For those of you who’ve been following me for a while, I recently hit a goal I’ve been chasing for a long time.

About two years ago, I decided to seriously throw my hat into the social media influencer world. Now technically, I’ve kind of been doing this for decades already. I mean, what really is social influencing? It’s promoting yourself and your message online — and I’ve been doing that since before 2000.

But a little over two years ago, I made the decision to aggressively push my social media presence and really treat it like a serious project.

My main focus has been Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. When I started this journey, I had around 7,200 followers combined across those four platforms.

Fast forward to now… and that number has grown to over 500,000 followers in just a little over two years.

Now I also want to make something very clear here.

I’m not a social influencer who suddenly turned himself into a martial artist after getting attention online. I’ve officially been involved in martial arts since 1985, and honestly, I was doing backyard martial arts stuff long before that. I’ve spent decades training, teaching, traveling, and working hands-on in the martial arts world. I’ve taught around the world, built organizations, worked seminars, camps, tournaments, films, and dedicated most of my life to this.

What social media did was amplify something that was already real.

Over these last two years, I’ve put a tremendous amount of effort not just into promoting myself, but into promoting Filipino Martial Arts in a positive and entertaining way to a much larger audience. Yes, there have been controversial posts along the way — and trust me, we’ll talk about that in this series — but none of this was built overnight by somebody chasing internet fame.

This came from decades of experience that evolved into something bigger online.

And honestly, one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned through all of this is that if you’re going to do social media successfully, you have to be authentic. People can spot fake a mile away. You need to be real, be yourself, and still find ways to have fun with it at the same time.

Before anybody starts comparing numbers, though, I want to be upfront about something — my growth probably isn’t a perfect model for everyone to copy because I already had some name recognition before diving deeper into social media. That definitely helped open some doors and gave me a starting point a lot of people may not have.

That said, a lot of people have been asking me how I’ve grown things, what worked, what didn’t, and how I deal with everything that comes with putting yourself out there online. So I decided to put together a three-part article/post series breaking down what I believe are some of the biggest keys to success.

The three areas I’m going to cover are:

Creating and producing your content

Interacting with fans… and trolls

Dealing with the possible fallout and pressure that can come with visibility online

The whole reason I’m doing this is because so many people have asked me about the process — how to grow, how to stay consistent, how to handle criticism, and everything in between.

So I figured I’d share what I’ve learned along the way.

With that said… let’s dig in.