This week we’re talking about the attention war online…
And how you can win it without spending a dime.
Right now there are people in offices in California whose entire job is to make sure you don’t put your phone down.
They’re not there to inform or entertain you but just to keep you there…
Because your time is being packaged up and sold to advertisers.
That’s the attention economy. And it’s in that environment all of us are trying to build a business.
The good news is that once you understand it, you can stop feeling like you’re losing and start playing a different game entirely.
Because here’s what I’ve noticed about the people who build real income online without throwing money at ads. They’re not trying to compete on reach. They’re competing on trust. And trust builds slowly in a way that reach never does but when it’s there, it’s solid.
Someone who found you organically, read everything you’ve sent for the last six months and trusts your recommendations? That person is worth twenty people who clicked your ad once.
So here’s how to start building that kind of audience from scratch, for free.
First: Find Out Where Your People Actually Are
Most of us guess at this. We assume our audience is on Instagram, or LinkedIn or wherever we happen to spend our own time. But assumptions are not always right or profitable.
SparkToro is one of the most underused free tools I’ve come across. You type in a keyword or phrase that describes your audience – “online marketing,” “self-publishing,” whatever fits – and it shows you the actual podcasts they listen to, YouTube channels they watch, websites they read and social accounts they follow.
Not what you think they’re engaging with but what they’re actually spending time on. Built by Rand Fishkin, who co-founded Moz. Free plan gives you five searches a month which is genuinely enough to rethink your whole strategy.
Google Trends is something most people glance at and ignore. The real value isn’t in whether a topic is popular – it’s in the shape of the graph over time.
Is interest in your niche rising or falling? Is it seasonal? And if you scroll down to Related Queries and look for anything marked Breakout, those are terms growing fast with almost no competition yet. That’s where you want to be. Completely free, no account needed.
https://trends.google.com/trends
AnswerThePublic shows you the actual questions people are typing into search engines about your topic. Not the questions you assume they’re asking. The real ones. It’s humbling and incredibly useful at the same time. Free searches every day.
Second: Create Content That Earns Attention Over Time
Paid ads stop the moment you stop paying. A good piece of content can keep working for years.
The principle is simple – create things that answer real questions, that are genuinely useful and that show up where your audience already is. The hard part is consistency. Most people quit before it really starts to build.
A few places to get up to speed on how this actually works in practice:
HubSpot’s organic marketing guide is one of the more comprehensive free reads on this. It covers the full picture – what organic marketing actually means, why it outperforms paid in the long run and how to think about building a strategy. Updated regularly.
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/organic-marketing
Marketer Milk’s organic growth piece is more tactical. Written by someone who ran organic growth for Webflow from the inside. The bit on product-led growth loops is particularly good if you’re selling anything digital.
https://www.marketermilk.com/blog/organic-growth-marketing
Neil Patel’s YouTube channel I know, everyone knows about Neil Patel. But if you haven’t actually sat down and watched a few of his how-to videos on SEO and content, they’re worth an hour of your time. Very practical, very free.
https://www.youtube.com/neilpatel
Third: Build Your List And Own Your Audience
Social platforms change their algorithm whenever they feel like it. Your email list doesn’t do that. It’s the one audience you actually own.
If you’re not building a list yet, or you’re looking to move platforms, here are three worth looking at:
Kit is free up to 10,000 subscribers and built specifically for creators. You can sell digital products directly from the free plan, which is unusual at that price point.
Beehiiv is free up to 2,500 subscribers and has built-in growth tools – like a recommendation network that helps you grow by being recommended in other people’s newsletters – that most platforms charge extra for.
MailerLite is the simplest of the three. Free up to 1,000 subscribers and includes automation on the free plan. Good starting point if email marketing still feels a bit overwhelming.
Your TED Talk This Week
How a handful of tech companies control billions of minds every day – Tristan Harris, former design ethicist at Google.
This is the talk that started a global conversation about the attention economy. Harris explains exactly how platforms are engineered to exploit human psychology – not to inform or entertain, but to keep you scrolling – and what a world designed around human wellbeing might look like instead. If you want to understand the environment you’re building your business in, this is where to start.
It’s about 17 minutes and I’d watch it twice.
