. I dropped my spending by $20,000 a year. At least I would say maybe, um, my kids muting was costing me $7,000 a year.

And since I traded that in for an electric car, electricity in Texas is so cheap. Uh, it’s, it’s crazy. It’s something like 7 cents a kilowatt hour. So it’s almost essentially driving a car for free. No oil changes, no maintenance on an electric car. All you do is charge it. And the electricity is almost free.

It’s not free, but I, I calculated how much it was costing me. And I took my $7,000 commute per year, and I turned it into something like one 50, $200 a year. And it’s an instant win in your pocket book. Whenever you put expenses, whenever you cut expenses, it’s an instant win for you. And then what that allows you to do is leverage and invest more.

So. We started saving 70% of our income per year. And we weren’t even like living poorly. Okay. We were still, we had a nice townhouse and we had a nice home. We had, you know, we just, we just set ourselves up to be able to be efficient. Um, so. That’s how and the money and, you know, good stock market. The past seven years, I also made some, you know, risky bets that paid off as well.

I also started, uh, working side hustles, uh, all of the income that I made in side hustles and second jobs I put right into investments. Everything literally, I didn’t spend any of it. It’s so tempting to go. Make extra money, or if you get a gift from your parents to say, Oh, I got 500, a thousand dollars.

Somebody gave me this, or I got a gift from grandma or something like that. It’s so easy to spend it. Right. But how about you take it and invest it instead. And it will pay dividends off for the rest of your life. Right. But do you and your wife both work? Yes, we do currently. Yeah. Why do we still work?

That’s a great question, right. Um, because we’re still working. That’s why? Um, because we, we want, what we want ultimately is, is pro 1 million. Great. Right. Okay. But we want, we want to be like in that, like two to 3 million category. Okay. Uh, I know that a lot of people in the fire community. Once they hit that million or some of them even retire off 800,000.

They stopped. We also, we also have a son. So, um, what we want to do is just, we’re, we’re kind of like trying to build like, you know, with social media and we’re, we’re trying to build something much bigger than just retiring early. Does that make sense? So that’s why we’re still working the nine to fives.

Um, you know, maybe one day we’ll, we’ll call it quits from there. But it depends on how much are the social media presence and how much we grow on social media as well.

Yasi: And what are the biggest wins for you in your, wealth accumulation phase? You mentioned the investment. Is that anything that you did really, really well that accelerates your net worth growth, right?

Aop: Yeah. So I know that this is going to get a huge, no, from a lot of people, my investment strategies go like this, uh, For all of the money I get paid through from my nine to five, I put in retirement accounts and investment accounts through Vanguard. That’s 80%. And then what I do with the 20% is I put them in high-risk trades, in the stock market.

So I’ve did something like where I bought leverage NASDAQ stock, right before the election in 2016. And no, I don’t recommend people do this, but I made. A lot of money off of this. So that accelerated my growth. Uh, Nevada talks about this too. Uh, if you want exceptional returns, Sometimes you need to take exceptional risk.

And I took exceptional risk in this one part. So what I recommend is this, if you are going to take risk only do it with a small percentage of your net worth. And for a certain percentage, I use the 80 20 strategy, which is 80% conservative and 20% high risk. So if I lose, I’m still sitting there with a good chunk of my change and, you know, And just, you’re not sitting there with nothing.

You don’t risk all of it. You only risk. It’s easier to sleep at night when you’re only risking a cer a smaller percentage.

Yasi: Yeah. The ones that if you lose it won’t bother too much. It hurts, but your life goes on, right? Aop: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

Yasi: And besides the investor in like Vanguard, total world, and also few risky ones, Do you also invest in other areas like real estate and gold silver Bitcoin?

Aop: That is a great question. Um, no, I actually do not because I feel as though I have much. Okay. And I know a lot of people do. Real estate. And one day I may dabble in it. Uh, the thing I like about the stock market is that it free. I have a blog post on this, like automating. I like to invest in things that are highly automated.

So when I work my nine to five, I don’t even see the money coming to me. It just gets pulled out directly if my paycheck. And it’s so easy to adjust my lifestyle because of it, it’s like a mind tack. So I just get paid. I get paid much less. I still save. We still say 40 to 50% of our income, even though we’re already millionaires and we don’t even see the money, it just comes right out of our paycheck.

So that’s one thing. So I like automating my investments so that I can use my time to go into other endeavors. So I’d used to be flipping and side hustling there. Now it’s on social media and now we’re building a brand on social media. And because I don’t have to worry about all of those Vanguard stock investments, they’re just there, they’re doing their thing.

So people forget that a lot. They, they all worry, like what Vanguard. Fund am I going to invest in what? And I get a lot of questions from people who know me in regular life. They go, what’s the perfect ratio of buying Vanguard, total stock index versus total world versus, you know what I mean by that? And it’s absolutely silly because they’re already diversified investments.

Right. And so. Just pick one, take it, run with it and then go use your mind and energy on something more important. As far as gold and silver. I don’t, I don’t invest in gold and silver. I don’t invest in currencies, so I don’t invest in Bitcoin. I probably, a lot of people are, may disagree with me on that, but maybe, maybe one day I will diversify into that.

But, uh, As of right now, I’m, I’m, I’m fine with what is it works? What I do works for me.

Yasi: Yup. Yup. Exactly. And also, what do you think are some of the smartest thing you did with money?

Aop: Oh, the smartest thing I did with money. Oh wow. The smartest thing I’ve ever done with money is ho boy. Um, I think that, uh, one of the smart things I did was at F this is counterintuitive here.

Uh, I started at first I started saving so hardcore that I was purchasing food in like processed mass produced. Just to say there, there’s certain things that you need to spend a little bit more money on. Okay. And it’s not worth sacrificing. For your long-term health. So one of the things that I did was over the past year, I started gaining weight actually.

And because I was eating so much processed food because it’s so cheap. Right. So what I did was I started investing a little more in like organic meats and, uh, grass fed and healthier foods and cooking, staying at home at that. That’ll save you money, not eating out, but. I think one of the smartest things to do is to align your body with the finances.

Uh, cause the best investment that you can make is in yourself and your body and your mind are linked. I’m like a big believer in that your mind changes when your body is in great shape.

Yasi: Yeah. And also I interviewed one of the, um, financial, personal finance bloggers in Switzerland. So he did a one month challenge by limiting his monthly budget to 1000 Swiss Franc, but 1000 Swiss fracking, Switzerland, it’s really nothing.

And he just eats, ’em like a pasta and stuff like that. Yeah. But he felt so horrible. He just did the challenge. So he know what he let it go off. He doesn’t miss that. What he misses other important things to him. So that’s how he evaluate where things, what budget he can cut, what he cannot. Right. So right.

Aop: And it, but it makes sense here. And I think people are focused too much in, on the money aspect of it as well, which is important, but what’s more important than money is time. Right? So if I’m going to sit and eat foods that are going to take years off of my life while that’s not a good investment, because you can always earn more money, but you cannot earn more time money.

You can always earn by the time we’re not come back, it’s gone. It’s gone.

Yasi: Yeah, that’s right. And then what do you think are the most common mistakes people make was money, um, for, is this for regular people or just regular people. Okay. Okay. Hands down. Okay. I have to get in that mindset, so, okay.

Aop: The biggest mistake people make. They get suckered by marketing and advertising and they don’t even, they don’t even see it. And I tell a lot of the people that I work with and it’s in my free book, it’s on my site and mental models of a millionaire. It’s a free book that I give away. I tell people to try to see things for what they truly are.

All right. So you have these luxury cars that cost 50, 60,000 us. And then you have a nice Toyota that in the U S can cost $20,000. That is actually a better car. Okay. So it’s not as fancy as the other ones. It doesn’t have the slick MW Mercedes label on it. But from going to point, if you’re going to use it to go from point a to point B to commute, Stick with something like a Toyota, as opposed to going for something fancy and buying the brand names and getting suckered by what you’re doing is basically buying the name and the advertising when you do that.

So I think that’s the biggest mistake people make is they don’t see things for what they, the true benefit that it brings to them. Maybe one to two typical examples, like things that people spend money on that you think they should not have. Uh, it’s mostly the, the cars. So in the United States, uh, the average auto payment is I believe $600 per month.

It may even be more than that right now. So some families will have two cars that they’re. But that they’re paying monthly payments on. And then the new car has higher insurance rates. There’s a lot of associated expenses with it. They’re spending money on vehicles that they’re driving, you know, 10, 20 miles to work when something natural, like a nice Toyota Camry or a simple car, a basic, a Honda.

That is half of the price. Um, it’s one of the worst mistakes that regular people make. The other one that they make is that they get suckered by, um, they get suckered by purchasing services, uh, too much of a service. Okay. So like, Cell phone plans and internet. And now this is in the United States and cable TV.

It’s the same way too. It’s like when I purchase a cable TV, um, they have 500 channels and it’s like, how many of them are you going to really watch? You can only watch one at once, right? So they’re spending some people spend in the United States, one to $200 a month on cable, just to watch TV shows that have advertisements built into it.

And then the advertisements get you to want to buy more. So a lot of it, I think the biggest mistakes are happening because of advertisement really. And the people are getting suckered because of it. And also the influence social media. Uh, other cultures led by the key opinion leaders in the internet.

Absolutely. Absolutely. And if you have diet again, let’s say in the past seven years, how you accumulated your wealth, is there anything that you would. You would have done differently? Yes, I would have started on social media and on the internet a lot sooner. I guess one of the biggest misperceptions is like, I need to do out and hard work is really important and like hustling and flipping and doing those things to earn extra money.

Uh, it’s a lot of hard work, but I would have definitely started on social media. It’s a lot easier to generate income online and, uh, The the earlier you get started building your social media brand the better, because even now we’re still in the infancy stages. So if one thing I would have done seven years ago, I would have started online.

You don’t see the results immediately. That’s the problem. So that might not have convinced me at first, but if you stick with it, you can, and right now you are working on something to help people. Create more followers or monetize from Twitter. Is that so yes, in fact it’s already released, so, um, yes. Um, basically we took our accounts that had my first three months on Twitter.

I had something like 900 followers to a thousand, which I guess is pretty good. But in the past three months, we’ve added over 15,000 followers, all organically, um, all by understanding how Twitter works, playing the game while producing great content, you need to be able to produce great content. So my course is a lot about how to create great content and then also understand how to play the game on social media.

Uh, how to network, how to, when to post a lot of it is like some people post great content, but they don’t understand, like you need to be, people need to get their eyes on it and like how to get your eyes on your posts. And then once you get people to see what you’re doing, you’re going to start generating a following and followers.

We also talk about monetization as well. Uh, I know people that are selling thousands of dollars worth of affiliate products per month on Twitter. And, uh, you can make money as affiliate marketing. We have a park a sec. It’s just one section in our course that just deals with affiliate marketing. Um, And it’s, it’s a nice chain.

It’s it’s for, for where we’re at right now. It’s, it’s changed. I’ll make a few thousand, a couple thousand just from affiliate marketing. And, um, that’s not even including that. The, the content that we create that is making money very handsomely. Hmm. So it’s all started from three months ago. Really? Yes. Uh, in August we had, I want to say a thousand follows and in the past three months, and I can even show statistics on it keeps track of everything on here.

We’ve added, I’ll pull this up right now. In the past month, we’ve added 4,500 followers. Uh, last month in October, our tweets got over 5 million views and, um, We add in October we added 4,000 followers, I think w w for November, we’ll add 5,000. I think that’s where we’re going to be and have eyeballs on 7 million of our tweets.

That’s that’s about where it’s going to go 7 million impressions. And once you’re able to do that, so this, the process is like this, the way to monetize there’s other ways to do it too. But the way we’re monetizing is once you actually have people viewing your content, So you got to build the following up first and then, and then you can start maybe selling one or two courses in whatever your niche is on Twitter.

So that’s, that’s what we do on, on Twitter. Do you have a background in content creation? Are you from this space or professionally? Uh, isn’t that funny? Uh, no. My background is I’ve actually been involved in the arts since I was five years old. Uh, I used to be an actual opera singer way long time ago, went around the world, did a lot of things like that.

So I think my I’ve been involved. In the arts for so long, I’ve studied with so many of the masters and learned how to, I guess, create content on a completely different platform, right. In a way, not digital. So I’m just basically taking the lessons that I’ve learned from teaching because I’m an actual teacher and.

Content creating as an artist, combining it and putting it on digital with Twitter. So I interact with my audience on Twitter, the way a lot, like somebody on stage would interact with the audience at an opera house or at a theater. Interesting. That’s a very. Interesting. When to look at it, content creation actually is a form of art that you created and bring it to the audience, which are the followers or the browsers on the internet.

Absolutely. Yeah. Content creation is an art form in itself. I, if in my course, I view my course a little bit like this. Like if you’re an artist or a musician, you would take private lessons and you would study with. The greatest in the world that I’ve actually spent years of my life studying literally the greatest masters in the art world.

And so I know what it’s like to study, take masterclasses and have someone as a mentor like that. That’s what my course does. It just takes basically what’s going on in the art world and like turns it into Twitter and digital media. And so it’s, it’s a really interesting concept and that’s why that’s the unique thing that my account brings.

To Twitter. And what’s the name of your course? The course is called create 24 seven, the blueprint to unlimited content creation. So that second part is I can, it would take me a long time to explain it. You have to get the course to understand, but there’s a way to create that is I see a lot of bloggers out there with wonderful blogs.

Unbelievable blogs and unbelievable social media presence. I’m not even going to mention your names. I they’re leaving money on the table when it comes to Instagram. And when it comes to Twitter, I go to their pages, their Twitter handles and I’ll see, like they have eight, 9,000 followers or somebody has 20.

I’m about to pass them on 20. They are unbelievable bloggers. They could literally have hundreds of thousands of people following them on Twitter. If they knew how to tweet, right. They, and they have the content already done. There’s a lot of great snippets from your blogs. And a lot of great snippets from even podcasters can do this as well.

Um, so it talks about how to generate ideas from the root and how to build on it. You can ask questions to your audience so that you find out what they don’t know. One of the first things I found out so early on, I started asking my audience questions, like, what are the books that influenced you in finance?

And then I found a lot of my readers, my viewers were. All about like rich dad, poor dad, not really the best books on personal finance. So from there, I started to create posts like, Hey, check out the millionaire, next door, check out your money or your life. A lot of these people didn’t know that because they’re in their twenties and I’m a little older.

So once I started asking questions, I knew what content my audience was interested in. And then I knew what to fill it with. Okay. And then from there we created threads, elaborate threads, and then we took these threads on Twitter and we turned them into actual blog post itself. Ideas never end your con.

You should be constantly building on top and evolving your ideas and turning it into something bigger, taking it to the next step. So my book talks a lot about that, and then you can actually work on it in reverse. Once you have a blog post. You can find the most interesting snippets and turn them into tweets as well.

So there’s like a cycle that goes with ideas. And we talk about that. The book create 24 seven, the blueprint. Yeah. Yes. The blueprint to unlimited content creation. So, um, Which is very appealing because when you’re on social media, you want to, I see some people that are on Twitter and they post like maybe once or twice a week.

Okay. So what will happen then is that the algorithms and Twitter will not prioritize you. So you need to like have enough content to continually go. So you need to be posting like two to four times a day. I post seven because I know that when my viewers are interacting with what I’m posting, the algorithm will like boost me up a little bit.

And if they make comments. If somebody makes a comment on your posts, the next time you post the algo then says, Oh, you’re somebody who interacts with this guy. I’m going to, so my tweets are seen more for a reason because I know exactly, you know, really how to play the game. If you don’t know where to go for the book, the book is on Gumroad.

And if you go to my Twitter handle, which is at creation 24 seven. At creation 24 seven it’s right in my bio. And you can actually click and look into the book. And it’s a constantly evolving book that is actually never, it’s never going to end a lot of people. They drop a book on social media. There it is.

It’s just a book, but our book is going to be continually updated. So like, as Twitter changes. We’re going to be able to add some new things. So like they just added fleets on Twitter now, which is kind of like stories, Instagram uses. Now we’re going to like, totally learn how to take advantage of that.

And then we’re going to educate our customers on how to, how to, how to take advantage because social media is something that’s constantly evolving. So if the course is about social media, shouldn’t it also evolve along with it as well. And then once you buy it, you get all of the updates for free. Yeah, I liked that part because I read some, some parts in book last night and I really like how you simplify the methods and then people can use it immediately.

It’s actually not that complicated. They just need more practice. Yes, absolutely. Um, I. As an artist, one of the, the way that you can demonstrate proficiency the most is by creating on demand. And it’s a, it’s a concept we talk about. So like, if you’re going to create like force yourself to actually do something.

So in the mornings I will actually write down is James to share talks about this too. Coming up with 10 ideas, I talked to my readers, just force yourself to write down 10 tweets, 10 ideas that you have. You may look at it and go. Okay, only three are good. Then throw the seven away or maybe only one was good and then use that.

But one of the things you can do is if you write down 10 ideas, you can always go back to it later on. If you stay organized and look at it, some of my best tweets I wrote, and then like three months later, I thought like, Oh, wow. It was just missing this one thing. Let me add to it. And then I, I add to it, like, it just needed that one little extra line to it to make it pop off.

And then once I do that, then the idea really, really shines. Sometimes they need to like marinate on a piece of paper for a while. Married knit like this.

Yasi: Okay. Thank you very much for all the great information and your experiences that you shared with the audience. We learned a lot from it like me. I personally learned a lot from, from you, but I wonder, like, could you let audience know where can they find you like your Twitter, your website, your blog.

And I can also write them in the show notes.

Aop: Absolutely.