In this solo, podcast‑style video, Eric Siu outlines a practical, day‑one plan for launching an audience‑building effort without any paid promotion. He starts by stressing the importance of choosing a single platform and a clear topic, and of defining explicit roles and responsibilities when collaborating. He recommends batch‑producing at least five pieces of content (podcast episodes or videos) before launch to create a buffer, and suggests a daily publishing cadence for new creators. Siu explains how to repurpose each piece of content across formats—video, audio, and blog—to multiply reach, and advises focusing on the platforms where the target audience already hangs out. He highlights leveraging guests’ audiences and bartering services (e.g., offering SEO work) to gain promotion, while emphasizing equitable trades. Throughout, he shares his own experience growing the Growth Everywhere podcast from single‑digit daily downloads to over a million monthly downloads, using the analogy of progressive strength training to illustrate the need for patience and consistency. The video concludes with a call to action for viewers to comment on their own audience‑building plans.
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All right, and today we are going to talk about the 30-day strategy to building a massive audience without spending a dime. So before we get into it, don't forget to rate, review, subscribe, no matter what platform you're on, if you enjoy these clips on business and marketing. And let's go ahead and jump into it. So the first thing you need to do on day 1 is you need to think about the platform that you're going to be on and the topics that you're going to cover. Duh, right? But here's the thing: one of my friends, he started a podcast with his friend, and they had no idea what they're talking about. They're just rambling about things. And I also asked him, and I hope you're listening to this. I said, "Hey, so like who owns this podcast? Are you guys like fifty-fifty? Whatever." He's like, "Oh no, like I'm just helping him." Da da. Like when you dilly-dally like that, you you you you just have no dignity. And then what happens is like the podcast ends up folding because you guys didn't know what you were doing in the first place. So. You have to have a sense of what you're gonna talk about in the first place, and if you're working with somebody else on it, clear expectations, clear guidelines, clear responsibilities that are drawn out. Otherwise, you're gonna set yourself up for failure. So, once you choose your topic, let's say I decide to start with podcasts, well, even though I start with blog posts, or even if I start with video, record 5 at a time, so when you come out the gate, when you launch, you're gonna be out the gate, ready to go, boom, boom, boom. You're not gonna have to worry about the next one, the next one, the next one, 'cause you're gonna have 5 spread out. Here's the cool thing, like, if you're doing podcasts, if you're doing one per week, and you start with 5, you're good for the next 5 weeks, like, good to go. And then you can start to focus on, okay, what else do I need to do? What else do I need to do? What other topics do I wanna cover? Then you can start to build your base and go from there. If you're launching, let's say you have no audience, but maybe you're interviewing people on your podcast, or interviewing people in video, get those people to help you promote too. Say, hey, look, you know, I could use your help promoting this too, and, you know, maybe I send it to your email list. The least they might give you is a tweet. Maybe they might not hit your email list, but then you might get 2 people, 5 people, 10 people or so. You start to get bigger and bigger and bigger. But it's important for you to, you know, get the promotion going. You gotta set a cadence in the beginning. If it's gonna be 1 week, daily, whatever. I would recommend if you're doing a podcast, or even if you're doing video, if I were starting from scratch today, I would do daily. Whether it's video or podcast, I would do daily. And what I would do too, if I had nothing right now, my luxury, the luxury of what I would have right now is time. I would have so much time right now. Let's say I'm 20 years old, Guess what? I can do 30 videos, those videos can become audio files too, video, audio, those can become blog posts. Maybe you do, you know, you convert 4 of them into a blog post, right? Now you have a content sprouting method that we talk about a lot, where you seed a piece of content, a video, it becomes audio, then it becomes blog posts as well. I would ignore social media in the beginning, 'cause you just don't have the time for it. Like, I'm trying to think, you know, if you're starting from scratch, you know, you might not have that many resources, I'm trying to make this more open to more people, okay? Now you have a machine, 'cause now you are basically creating, what is that, 64 pieces of content in a month. You are now a content machine, okay? Do that over a year, what is that, like 760, something like that? 760 pieces of content. Now you are, you're basically a publisher yourself, okay? Now, you gotta think about this too. Where is your audience hanging out? If your audience is hanging out on Instagram, Don't think that it makes sense to do a podcast. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't, but you gotta go think about where your audience is hanging out and then produce content that's native to them. And think about what works best for you, okay? You start out with a topic, you start out with a platform, you start getting people to promote it a little bit, you start being consistent. That's the first— these are the first things that you need to do to start becoming successful, right? Then you can start to think about collaborations. If you wanna start collaborating with other people, that's gonna help make you stronger too because These people have audiences. And if you have no audience to begin with, what you can do is this. Let's say someone has 10,000 followers and you have zero followers, but you happen to be good at SEO. I would offer some of your SEO services to this person, say, hey look, let's barter a little bit. I'll give you some SEO services, and in return I'd like you to be on my podcast, and I'd like you to help promote me a little bit. I'd like to also, you know, do something on your YouTube channel. This is the value of my SEO services. Would you be interested in doing that? Because if you don't have something that's apples to apples in terms of, you know, follower to follower count, like the ratio's about the same, you gotta add something else that is of value, and then that way people are going to, you know, find that it's an equal trade. Because if it's not an equal trade, they're just gonna ignore you, they're gonna laugh at you. Also, they're gonna hate you because you didn't think about what is equitable, and you're wasting their time because you are being selfish, okay? Just 'cause you think you put the work into it in the beginning does not mean that you deserve to have an audience. The audience takes time. Remember, I talked about this in the past, and for those of you that watch this channel, the Growth Everywhere podcast, I spent 6 hours, 6 to 8 hours a week on it in the beginning. I was only getting 9 downloads a day after the first year, only 30 downloads a day after the second year. So, was I entitled? No. Was I sad? Yes. But it took a long time to get there, to build an audience to 100,000 downloads a month, which led to other podcasts, which is 1.1 million downloads a month now. I'm just saying, look, this stuff takes time, But you do the things, this is just for day 1 right now, you do the things that matter foundationally, you start to build the habit. It's just like when you go to the gym working out. In the beginning, you can't put up a bar, it's like 45 pounds, and then you see everyone else, they're doing like 2 plates, and then you're just like, oh God, what am I doing here? What am I doing with my life? But eventually, you can get yourself there. You can get up to 2 plates, maybe you can get up to 3 plates, 315 pounds, who knows? That's it for day 1. This is how you build an audience, a massive audience, without having to spend a dime. You can be scrappy about it. Let me know what you plan to do to build your audience inside of the comments, or maybe inside of the reviews. Don't forget to rate, review, subscribe, and we'll see you tomorrow. Bye.
