MBA1796 How to Build an Audience P1

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Hey Yo. Welcome to the $100 MBA show Better Business Building goodness every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my co founder back in 2014 and today's episode is part one of our two part series on how to build an audience. Your audience is your greatest asset in your business. Your audience are the people that are your potential clients, your email list, your community, your followers. If you have nobody to talk to, you have nobody to sell to. This is why your audience is so important and building one should be a top priority and an ongoing task that your business is focused on in order to grow your business. I wanted to go in depth and spend two full episodes on this topic because I truly believe if you nail this, if you build your audience the right one, it's very hard for you to not succeed in business. Even if your products, your offerings, your whole business changes, you still have your audience and you can still sell them your products and services, whatever that may be. In today's episode part one we'll define what our audience is, who these people are, how to attract the right people, and how to make it the top priority for your website. Tomorrow we'll talk about all the different strategies of building your audience even from scratch. And how to maintain that flywheel, that growth engine day in and day out, year after year. We got a lot to cover in this two part series, so let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

We've all been there. You hold onto a coupon, hoping to cash it in at the store, but then you forget about it and suddenly you've got a mountain of useless expired coupons.

Do you think this one's still good? Free milk.

Oh, mate, that expired in 1993.

Dang it.

Fortunately, there are better ways to save money. Like by switching to Geico, you could save about $900 on car insurance without ever touching a coupon.

Ooh, how about this one? Half off floppy disks.

Now you should try a bit of spring cleaning.

It feels good to save big. It feels good to Geico.

I want to start this two part episode on building your audience with a simple fact. Everybody that you know in your industry that has a humongous audience in the business world, it could be Gary Vaynerchuk or Tim Ferriss or Seth Godin. No matter how large anybody's audience is today, they all started in the same place. They started with zero people, they started with zero email subscribers. So if you're getting started, if you still do not have an audience, you want to build your audience, take comfort in the fact that everybody starts in the same place. I also want to mention that most entrepreneurs that I know, their biggest regret is not building their audience sooner. So every day that goes by that you do not implement the stuff you are learning in this two part episode is a day wasted. Because you want to be able to start building this audience as soon as possible. Because every audience member, every email list, subscriber, every person that joins your community is a potential customer, a potential lifetime customer. It's a potential person that you can help, that you can impact, that will then tell other people and bring you more customers. So it's imperative you do this work. It's imperative you do not put this off anymore. And if you are building an audience, it's time for us to kick it into gear to make it our top priority in our business. Webinar Ninja, our software company, with our podcast, the $100 MBA show and the $100 MBA, building our audience is our top priority. I know from experience that if I have an email list of a thousand people and I email them, I almost know to the exact dollar how much money I can make from those thousand subscribers. If I email them an offer, I know what my average conversion rate will be. If I just multiply the number of potential sales by the price of my product, I know exactly how much money I can make from that audience. So if I want to grow my business, I want to grow my revenue, then I have to grow my audience. This is why so many businesses spend so much time and effort and money on doing this. On their blog, on YouTube, on podcasts. This is why you see so much free content out there. Because they're trying to attract an audience. Attention is the most valuable currency in today's world, and that's what people are doing. They're trying to get people's attention so they can eventually build a bond, build trust, and convert them into customers. But not all audiences are created equal. I want to make sure that we spend a bit of time talking about building the right audience. You want to build a list of ideal clients. Ideal customers. People that are made for what you offer. Don't be tempted by casting a wide net and try to bring in as many people to your email list or to your followers on Instagram. More about social in a moment. This is gonna shoot you in the foot. This is gonna backfire. Why it's easy for me to get a thousand email subscribers if I wanted to throw a contest. If I threw a contest. I'm giving away Amazon gift cards. Just sign up for my email list. I'm gonna get everybody signing up. Very, very simple. But these people that are on my list, they're not ideal. They're people that just want a free gift card. They're not opting in with the intention of buying something from me in the future. I don't know who they are. I don't know what their problems are. I don't even know if we're a good fit or if we should be even talking to each other via my newsletter. I want people that can't wait to get my emails. I want people that love my content, that love my webinars, that can't wait for my next product or service to come out so they can pull out their wallets and buy it. That's who I want in my audience. Many people have heard of the blog posts by Kevin Kelly. Thousand true fans. All you need is a thousand true fans to have a viable business. But even recently I read a blog post on the Adreessen Horowitz blog how that's even changing and all you need is a hundred true fans. Charge them a little bit more and you have a viable business. The point here is that it's not the size we're looking for, it's the quality of this email that we're building. And when we say building our audience now, all platforms are not created equal. The absolute gold in audience building is building an email list. Why? Social media is okay, but it should be a vehicle for you to bring them onto your email list. Your whole goal in business when you're trying to build an audience is to get them on your email list. And I'll explain why in detail. When somebody's on your email list, you have access to their inbox. People's inboxes is the most sacred space in their digital world. People have to deal with email, they have to read it, they have to save it, they have to archive it, they have to do something with it, they can't ignore it. It's not like social. They can just thumb through their feed and just completely not see your posts. Email is intimate, email is one to one. People can reply to email. It's a different ball game. There's tons of studies showing that email conversion rates when it comes to sales offers convert higher than any other form of communication. Better than social, better than TikTok, better than Instagram, better than sales pages. It's pretty incredible. This is why we're big believers of growing your email lists and ways of growing your email list. Whether you're running a webinar to grow your email list, whether that's automated or live, whether you're offering content upgrades or, you know, a lead magnet like a cheat sheet. The point here is that we want people that are ideal clients for us to be part of our list so we can continue to build that relationship with our newsletters, with our great content, with our blog posts that we share with them. Social is not a bad tool. It can work for you. But the point of social is not to build your social following. A lot of people think this, if I get 100,000 followers, I'm going to be fine. No, business is not done on social media. It gets done on your website, gets done via email. So your whole goal in building this following on social is to turn those followers into email subscribers, is to drive them to your website to sign up for your opt ins, drive them to your next webinar. That's the point. Why? Because Instagram and Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn, these are not your platforms. You don't have control over who sees your content. The algorithm does. And it changes from day to day. You don't have their email address. You don't have direct contact. If their DMs are not open, you can't even message them. Social is a busy place. You're competing with your competition constantly on social inbox. No, it's a lot easier to communicate once they're on the email list and it's much easier to convert them. So your number one goal with all your marketing tools, social, webinars, video, paid advertisement, your website, the whole purpose of all these things is to get people's email address, get them on your email list so that you can nurture them, build that trust, invite them to your next webinar, invite them to your next event, invite them to your next big sale or offer. This is how things work and this is how you're going to get the highest conversions. Here's a question for you. Why do you think I run a daily podcast? I run a daily podcast because I want to provide valuable information, to provide exceptional results for my community. I want people that listen to my podcast to get better. I want them to have an experience, to have changes happen in their life and their business. Why? Because if I provide that, they will say in their head, you know what? Omar is pretty cool. Omar has provided value. I want more. By nature. They're going to go and check out my websites, whether it's 100 RMBA, whether it's webinar ninja, they're going to check out what I'm doing. That's going to lead them to sign up for something free, to get on my email list and be part of my ecosystem. And then from there, if we're a good match, I'm able to offer them a solution to their problem via my products or service. This is why I put in all this work. This is why, because I know the power of building an audience. When you have an audience, you have power. The sponsors we have on this podcast, that's power. I'm able to offer that to my sponsors because they know we have an audience that listens. If I want to collaborate with somebody and they want to be on the podcast, and they can offer value to you as a guest teacher. Again, that happens because I have an audience. See, the value of an audience. This is why you have to invest your time, your energy, your money in building an audience. Now, there's many ways to build an audience, but the bottom line is that you have to consistently provide great value to your ideal customers. This could be in different forms. This could be in blog post form, where you publish blog posts on a regular basis. This could be in podcast form, like I do. This could be a YouTube channel. Now, which one should you choose to build your audience? We'll talk about that in tomorrow's episode. But the point here is that you have to know going into this, you're going to have to commit to a certain amount of time every week to build great, valuable content for free with the intention of building your audience. Great value cannot be ignored. Something amazing cannot be ignored. This is why things go viral. People share it. This is great. Whether it's funny, whether it's interesting, whether what's thought provoking. People share things that have value, and that's what grows your audience so quickly, is when you provide that great value, how do you make sure that it's great? How do you make sure you're providing something at a high level? We'll talk about that in tomorrow's episode as well. But as a sneak peek, it doesn't happen overnight. It's going to require you to put in reps. I can barely listen to my first hundred episodes. It's cringeworthy. But that's okay. I know it's a means to an end. I had to go through that and put out these episodes to be able to publish great episodes. Things that are great value, that get shared, that people love, that people talk about. But it took me time to get to that point. And it requires you to get started and start putting in the reps. We've all been there.

You hold onto a coupon, hoping to cash it in at the store, but then you forget about it and suddenly you've got a mountain of useless expired coupons.

Do you think this one's still good? Free milk.

Oh, mate, that expired in 1993.

Dang it.

Fortunately, there are better ways to save money. Like by switching to Geico, you could save about $900 on car insurance without ever touching a coupon.

Ooh, how about this one? Half off floppy disks.

Now you should try a bit of spring cleaning.

It feels good to save big. It feels good to Geico to wrap.

Up part one of building an audience. Your audience is your biggest asset in your business because you can always lean back on it. You can always offer them something new. In fact, we're working on some new projects. And when those things are ready, I'm going to lean back on my audience and email them and say, hey, we have something new here. Come and join me on this live webinar. I want to share with you. If you're interested, you can pre order. I don't need to run ads. I don't need to ask somebody else's help. I don't need to pay for an audience anymore because I spent years building one. I can make one announcement, one email, and I'm able to convert. Now, I don't say this to be on my chest, you know, please, that's obnoxious, and no one benefits from that. I say this because I know it takes time, and I want to just tell you that it is possible you can get there. But I've been doing this for over eight years, building the audience I have for over eight years. And that's the type of sacrifice it's going to require. But it's my biggest asset when I go to sell this business. At one point, if I ever do, this is what people really care about. When Instagram sold to Facebook for a billion dollars, it wasn't because they had superior technology. Facebook can recreate that. It's because they had millions of users and they want that audience. Instagram's a free app. Instagram wasn't monetized back then. There wasn't. When they sold for a billion dollars, they weren't running ads. But Facebook was like, hey, they got a huge audience. They have lots of ears and lots of users and lots of eyes. People that want to consume information, that's gold. This is why it's worth you investing in building your audience. That wraps up today's lesson, but tomorrow is part two. We go in depth about building your audience through different channels, how to get started, how to get these wheels in motion, and how to maintain it. Thank you so much for listening to the $100 NBA show. If you love what you hear, jump on over to Apple podcasts, search the $100 NBA show and leave us a rating and review. Let us know what you think of the show, what your favorite episode is, what your favorite takeaway from today's episode, even. We'd love to hear from you. I read every single review. And of course, when you leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, you enter our weekly random draw we call Freeride Friday. Every Friday. Tomorrow, we give away a lifetime membership to one of our programs. We do a random draw with everybody who left us a review. So if you want to win a free ride, just leave us a rating and review and listen in on Friday. That simple. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Taking 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 years to build an audience that can reap you massive benefits is actually not that bad. It's actually not that huge of an investment. Your doctor took more than eight years to become a doctor with her undergrad, with her medical school and residency. And then she started to see patients and earned a pretty decent living. So not a bad deal to spend the time to build an audience. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode, Part two of how to Build an Audience, our two part series. I'll see you then. Take care.

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