How To Build An Audience Of Buyers In 90 Days (Updated For 2023)
11 Dec 2025 · 29 min
Ryan Daniel Moran (Capitalism.com) explains how to build an audience of buyers in 2023 using a three-part "traffic triangle": traffic (exposure), conversion (email/list & funnels), and the "hopper" (engagement via Facebook groups, YouTube, podcast). He recommends combining ads or short-form content with a free lead product (free course, book, coupon) and an engagement hub (Facebook group, podcast, YouTube) so prospects see you in multiple places, bond, and convert repeatedly. Moran provides examples (cookie brand Effing Good Snacks; Sheer Strength Labs) and a step-by-step action plan emphasizing predictable, repeatable growth over viral hits.
Questions this episode answers
February 8, 2023
Traffic (exposure), Conversion (email/list & funnels), Hopper (engagement: Facebook groups, YouTube, podcasts)
$7 (digital copy)
150,000 to 200,000 copies
2017
Chapters
Today I'm going to teach you how to build an audience in 2023. And I'm going to teach you how to build an audience of buyers. Because it's not enough to have an audience that doesn't buy anything, right? You can't build an audience off of that. And we're going to go through how things are different today than they may have been even as recently as a year ago. Because when we're in boom times, everybody's buying things. You can kind of get away with not building a long term audience and go right for the sale. You might have seen this in a lot of the coaching funnels. What people were teaching a year or two ago was that you should run ads straight to a vsl, put people on a strategy call, and you're making sales and you're building an email list and it buys over the short term, but you're not really building an audience of people that follow you for a really long time and buy from you over and over and over again. The strategy changes when we're not in these crazy boom times because the buyer cycle is longer, because people don't buy on day one as frequently as they do during the really great boom times. Your audience is the secret weapon to having seven figure businesses. I've helped hundreds of people build seven figure businesses and the secret is, can you get an audience that likes you enough to buy from you over and over and over again? All right, so if you're listening to the podcast right now, you can't see that I've got this beautiful whiteboard here behind me. But I'm going to draw out what I call the traffic triangle. The traffic triangle is how we can get people to engage with our stuff, buy our products, and come back to us over and over again. I call it the traffic triangle because I'm in the Illuminati. And the traffic triangle is three things. The first one is obviously traffic. The second is conversion.
And the third is something that I'm going to call the hopper. And a hopper is just engagement. It's a place where we can engage with our audience frequently and stay with them. Top of mind. Now we have to have all three of these pieces. People who fail at building audiences only do one of these three things. I'll give you an example. Conversion is where Amazon sellers fail because people who are selling on Amazon just get the conversion and they wonder why people don't come back and buy from them over and over again. It's because they've only got one part of the Triangle influencers who have a ton of exposure on Instagram or even YouTube, to some extent, they just have exposure. They just have eyeballs. They don't have real engagement or conversion. This is why you see influencers who launch a T shirt brand and they sell 26 units. It's because they don't have an audience that buys from them. It's. It's also difficult to take people from an exposure channel like Instagram and turn them into buyers. But we'll do that by building the traffic triangle. And these three pieces all work together to create trust and to create bonding and to ultimately lead to a sale. So let me walk you through what each of these three things are. Traffic is your exposure. This is where we get in front of people. I had a friend say once, there's not a lack of traffic out there. You don't have a traffic problem. There's all kinds of traffic out there. You just got to go out there and step in front of it. And you can do this in a thousand different ways. You can do this by creating short form content, long form content, or the easiest and fastest is ads. Right. And.
If you don't have a ton of capital, it doesn't matter. You can still run ads, but you don't have to spend ads. It's my favorite and I'll explain how we're using it here in a second. Traffic is how we're getting in front of people, just how people become aware of us. Now, the hopper piece is what most people skip. This is our engagement. This is where people are really bonding with the brand or the person. And there are really three ways to build this hopper. There are Facebook groups, which are really popular.
With a lot of businesses because it grows organically. You can have direct engagement with your potential customers if you're selling high ticket stuff. Facebook groups are awesome. They're awesome for high ticket stuff. There is also, and this is what I do, there's YouTube and podcast. Now why those? Because that is where people will engage with you for decent amounts of time. For a while, podcasts were the highest converting hopper because people spent the most amount of time consuming content from that person. I heard Tai Lopez say once that if you can get someone to. To engage with you for a total of seven hours, you have a really hot prospect. Seven hours. So what is the chance that somebody is going to consume seven hours worth of content with short form TikTok videos? Zero. Right. Unless they're with you for a very long time, what are the chances somebody's gonna consume seven hours worth of YouTube content. Pretty good podcast. Absolutely. So where people are going to engage with you for a very long time, that is that, that, that's how you're going to create the hopper. That's where you're going to create the bonding. You're going to turn a cold prospect into a really warm prospect. But the hot prospect, the hot audiences are in your conversion and that is always email. Why? Because email to this day is still the number one converting platform. You can send an email, get clicks and get sales right away. It is still to this day the highest converting channel. Now we again, if we want to build an audience that buys, whether you're selling physical products or you are selling high ticket courses, I don't care. You've got to have all three of these if you're going to build an audience that grows organically and grows your business for a really long time. So the trick of the game here is marrying these three pieces and tying them together in some way that grows, engages and leads people to buy. All right, so I'll tell you how I'm doing it in 2023. And remember, my strategy changes a little bit during recession times because the buyer cycle gets longer and people are also less willing to buy your highest price thing right out of the gate. There has to be trust from them, buying from you and having a good experience. So let me walk you through what I'm doing. When we look at building an email list, like some people will write to me and say, how do I build a really big email list? Well, first we have to have a reason for them to give us their email address. So what I'm doing here@capitalism.com is I am currently creating a free course and I'm doing a free course. It's going to be called the road to 1 million. It's going to be probably a 30 day course where I'm just giving away some of my best stuff. It's going to be investing to build a high net worth, how to come up with business ideas, and it's going to be free. And I'm building this with the intention of giving someone just an amazing experience of what it looks like to change their mindset, work with us, come up with ideas, and at the end, my hope is that they obviously want to work with us in some capacity over the long term and so we'll prove ourselves by creating something really good that's free. Now, if you're selling physical products, this could be a free ebook, this could be a free challenge, this could be A discount code like the. If you want to make it super simple, just do a discount code for your products and give that away for free. Because now you've got a hot list of people who want your stuff. If you haven't even launched yet, you can say go here to be first in line and save 25% when I launch. And you can build the pre launch list. Now this isn't enough on its own. This is where I am bringing people into the conversion platform. Now if I were to make a free course that was really, really good, but no one ever saw it, that would kind of suck, right? Because I'd have this great course but nobody to send it to, nobody engaging with it. That's why we have these other two pieces in the traffic triangle. Now the top part of this, we obviously need traffic to put into the free thing. And the way that I will do that is run ads to the free course and I will also do short form content. So here's your short form TikTok, IG reels, etc. And guess what this is gonna do? This is gonna link back to the free course. If I did only those two things, I'm ahead of most people. And you will be too if you want to build an audience of people that buy from you on launch day. A great example is somebody who's in our community. His name is Damian. He launched a cookie company and this, this, the company is called Effing Good Snacks. You can find it on Amazon. He's crushing it. He's doing a great job. All he did was create short form content that documented the brand. Hey, we have a new cookie flavor. Hey, look at this guy's reaction when, when he tried our cookies. And he did that several times a week just documenting what was going on in the business. He did this great video recently where he showed how he was running into trouble at, at Amazon, how he's getting these emails from Amazon saying they had pulled his listing or they had restricted his listing. He talked about how he was trying to get it unblocked, thanking the people who helped him with this, with advice or writing to Amazon. It was really cool. So he built up exposure from the short form content and he sends everybody over to a pre launch list where they're first in line to try the cookies. He comes out of the gate and smashes it. I will use this case study for years because he did such a great job of just doing these two things. So again, if you're selling physical stuff or if you're still in the process of getting ready to launch your product that is better than most people because you've got the exposure and you've got people on a conversion list. This is better than most people. If you want to grow really fast, run ads. So one of the ways that I'm doing this is we're running ads to a book funnel. So the whole point of the book funnel is to break even. So we've got a low dollar book. It's my book, sold 150 to 200,000 copies of it, and we're doing a digital copy of it for $7. And we're running ads to it. Now what that does is it breaks even. Right now, we lose money on it, but we're running ads to get exposure. And then when someone buys the book, they're on our email list. And so we're able to grow the list of buyers by running ads and when they buy, they're on our email list. Make sense? Now here's the death grip. Here's where we really create the type of audience that wants to buy from us over and over and over again. It's when we layer in the hopper. So once again, if we just have traffic in the free core or traffic and the conversion source, we're better than most people. But the death grip is when we have some way to engage with them over and over and over again. Facebook group is going to be the easiest way to start. So here is how that would work.
In my free course that I'm creating again, it's gonna be called the road to 1 million. It's not available right now, it's not ready. You'll see it when it's ready. But when we run ads to the free course, they'll opt in. They'll give us their email address. Yay. We got two things now. We got the traffic, we've got the email address. But on the thank you page for the free giveaway, we're going to invite them to this Facebook group. The Facebook group is going to be called the road to 1 million. And it's going to be where everyone who is going through this free course can engage together. Now, what have I done there? I've now completed the traffic triangle where I am getting the person to see me and my content in three different sources. Psychologically, if you see someone in three places, you feel bonded to them. If you work with somebody, they're a co worker. If you go out and have a beer with somebody that you work with, they're now a co worker that you have a Drink with. But if you invite them over to your house to watch football now, they're your friend. They've seen you in three places. Work, going out for a drink, your house, you are psychologically bonded to that person. There was an old, one of the old pickup teachers, he went by David d'. Angelo. His real name is Evan Pagan. He used to teach how if you can get a date to just go to three different places with you on a date and it might be like, let's go to this corner of the bar, let's go out for dessert afterwards. You can get them to see you in three places. They are bonded to you. It can actually speed up the dating process. There's a tip for all you single guys now, if I can get them into my Facebook group after seeing an ad and being on my email list, someone is bonded to me and I have the ability to stay in front of them almost all the time because I can send them an email, I can send them a notification by tagging them in my group and they're seeing my ads and my retargeting ads or my short form content. It's not like I'm everywhere. It's gonna be pretty easy to get that seven hours of interaction for that prospect. Now I personally like to create content. I like to teach this kind of stuff. I like to be on stage, I like to make videos. So my death grip in all of this is that I'm sending follow up emails to the email list, to my long form content like this, like this lesson right here and the, the YouTube channel and the podcast serve as the hopper. I don't take sponsorships on my content, at least as of right now. I don't really care about.
You know, monetizing my channel all that much. I care about engaging the people who are following my work because this is where I can deliver a ton of value. This is where I can grow in exposure for a very long time. And this is where I can, I can serve the people who are paying attention and build trust and goodwill with those prospects and followers. Now at this point, half of you are like, oh, this sounds like a lot of work. Well, you don't have to create a ton of content. You could just create a Facebook group and interact with people here. So I'll give you an example. I have a company. I sold a company in 2017. I just bought it back for pennies on the dollar because the group that bought it ran it into the ground and we're now running the traffic triangle to build up a List of our ideal prospects, which is fit dads or dads who want to be fit. The company's called Sheer Strength Labs. Don't look it up. It should be called Shit Strength right now because the company sucks right now. The products are great, but the company sucks. And I have to fix that because previous ownership ran it into the ground. And what are we doing to build up the traffic triangle? We are running ads to a book funnel. The book is called From Dad Bod to Father Figure. When they buy, they're on an email list and we're gonna create a Facebook group where they're gonna be engaged with where people who are going through the book, who are buying our supplements, are engaging in that group. Traffic triangle complete. And now we have a list of people who wanna come back over and over and over again. One of our mentors inside of the 1%, her name is Alicia. She, she sold water bottles. Now, it's hard to make water bottles sexy, but she did. And guess how she did it. She did a 30 day challenge as a Facebook group. And that 30 day challenge was the Drink More Water challenge. That's it. And every day she had a video in there talking about drinking more water. That's it. Just 30 day challenge. We're gonna drink more water. Everybody who was in that Facebook group was also on an email list and she advertised it through content, through follow ups with customers, through advertisements. So she put people through this process and she built up people who were not just buying water bottles, they were going through a transformation, they were going through a journey and they invited other people into that challenge. So check this out. If you do this right, you get organic growth across all three channels. Because if you've got a Facebook group, or if you've got a YouTube channel, or if you've got a podcast and it's decent, you're not only going to engage the people who are already on your list, you're gonna get people who share it. You're gonna get people who invite other people into the challenge. You're gonna get people who invite each other into the Facebook group. Well done. Facebook groups can add 100 to 500 people a day that are engaging with the rest of this community. And when they engage, you can have processes to put them on an email list. And guess what? If your emails are decent, you're gonna have people who are recommending. And if your short form content or your ads are well done, you're going to build the audience. That way people obsess over getting one of these things right. They try to build massive YouTube channels, they try to build a massive email list, they try to get famous on TikTok. That stuff happens, but it is not predictable. And if you're like most people, like I am, I don't have the biggest audience in the world. I don't have a huge TikTok following.
I don't have the body that you want to follow on Instagram. I'm a dad. I don't really know how to dress. I'm not as funny as I think I am. So I'm not gonna go viral every time I do a piece of content. Instead, every time I engage with any one of these three pieces of the traffic triangle, I'm just making a deposit in the relationship. When I send an email to my list, it's on the fly. It's from the heart, at least most of the time. And I get feedback from my readers that are like, hey, this was insightful. This helped me on my journey. When I run an ad, I don't just want to sell something. I want to connect with somebody. When I do a short form piece of content, I hope that it.
Engage with somebody a little bit, that they might share it with somebody else. And when I am doing a YouTube video or I'm building a Facebook group or whatever it is, it's one more deposit into that person's experience. And as a result I can have a seven figure business, a multi seven figure business, hopefully headed towards eight figure business by the end of this year. That's our goal by having kind of a small audience again, my audience isn't huge, but it buys. And that's always been the case with all my businesses. Sheer strength at its peak was doing about a $10 million run rate. We never had an email list more than like 15,000. We did have a Facebook group, but it wasn't very big. It's like maybe a thousand people. It was not a big audience, but it was enough to have an eight figure exit. And when you realize that you only need a few hundred or a few thousand people to have a multi seven figure business, this doesn't seem so daunting anymore. So let's clean this up into like an action plan that you might be able to use. Your first step is to say, okay, how am I going to create something that would be meaningful to someone's life? And if you are selling weight loss supplements, for example, you might do a free.
Weight loss course or a free keto diet recipe book or.
Some accountability group via email. I don't know, it's your business, you come up with it. But the minimal viable thing that you could do is some sort of coupon for a future purchase. That's enough to get them on the list. And we want to have some place that we're going to engage with them. The simplest is going to be a Facebook group so we don't have to create a ton of content. So if we now have something free and someplace to engage them, we just got to get awareness for it. And you have your option of either content or paid. You can pay to play, which is fastest, or you can go free, which requires that you take short form content and you create enough of it to get some awareness, like Damian did in the earlier example. So you have something you want to sell, you're selling some weight loss stuff. You have a coupon code or a free recipe book on your website. You have this challenge and we're going to do short form content. How would that work? Well, you're going to make one minute videos with weight loss tips. You're also going to show transformation videos from people who have gone through this challenge. You're going to do videos, one minute videos where you are showing what's going on in the Facebook group and the feedback that you're getting and the results people are having of the 25 people who are in here. It's not going to be a ton of people when you start, but you use that as the fodder. You use that as the kindling to be able to make a lot of short form content that grows and exposes the hopper so more people get in. And inside of the Facebook group you have a post that is a sticky at the top of the Facebook group that says if you're going through this and you're not on the email list, you are missing out on announcements for this group and discounts on our products. So go over to the website and put in your darn email list.
Email address. That's what it's called. This isn't rocket science. It just requires you to remember that every lead matters, that every eyeball is the potential to impact someone's life and that when they see you in three places, they are likely to engage with other people. Go through your short form content, which is going to boost you in the algorithm, which is going to make them shift, share it with other people and get in front of lots of other people. Over time, what starts to happen is you start to get a little bit of traction on the short form content. You start to get a little bit of Traction in the Facebook group, you start to get a small email list and then you launch your second product or you pre sell your first product. And what happens is that Your group of.
800 people and your email list of 1600 people buys at a very high rate and you sell 300 units of your first product and you're like, oh my goodness, I have something here. And then what happens? Since all these people are so bonded to you, they are much more likely to leave a review. And when they leave a review, your conversion rates go up. And as your conversion rates go up, you're able to spend more money on advertising. And as you spend more money on advertising, you're getting more customers. And as you're getting more customers, there's more people who are joining your email list, there's more people who are going through.
Your engagement content. And your audience is starting to build. And over the course of a year, you can have a group of people that buy from you over and over and over again. Which makes it very straightforward for you to have four products that get 25 sales a day at a $30 price point, which is a million dollar business. So what most people wanna do is they wanna come out of the gate with a big audience, they wanna go viral, they wanna launch to a big email list. And I get why it'd be great to come out of the gate with a big smash. And that happens. But, but the more predictable way to do it is to consistently pump out content or engagement through these three places and build up the long term goodwill with a small group of people. And as that small group of people gets good results, they tell other people about it. The way again that I'm doing this is before the end of this quarter, I'm gonna have this free course that's gonna be really, really good. And people will read the emails, they'll get results and they'll be posting about it in the Facebook group. I will be screenshotting the feedback from the Facebook group and I will be taking the clips from the lives that I do in this Facebook group to keep engaging with people. And I'll turn that into short form content and I'll turn it into Instagram stories. That will grow the exposure, that builds both of these, and the snowball continues to build. That's it. That's how you build an audience in 2023. Remember that the, the, it's actually true that the longer the life cycle of a lead, the higher the conversion rate, the better the goodwill and the faster the audience will grow in the long term. So lengthening this buyer cycle and going through this recession is actually really good for a lot of businesses to build the foundational work that is going to set them up for the next five, 10 years and have a really, really big exit. So this is how I'm building my audience in 2023. This is how I am recommending that our clients and our members build audiences. And when they do it, they smash a launch, they get to 25 sales a day and they have the foundation of a seven figure business. That, my friends, is how to build an audience over the next year that sets you financially free for life. Thanks for watching. I'm Ryan Daniel Moran with capitalism.com this is part of how I help entrepreneurs build seven figure businesses. Hope you enjoyed it. I'll see you on the next video. See ya.
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