How To Build A Profitable Audience

Fastlaners. What's up, Ryan? Daniel Moran here. Welcome to Freedom Fastlane. And today we're gonna be talking about something that is really at the crux of every business. We're gonna be talking about building a profitable audience. You know, a couple years ago I was on a chat with one of my best friends, Travis Sago. He's been on the podcast before. He has a fantastic episode. If you haven't heard it, I'd recommend you search for that episode with Travis Sago. It' a life changer. But he said something to me. He said what most people don't get about business is that what we really are doing at the core of everything is we are building audiences. It's the centerpiece of everything that we do. In fact, it's the asset, the long term asset that carries you through everything. Or at the very least, it's leveraging someone else's audience. That's called advertising. That's what advertising is. It's going to an audience that someone else has built up. And we're using that as a leverage point to display our products and services. I remember a couple of years ago a buddy of mine posting on Facebook and he was breaking down the profits of his business over a long term period and he broke it down by dollars per activity. This is what he said. He said, I've been looking at my activities and I've realized that the most profitable thing that I do in my business is emailing my list. Well, how did he get that list? He built an audience. So even in my physical products businesses, the majority of what we do comes down to what will our audience respond to. When I have my physical products clients come into Austin, Texas at the next level, by the way, we've just put together a free video series for the next level. It's at next level video series.com that is. Those are some free videos about if you've got a 50 to $100,000 physical products business primarily based on Amazon.com that'll help you take that business into the multi millions. But one of the things we talk about actually in the workshop of the next level is how do we take our business that's getting customers and build a really responsive audience out of that. Because everything that we do in our physical products businesses is building audiences and leveraging that audience to go to that next level. Because business ultimately comes down to having a responsive, hungry crowd that loves what we do and wants more of it. Now as I was putting together the notes for this show, I originally wrote, you have to have something, you have to have something beneficial or valuable to say to your audience before we get started. But then I realized that that wasn't true because Tila Tequila has quite a large following. Kim Kardashian has a very big audience. Get your head out of glitter, dude. What did you think I was gonna say? So there are people with really nothing valuable to add to the marketplace that have plenty of.

Plenty of a valuable audience. Now you might say, well, Kim Kardashian doesn't have a valuable audience. She has a bunch of teeny boppers following her. Well, you know what? She gets sponsorships and she gets TV shows as a result of having that large audience. So, in fact, she does has have a valuable audience. She has plenty of eyeballs. She has plenty of people. If she sends out a tweet, I think I looked into it once, that Kim Kardashian would tweet out your business for, like, $10,000. So a tweet, 140 characters of Kim Kardashian making a tweet is. Is worth $10,000. Why? Because she has a big, sexy audience. I mean, that's what it comes down to. She's got an audience. So she gets sponsorships, TV deals, commercials, whatever it is, as does Taylor Tequila or whoever it is that you don't know why they're famous, but they're famous. They're famous because they have an audience, because people, for whatever reason, listen to them. Now, in business, we tend to say you have to have good content. You have to be able to give your audience what they want, but that's really not what it is when it comes to building a profitable audience or a sizable audience that is going to send you checks. Really, what that comes down to is getting attention.

Getting attention is really what marketing is. We have a limited amount of attention span and capacity for attention in our brains, and it is constantly being vied for via billboards, TV ads, food, sex. Any way that marketers can get our attention. That is the valuable commodity that drives your audience or the responsiveness of your audience is can you get their attention. Now, how do you get enough attention in order to build an audience? You do it by giving your market what it wants. Giving your market something controversial, you. You do something that shocks them. Now, I'm. This is. I'm removing the ethics from the equation here, because we could sit here and we could argue whether these different approaches were ethical, but all of these are methods of getting attention and thus building an audience, which would be the crux for any business you can also do it just by creating something that is so captivatingly valuable that somebody can't help but read and digest every ounce of it. That's another way of getting attention. That's another way of building an audience.

There are many ways to skin this cat. The important thing is that you capture someone's attention on long enough for them to become an audience member. And we'll talk about what that looks like when we talk about the power of three. But you start building an audience by calling your target audience into being. Now, what do I mean by that? I mean, first, getting very clear on who it is that you're going to be serving.

Now, most people get this wrong because they try to target everybody. But this is a quote that I want you to remember. You can make money on hate, you can make money on love, but you cannot make money on indifference. If people are indifferent to you, you cannot turn them into an audience member. You can turn someone into an audience member by having them love you. You can have turn somebody into an audience member by having them hate you.

The Westboro Baptist Church has an audience. If they go pick at a funeral, if they go tweet something out just recently, they. I think they tried to pick it or.

Make some. They try to get some attention, negative attention, towards the fact that was it Ireland that just voted to make gay marriage legal. And. And they messed up. They had some sort of a. They put the wrong flag or something on one of their picket signs. And this is one of the top trending stories on Facebook that the Westboro Baptist Church, one of the top hate groups in the world, had a mistake on one of their picket signs. This was top news on the Internet. Why? Because millions and millions and millions of people hate them. Myself included. Now, they may not have a profitable audience, but they sure as hell have an audience. And they have a different type of profitable audience. It's like the 150 people that actually go to that church and give them money for whatever reason. But anyway, you can make money on love, you can make money on hate, but you cannot make money on indifference. Now, the only way that you can have an audience that is profitable is by isolating some. This is why trying to market to everybody always fails. You only.

Start to see traction in building an audience if you are targeting a very specific target market. But by doing so, you alienate some. And as a result, you will have haters. And you know what they say about haters. Haters are a good sign that you're doing something right. And haters are gonna hate. The fact of the matter is, if you have a target market, you're isolating some. And by isolating some, you are going to have some haters. But you cannot have a responsive audience if you are not willing to define your target market.

You get the attention of your target market by calling them into being by speaking to that exact direct market. You do this either consciously or unconsciously. You do this in as simply as your Facebook feed. By putting certain things on your Facebook page. You call certain people into following you by me having this podcast. I call certain people into following me, by you writing a blog post. You call certain people into following you, even if it's no one. Because if you make a Facebook post, a podcast, or a blog post that makes everyone who reads it indifferent, you get a net audience of zero by calling a target market into being, by being very clear on who it is that you are serving. You call a very specific person to follow you by either them loving you or hating you, but not through indifference.

Now, for most of you, you are calling a specific audience into being because they're going to follow you on a certain topic, on a specific.

Thing to do or how to or topic. They are following you because you have a business that answers their burning questions. What are those burning questions that your audience has? You can only know that by being very clear on who your audience is. Whether you like it or not, try it or not, you have a specific audience. You can change that at any time by targeting somebody else, but you have a very specific target audience. Speak to exactly who it is that you want to attract. Just speak to their fears, what they worry about, what they love, what they think about, who they want to be, alleviate their fears, confirm their suspicions and affirm their hopes, even if they don't currently find you or know that you exist. Speak to those points and the person who shows up that matches that criteria, matches that criteria and then shares it with somebody else, who shares it with somebody else, starts to build an audience. Now, there's something that you should understand about audience building, and it is this, is that it doesn't happen overnight. It happens over a long period of consistency. This is a point of consistency that is worth making a habit. Because audience building and having a responsive audience is the crux of almost every business. So because of that, it is worth working into your daily habits to serve your audience. In fact, one of the daily practices I recommend my next level participants do every day is give their audience something that is either valuable or gets their attention or polarizes them so they continue to hold the attention of their audience members, because that is going to be the crux of everything that they do from that point. So let's assume that you have a target market and you have a message that will resonate with that target market. You know exactly who you are going to serve, and you know exactly how you are going to serve them. If you don't know what those two things are, then you need to answer those two things. Who is it that you're serving? And how are you either getting them towards where they want to be, keeping their attention, or polarizing them in some way? What are the things that you're talking about? What are the ways that you're getting their attention? How are you giving the information that you want to give to your target market? And who is that target market? Those are questions you need to answer. But let's assume that you have them answered. The next thing that you need to ask is, how do you want to serve them? Is it by talking? That's how I do it. Is it through video? Is it through writing? What medium do you want to communicate with to your audience? Some people use all of these. Now, if you ask me to just write a blog post on a whim, I'm gonna have a hard time. If you ask me to just make videos on a whim, I'm gonna be okay. But if you ask me to talk in front of a microphone, what I'm doing right now, I'm golden. It's my happy place. I can talk for days in front of microphones. So that's my chosen medium. Now, let me tell you a quick story. Three years ago, I was trying to do it completely different and failing miserably. I was trying to build up an audience through a blog and selling information products to them. I never enjoyed the process at all. So I retired from teaching business and just decided to have a podcast where I would just share exactly what I knew that I knew would help people get to the next level in their life and business and find Freedom Fastlane was born. I started communicating to an audience that did not exist, but I called them into being by identifying a target market and sharing my message with those people and intentionally alienating the people that I didn't want following me. And as a result, Freedom Fastlane as a podcast has been extremely successful. In fact, one of the most successful business podcasts on itunes. And the audience has gone up 5x since I began. It was an audience that did not exist. But I hustled, and then it Spread because I had a defined market with a defined message and I spoke to the audience that I wanted to attract using a medium that I'm comfortable with. Now some people wonder how the heck do I record podcasts? And they say you must have a bunch of notes in front of you and you must put prepare for hours. No, I create a couple bullet points and then I talk for 20 to 30 minutes because this is an easy medium for me. For other people it's videos. For other people it's writing.

You know, some people are very comfortable firing up their the camera on their iPhones, recording a three minute video and putting it on YouTube. And there are people who have audiences in the millions on YouTube doing that exact process. Which leads me to my next question for you. You have identified who your market is. You identified the message that you're going to share with them. You have identified how you are going to communicate with them. Audio, video, blog posts, whatever you have decided is going to be the way that you communicate with your audience is going to lead you to the next question, which is what channel? That's that magic word we use here all the time on Freedom Fast Lane. What channel are you using to communicate with your audience? Where is your audience already hanging out, using and consuming the medium that you are going to use to connect with them? If you decide to target investors talking about end of the world preparation via video, then you probably want to have a YouTube channel. If you want to target new moms who are who have conservative politics and you want to do it via writing, then you probably want to have a Christian moms blog where you are doing the writing and you're having other people doing some writing in addition.

So you go where the audience already exists. Now we can refine this even further to what people already have an audience in that medium who are targeting those people. We're going to do a couple things. First of all, we're going to emulate what they're doing successfully. And second of all, we're going to make connections with those people and get them into our success network so that we can leverage their audience. So let's stick with the previous example. If you're a new mom who is targeting other moms with conservative political views and you are doing it on YouTube, then you would be looking at other people who have Christian audiences, Christian female audiences, new mom audiences on YouTube and be emulating what they do. And you would also be networking with them, working with them, looking at what content they have that has gone viral, what content has had the Biggest responses and making your own version of those for your channel, for your blog, for your podcast, Giving your opinion on things that are coming out, that are news worthy. This is how you start to take advantage of of the blood that is already in the water. You go after who is already on the channel that you're using. When I was really new in my career and I was just blogging and doing affiliate marketing, I started using YouTube as a place to host my videos. What I didn't expect was for thousands of people to find me on YouTube. To this day, I don't really use YouTube as a channel, but I put my videos there as a means of just free hosting. And as a result, a lot of people find me on YouTube just by nature of me having content there. That's what happens when you call a specific target market into being on a channel that already hosts the target market that you want to serve. And I don't care if it is podcasting or blogging or videos or whatever it is. If you put your content that calls a specific target market into being on a channel that already has that target market, it is a guaranteed way to get an audience. That's just how it works. So if you've got a business or you want to have a business, but you don't know how to build an audience, or a set of customers or clients that want to find your product, you simply need to go where your target market already hangs out and start putting content there. You don't even need to be good, you just need to be kind of good. And you do that by identifying your target market and speaking directly to them. Now, there are some additional things that we can do in order to position ourselves in front of that audience. And that's by going to the people that already have the audience and looking at what they're talking about. It's by making connections with those people who already have an audience. It's by looking at what's gone viral, what people are talking about, and giving your opinion on that. One of the ways that you can do this is by just looking at what's buzzworthy in your market right now. What is the current event in your market? What's the current event that your target market is talking about? Make a video, a podcast, a blog post about your opinion on that thing, share it, and be polarizing. And by polarizing, I don't mean make people hate you, although that can be an effective strategy. I mean polarizing in the way that you talk directly to a specific market and intentionally isolate people who don't resonate with your message. Call out the audience that it is that you're serving. Give your opinion on this buzz worthy topic of whatever is going on right now. And by the very nature of you sharing that, you call certain people to follow you. For example, for whatever reason I listen to Glenn Beck's podcast, I think it's because I both resonate with him and he polarizes me. Sometimes I really agree with him and sometimes I think he's off his rocker. But for whatever reason, I listen to his podcast. Now as I record this podcast. Bruce Jenner's gender transition is big in the news. And Glenn Beck just did an episode all about that topic because his audience is talking about that topic. They're talking about that idea. They're talking about what do you do about that? What does it mean? What is the fact that this is popular in the news mean about today's society? What does it mean about the changing trend? Or how do we respond to the fact that this is a topic in today's society? Now, some people really agree with him, some people really disagree with him, but plenty of people are paying attention and that's what's important when it comes to audience building. Whether you like him or not, and I don't know if I like him or not, Glenn Beck has a business that makes $40 million a year@theblaze.com because a lot of people love him, a lot of people hate him, but he has an enormous audience.

I don't know if I like or hate Kim Kardashian, but she has an enormous audience. And when you have an enormous audience.

You have advertisers, you have buyers for products, you have sponsorships, you have potential equity deals.

When you have an audience, you have a medium, you have a platform that other people want because you have eyeballs, because you have a target market. Now, if you don't have a target market, this is useless because nobody wants to advertise to everybody. People want to advertise to a very specific target market because that's how you get an audience. It's how you get customers, how you get clients, it's how you attract your target market. Somebody who is targeting a very specific target market want to go to other people who have audiences in that target market. They don't want to go to people who have mass audiences and hope that their target market shows up. It's why you never want to do things like rent big email lists or you never want to just have really wide reaching.

Advertisements like you would never Want to have a TV ad on just some random late night show? Unless your late night show commercial called into, called a very specific audience that was up really late. One of the best ads I ever saw was when I was in elementary school and I went through a bout of insomnia for about a year where I just couldn't go to bed from like 10pm to 2am I just was up, I just could not sleep. And there was this ad. I was up watching infomercials. I think that's when I became an entrepreneur. I just watched these late night infomercials. But I was up at like 1:30am One night, laying on the couch in the basement cause I couldn't sleep. And this dude came on TV and he said, I know why you're down here. You can't sleep, your body's tired, but your mind just can't shut down. And I was like, whoa, how do you know I'm down in my basement, I'm tired but I can't sleep. So that was a very specific targeted ad for product. I don't even remember what they were advertising, but I remember they called me into being because I said yes a bunch of times. But that was a perfect example of somebody using a medium to call out their target audience.

That would not have targeted the truck driver who was in between shifts watching TV on his downtime. It intentionally isolated him and only called into being the target audience. That's what you need to do in your marketing is call into being your target audience, speak directly to them, and as a result they will follow you. You also go to a channel where they already hang out. In my case in that example, they knew that late night people who couldn't sleep were down in the basement watching tv.

So you go to where your target audience already hangs out. You speak directly to them in a medium that makes you comfortable, meaning text, video or audio. You get around the people who already have audiences in that market and then you unleash the power of three. The power of three is the psychological trigger that says that when you follow someone or see someone in three places, they know you, like you and trust you. For example, somebody who you work with is a co worker. Somebody that you work with that you go out for drinks with on a Friday is somebody that you work with that you occasionally go out for drinks for. But when that person comes over for Sunday football, they work with you. They see you at a bar and they come over to your house for football. They're now a friend. They are bonded to you psychologically, three places is where we are bonded to people. As a result, we want to give our audience, our target market, the opportunity to see us in. Three places that could be Facebook, a blog, and a podcast that tends to be what I use at Freedom Fast Lane. At Freedom Fast Lane, you listen to my podcast, you follow me on Facebook and you're subscribed to my email list or you saw me on YouTube. You listen to my podcast and you're on the newsletter freedomfastlane.com 3 Places for your audience to follow you, your blog, your Facebook, your podcast, your YouTube, whatever it is. Three places.

That can be broken down to where you release your content, your blog, YouTube, where you host your content, iTunes, podcasts, YouTube, and where you deliver regular correspondence, a blog, an email list, Twitter. Pick one of those three spots or one of those spots in each of those three categories and be present in each of those places. The power of three is when someone becomes a loyal subscriber. Now, speaking of subscribers, I have made more money in my life, as has most of my colleagues and people that I work with, by having an email list by having an email list that you can regularly correspond with to send them wherever it is that you take orders. And we'll talk about that when we go into monetizing our audience here on the next episode.

Now, there are lots of people who have loyal audiences on YouTube, podcasts, blogs. They have hundreds of thousands of people following their stuff, but they don't know how to monetize it. That's what we'll dive into in the next episode. Now there's an article that you should read by Kevin Kelly. It's called A Thousand True Fans. I almost said 100,000 true fans, but it's just a thousand true fans. And is simply the argument that when you have a thousand people who just earnestly digest your stuff, who are addicted to what you put out, who are polarized by you, who respond to what you put out, who read the content that you that you produce. It's really hard to ever run out of money when you've got a thousand true fans. I used to have a program that I taught called Six Figure Blogging. And it was simply a course about how to build an audience, about how to build your thousand true fans. And it was doing exactly what we talked about on this podcast. It was calling your audience into being, going to where they already hang out and speaking directly to those thousand people who are going to regularly digest your content. Because that is going to be the crux of who we monetize when you have a thousand people who will watch a video, a thousand people who will listen to a podcast, a thousand people who will share your blog post, then it is time to monetize that audience. I don't care what business you're in. I don't care how you are monetizing your audience or if you are monetizing your audience. When you have a thousand true fans, you have income for life. It's why anyone can start a business. Because anyone can call into being a thousand people who resonate with their message. Anyone can make a meaningful impact in a thousand people's lives. It's why this is one of the greatest times, if not the greatest time to be alive. Because anyone can impact a thousand people and thus have a lifelong income stream from a thousand people. Imagine if you had a thousand people who paid you $20 a month. You'd make more money than most people in history. But that will be saved for the upcoming episode about how to monetize your audience. Let's recap what we've talked about. It takes about a thousand people to have a true business, but doing that is fairly easy. You do that by going to the places where your audience already hangs out and speaking directly to the people that you want to attract. You also look at what the thought leaders in your space are already talking about, sharing your opinion on that topic and making connections with the other people in your space. Who are the people who on YouTube get 20 to 100,000 views per video? Start making connections with those people, go to conferences where those people hang out, contribute content for their channel, do guest blogs on their blog, Go where your audience already hangs out, write blog posts on their blog, make videos on their further video channels, make responses to those people, be interviewed on their podcasts, speak on their stages, go where the audience already is, speak directly to them, and intentionally polarize the people that you don't want to follow you and you will have a thousand true fans very quickly. You don't even need to have the most valuable content. You just have to have the most interesting content. That's why Tila Tequila and Kim Kardashian have audiences because of what they look like and because of what they say, because they polarize people as a result. So you can leverage lots of different assets to build an audience. The important thing is that you get people's attention. Once you have a thousand people's attention regularly, you have the opportunity to have a business for life. In the next episode, we'll talk about how to monetize that audience. But I would love to hear your thoughts over@freedomfastlane.com hey, before I go, you know I build my audience by podcasting. Occasionally I blog over@freedomfastlane.com and I share an email list. I share information on my email list. I announce my blog posts and my podcast with my email list. Occasionally I launch products or affiliate products to that audience. But those are the three ways that I build my audience. So as a result, my business lives and dies by you being plugged into one of those mediums. So if I have shared value with you at any point, by you listening to Freedom Fastlane, by you reading the blog posts, by you reading my emails, by you Seeing me on YouTube Subscribe let's make this official. Go to I itunes subscribe to Freedom Fast lane. Go to freedomfastline.com Enter email address and I will send you the 10 day challenge for you to get on the road to the Freedom Fast Lane. This is how I build my audience. So I selfishly want you to be invested in this. I want you to be subscribed on freedomfastlane.com I want you to be subscribed in itunes. But it's also a way for you to see how I build my own audience. So subscribe on Freedom Fast Lane on itunes. Search for Freedom Fast Lane or find us in the business category. Hit subscribe. Enter your best email address over@freedomfastlane.com subscribe to the channel, the Freedom Fast Lane channel or my personal channel. Ryan Moran 13 over at YouTube you can watch How I build my audience. And guess what? It also helps me build my audience. So thank you for listening to this episode of Freedom Fast Lane and I will see you on the next one. See you soon. Thanks everybody.