The 30 Day Strategy to Build an Audience - Without Spending Money! (Part 2)

In today's clip, this is day 2 of how to build a massive audience. This is the 30-day strategy to building a massive audience without spending a dime. But before we start, don't forget to rate, review, subscribe no matter what platform you're on if you like business and marketing and entrepreneur tips from myself, yours truly, Eric Siu. So in the last video we talked about how, you know, day 1, how do you get about going building this audience, right? And day 1, by the way, is this day 1. This is like day 1 through 30, day 1 through 60, by the way. This is the very beginning. These are the foundational pieces that you need to do to get started. You gotta, you know, pick your topics, you gotta pick your platform, you gotta start batch a 5-day kind of starting amount of content, start to collaborate with some people, start to promote it a little bit. But what I haven't talked about now is what specifically you can do around kind of promoting and also batching too, because we talked about the beginning batch, the 5, right? But Marketing School, we do that every single day. That's 30 episodes every single month, and that's with another partner of mine, Neil. And how do we do it? Well, what we do is we batch it. We batch 20 episodes in a day, and then another day of the month we batch another 20 episodes. So we get 40 done per month. So we always have a surplus of 10, and usually we're ahead by another month. With Growth Everywhere, what I do is on Thursdays, and that's a weekly podcast on interviews, I will do 2 to 3 interviews on Thursdays. So basically each month I'm probably getting about, let's just call it, 12 to 16 interviews every single month. Sometimes I might do 4 in a day. That allows me to get ahead. I think right now on Growth Everywhere, I'm ahead by like 6 or 7 months. So I can go on vacation right now, not do anything for the longest time, still come back, make it, go on another vacation after that, and I'll still make it. Okay? So that, that's the peace of mind that I have right now that goes with it. So if you're going to do it daily, by the way, which I recommend that you do because most people are not doing it daily, um, that's fine. How do you do content and then create it daily? So, now when I create content, after you start to be in the workforce for a while, I find that all I'm trying to do is I'm just thinking about what I wanna do next, what I wanna talk about, what I wanna apply to my business, how I'm thinking about things, maybe there's something I wanna articulate, and I'm just endless content right now. Like, sometimes I wanna rearticulate something, that's how I create content. Me talking to you right now helps me get better at my craft. That's why you create content in the first place, to get better at your craft, Forget the audience thing. Like, the audience thing is almost like a side effect. The audience starts to form once you start to form a point of view. You don't start to form a point of view until you start to talk about it, until you start to develop your own voice. When you start to develop your own voice, by the way, you start to find that you're not following people as much anymore. It's totally fine to follow people in the beginning, but what you're gonna find is as you start to develop more experience, you're not gonna be following people as much, and you're gonna be your own person, which I think is very invigorating and very, you know, freeing at the same time. So, look, batch your content. If you can do it every day, do it, because most people, they just don't have the time to do it, or they're too scared to do it, whatever it is exactly, you're gonna have an advantage there. And promoting as well. So we talked about, you know, getting guests on your show too, but if you can't get guests, like, when I first started doing blogging, we'll go to blogging for a second, I used to always write ego bait pieces. 50 top entrepreneurs to follow, 50 top marketers to follow, you know, what I learned from these entrepreneurs, and I'd reach out to every single one of them, 'cause there's 50, Maybe 5 of them, 10%, might respond, and, you know, they'll tweet you out. And that's what started to get my name moving. I remember when I first left Treehouse, I led their marketing team, I started the Growth Everywhere podcast, and people started to slowly find out about me, but it took 2 years for people to start to find out about me. And nowadays, I'll get texts from people in foreign countries, like my friend was in Ukraine, and there was a guy holding a phone, and it was with my Growth Everywhere logo on it, right? Or someone else was in Spain, and it was the same thing, it's the Growth Everywhere logo. It's like my friends will find other people, and they'll stick the thing out. And, look, here's the other thing. Don't worry about the audience too much, because Marketing School gets 1.1 million downloads a month, Growth Everywhere's only about 100,000. But you know what? More people, when they come up to me, they talk to me about Growth Everywhere more often, maybe 60% of the time, they talk about Growth Everywhere versus Marketing School, okay? So it's not always about the numbers, it's sometimes it can be a vanity metric. And also at the same time, you gotta consider, People that are listening to one podcast might be a lot more affluent. Would you prefer a podcast that gets 1,000 downloads a month, but it's all millionaires and billionaires listening to it, or one that gets 1 million downloads a month, and, you know, it's all kind of people that are just starting out in life? It just depends on what you're looking for at the end of the day, who you're planning to sell to. So you gotta know kind of who you're targeting as well. You can pay for promotion, but we talked about not spending a dime, so maybe you can't pay for promotion here. You can barter with influencers. We talked about bartering in the last episode on this. You barter your services, you barter your time, in exchange for some type of mention, in exchange for kind of getting your name out there. And what you're gonna find is the flywheel, right? Like, a wheel is really hard to turn in the beginning, inertia, right? I'm not gonna talk about physics right now, but it's hard to move something in the beginning. Once you start to get it moving, the wheels are churning, it starts to move a lot faster, faster, faster, faster, faster, and boom, you're just cranking, okay? And that's how you start to build the audience, because I found the same patterns over and over. Growth Everywhere, 0 to 9 downloads in the first year, then to 30 downloads a day in the second year. Then the Single Grain Blog, 3,000 to 4,000 visits a month. Now we're at about 250,000 visits a month, okay? Our YouTube channel too, like, we started at 2,500 subscribers, now at about 17,000 to 18,000. It's like, the flywheel on this one, man, this one's hard to push. Now it's still like struggle, struggle, but we're still struggling right now. But man, it's getting moving, right? So, Look, I'm gonna emphasize this again, but like, this is day 2, which is more like day like 60 plus. So, I basically went through a lot of days in here. But it is gonna take you time, you have to be patient. You have to keep doing what works too. Like, you're gonna find in your analytics, like look at your analytics. If you wanna build a good audience, find, like look at your top performing blog posts, look at your top performing videos, look at your top performing podcasts. And then, do it again. Like, if you find something that works, a title that works, Do it again. If you find your audience resonates with something, if they really like the fact that you talk about paid advertising, and, or like, you talk about slippers, and then the next second you're talking about like socks, but they really like slippers, and anything you've written about around slippers really performs well, and you decide to go to socks, and they don't perform that well, but you keep doing socks, and you keep trying to do all this other stuff, you're being not intelligent about this. So, look at the stuff that performs, Try to double down on those, and maybe 20 to 30% of the time, you try new things that you haven't tried before, and just keep experimenting. 20 to 30% is more than enough, but look, this other, you know, 70 to 80% of the time, do the stuff that works. You're gonna find the stuff that works through quantitative and qualitative feedback. Once you start to build a little bit of audience, survey them as well. So, that's day 2, which is, I mean, you got day 1 and day 2, I basically condensed a lot. Maybe it's part 1 and part 2, let's put it that way. Part 1 and part 2. on building a big audience. Look, it compounds, takes time, be patient with it, have a point of view, and you're gonna do great. So let me know what you plan to do to build your audience, what site it is, in the comments or in the review section if you are listening through podcast. Don't forget to rate, review, subscribe, and we'll see you tomorrow.