How to Build an Audience from Scratch

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How to build an audience from scratch? A couple of caveats here. First — this takes diligence, patience, and effort. Second — the more niche you are, the faster your audience grows and the more helpful you will be because your content is more focused.

Here’s the reality — when you’re focused on the right audience — you don’t need 500,000 subscribers on YouTube. You don’t need a million downloads of your podcast or whatever your cornerstone content is. You can build a great business — a profitable business — without a million followers.

Our audience here at Predictive ROI are agency owners, business coaches, and strategic consultants (ACC), and we work hard to figure out how we can be more helpful to our ACC audience.

I’m encouraging you to do the same thing and realize that a million downloads or 500,000 YouTube subscribers are vanity numbers — and they’re not important.

I recommend you think about how you can co-create content with people inside your niche. You want to find other people, other experts, other thought leaders, and other authorities who can add value to the same niche in a non-competitive way. 

For example — if you host a weekly video series on YouTube, interview other experts who can add value to your audience as part of your cornerstone content. And then — slice and dice each interview, as we talked about several videos ago, into smaller cobblestones to make it easy to share with their audience(s) in a non-self-aggrandizing way. 

Or — how about slicing and dicing several of the episodes together to create an eBook, or into long-form LinkedIn posts, or into what we call “Golden Nugget” emails — and make sure your guest gets a copy of everything so they can share them.

And guess what happens? Your audience grows. 

The second piece is making a list of influencers, media, publications, and whomever that serves your same niche.

There’s a great tool called SparkToro where you can do some quick research on who serves what niche, and which influencers share the same niche as you and the same audiences as you; then, you can start engaging with their social content. Not in a yucky way by commenting on their posts by then linking something from yours, because that is super unprofessional).

Start by commenting on their posts with your thoughts, and over time build a relationship where they might want to reciprocate. If you’re sharing a few pieces of their content with your community over time, they may want to share your content with their audience. And yay for that! 

Think about these two strategies — how can you strategically co-create your cornerstone and create cobblestone content with people who are also serving your same niche?

And — how can you attract and find influencers, media, and publications who also serve similar audiences that you are serving, comment on their content, and then build that relationship over time so there might be an opportunity for reciprocity?

Hope that helps. 

Onward with Gusto!