5 Simple Steps to Growing your Audience

You can totally start a business and grow a business, even if you don't have an audience. Say what you can, but you actually need to grow your audience to really start making money in your business. But I'm going to tell you, you don't have to dance on TikTok or play the content creation game over on Instagram to grow your audience. Because here's a little secret about having a business. You don't need to rely on vanity metrics like followers, subscribers, likes to make real money in your business. I have a client that in 2021 made over two and a half million dollars. Less than 5,000 YouTube subscribers and less than 8,000 Instagram followers. And they aren't doing TikToks or Reels either. And I myself, I have less than 50,000 YouTube subscribers and, and less than 6,000 Instagram followers and in 2021 alone made just about half a million dollars. So if I've got you convinced that you don't have to finally worry about vanity metrics anymore, and you want to hear how you can really start growing your audience so you can make bank in your business, hit that like button right now and we'll get started with step number one. Okay, I will break the bad news here. In step number one, you will need to get on some social platform. The reason why is social is absolute. And if you are just growing a business and you're trying to grow an audience, you want to do it without spending a lot of money on it. Because I don't know about you, I don't want to dump money into Facebook ads. So I think social is the best way for you to start growing your audience. But we don't have to dance and shake our butt on TikTok. When you pick a social platform, and I'm going to tell you all you need to do is pick one when you're getting started. To grow your audience. When you pick a social platform, you need to commit to being consistent and, and to a schedule. So knowing when you're going to post and staying consistent week after week. So I would say right now, in the social media world, the big three would be YouTube, Instagram and TikTok. Now I will tell you that you need to clearly understand where your audience is hanging out on because your audience could absolutely be hanging out on LinkedIn. If you're geared towards more of a professional type target audience, that could be your social media platform as well. So you do need to understand who your target audience is first. But generally, overall, these tend to be the big Three. So I want to break down each one of these social platforms to tell you how to start growing your audience over there. So let's start with YouTube. Now, YouTube is going to be a longer game here. It's going to usually take a little bit of time to get traction, but the content that you create on YouTube will live much longer. In fact, I have videos over on YouTube from two years ago that still send me leads to this day. So that is something to be aware of that you may not instantly see lots of views over there. But if you're just getting started on your business and you have a service based business, you know you need one on one clients, you don't need loads of views, right? You just need maybe two or three clients every single month and that only like two or three views from the right people to start helping you grow your business. I will also tell you, when it comes to posting on YouTube, I recommend any business owner to just get started with one video a week. Try to commit to the same time and the same day so your audience gets used to that schedule. But that's all you really need to do to focus on YouTube. The added bonus of YouTube as its search based traffic. So when your audience is searching on Google or YouTube because they have a problem, you have more of a chance of you showing up when they need you the most. So that's going to allow you to convert at a much higher rate because not only are you being on video and video just converts higher, but you're usually giving them a quick win in a YouTube video and they're going to be more likely to want to work with you. Now when it comes to Instagram, obviously it's kind of the hottest thing right now. Besides TikTok, there are two specific types of content that are hot on Instagram right now. First up is carousel posts. You know, when you slide through and somebody's giving very helpful content. The reason why this does really well for the Instagram algorithm is because people tend to save or share these types of posts. And so the more people share and save them, it looks more valuable to the Instagram algorithm. So Instagram is going to be more likely to show those types of posts to more people, thus growing your audience. So if you're going to start with Instagram as your platform, figure out a way to start incorporating at least two to three carousel posts in your posting schedule every single week. And then I know we've all heard about reels. Reels is so saturated. Not in a bad thing, but there are a Lot of reels being put out there. And that's why you want to be posting five to seven reels a week if you want to see, see growth or see your audience increase over on Instagram, if you're going to do reels. And the sad part is this content's average lifespan is about 48 hours. And that's why I love YouTube. It may be a slow grow, it may be the turtle of the two, but it lasts much longer. One other thing I will say about Instagram is it is great for selling directly on Instagram. So if you heard about it goes on in the DMs, people actually have conversations. And if you voice memo people back and forth, you can tend to get clients, like sell clients directly in the dms. And that does make Instagram a very valuable platform to be on because you can literally get clients from Instagram even if you only have, you know, a couple hundred followers on there. As opposed to TikTok, where TikTok is great to build your email list, it's a little bit harder to make direct sales on TikTok. What you can do with TikTok is obviously get in front of more people, build your visibility, but you're going to need to take them from TikTok over to your email list before you're going to be able to convert them. TikTok people, it's just going to take a while to warm them up, to want them to get a credit card out and work with you or buy from you. And I will tell you, TikTok's probably the biggest content eater right now. I think if you're wanting to see Success over on TikTok, you want to be posting at least every day, if not multiple times a day. So once you know what platform you're going to hang out on, literally just pick one or you will totally burn out. Because you don't need more than one to start growing your audience. Then you're going to want to capitalize on trends. Now, when I say trends, you need to make sure it's trends that targets your audience. Sure, it'd be great to go viral, but if you went viral to like tens of thousands of people and none of them wanted to buy anything that you have in your business or want to work with you one on one, what was the point of going viral? Right. Those views aren't putting money in your pocket. Clients are. Students are. Right. And so you want to make sure you're doing trends that make sense, that are going to attract your target audience or the people that you want to work with. So over on TikTok, you can go look at what is trending for music and you can use that trending music. But you want to talk about what you specialize in, what your business is about, what your niche is. And if you aren't sure what your niche is, I'm going to link to this particular video where I dive headfirst into understanding your niche and what that all means and why that's so important. You've got to definitely understand that to make sure you're creating the right content. But. But you want to make sure you're picking these trending songs that your audience would be watching. The same thing with reels, there's usually a little arrow button like that's pointing up that's going to tell you what songs are currently trending. That's just going to allow you to have a little bit of leverage to capitalize on those trends. But you don't just want to be dancing right. You want to be talking about content that your audience is interested in. What pain points are you solving for your audience that you can talk about in those reels? The other way to find find Trends outside of TikTok and Instagram is Google trends. You can type in a certain topic and see if there is a certain time of the year where that topic sees more traffic or more search. So like losing weight and goal setting. Obviously trends in December and January, probably like workouts are losing weight also would trend around May when people are thinking about the summer and needing to get into a bathing suit. But you know your audience, you know your niche. And so really figuring out when those topics would be trending. And if you have any specific tent pole events, you know, something that happens in your industry every year or every quarter, those are ways that you could capitalize on trends that are going to be highly searched for a specific point of time to get your audience in front of more people faster. Now with trends, you're just going to sprinkle that on top of step number three, which is creating how to content. Now, there are a couple reasons why you're going to need to create how to content and I'm going to tell you how to find what kind of how to content that you need to create. But the reason why you're going to be creating how to content is because you need to build your authority with these people. You need to show your audience as you're growing it that you actually know what you're talking about. And if you can do this on Video showing your face, it definitely gives you a leg up because those people can make an instant connection with you on video faster than any other content medium. It allows people to also build trust with you. So typically like with YouTube content that is search based content, they have a problem, so they're going to Google to figure out how to solve their problem. And if you have a video that does that for them and they see an immediate win from watching your video with a how to piece of content, they instantly trust you, right? They start to like you. If they like the way you broke down how to do something and this is going to cause them to want more from you, figure out how can they get more content from you or figure out how they can work with you or maybe buy something that you have. This is why how to content is so important in the steps to grow your audience, even if you're starting at zero. Now maybe you're wondering, but what kind of how to content should I be creating? Well, that gets us into step four that I talked a little bit about on before, but is knowing your niche or really having a clear message? When it comes to having a clear message, it kind of has three parts here. You need to know who your ideal person, client, audience is. You need to know what problem it is that you are solving for that person. And you need to know what they want the outcome to be. This is going to be so important when it comes to growing your audience because if people find you and they cannot understand if you are the right person for them or not, or they can't instantly hear it or see it or know it, they're not going to hang around to figure it out. It is going to be up to you. And it is your job as the business owner to make sure that your message is clear. So when somebody finds you, stumbles upon you, hears from you, they immediately know, oh, this person is totally for me. For example, I am working with Carrie who is helping me set up my Google Analytics. I am her ideal audience because first of all, I'm a business owner that has multiple lead magnets and I'm driving traffic to all of these offers from different places. The problem that she is solving for me is setting up all of this tracking information so that I can see what content is driving me. The most leads, the most valuable leads. So the solution or the transformation that I'm going to have at the end of working with her is I'm going to be able to look at a beautiful dashboard and know what content I need to double down on what platform, I need to double down on which ads are doing best for me. Like, I'm going to see immediately how I can pour fuel to the right fire to scale my business. That is the outcome that I want working with her. When it comes to my program, Video Strategy Academy, my target audience, my ideal student, is a business owner who is just getting started. They know they need to create content and they want to start on YouTube. The problem that they need solved is how are they going to do this? How are they going to have the time to do this? How are they going to figure out what they need to create on YouTube? How are they going to do that? That's what my program, Video Strategy Academy, does. So the outcome is by the end of going through my program, within six to 12 weeks, they are going to know exactly what to post on YouTube. They're going to know how to plan their content in a way that they only need to be on video once a month so that they're creating consistent weekly content that drives more traffic to their offer, helping them make more money in their business. You see how that is very clear. If you're not a business owner, then my content isn't for you, more than likely. And if you don't want a YouTube channel, that program isn't for you. And if you're looking for a different solution, like if you're looking to get 100k on YouTube or become the next YouTube star, that is not the solution that I'm providing inside of Video Strategy Academy. So this repels the wrong people for my program and it draws in the right people for my program. I'm going to tell you, this can take you a while. It took me a while for the long time. I talk about this a lot. I skirted between two target audiences, two ideal audiences. That business owner that I've now gone on over into and like the casual YouTuber, and I never really talked to one or the other, I just kind of talked down the middle. And what happened is at the beginning of 2021, I went all in with the business owner people and I talked more about that. I talked about the problems that they were having. And what happens is, is I tripled my agency growth last year alone because I got very clear that I'm talking to business owners and the solution that I'm solving for them is the traffic problem that they're having. Getting more eyes to their offer, growing their audience. And I do that by using YouTube. So this can take you a while. Like I said, it took me a while. But once you get that nailed down, that's how your audience is really going to grow exponentially. And I'm going to tell you again, this step is going to be the hardest step out of all of these when it comes to growing your audience. But I want to know that you're committed to diving into this. So comment below, nail my niche so that I know you're ready to put in the work and really solidify and nail your niche down and know who you're speaking to. Because I'm telling you, once you know that is going to be so much easier for you to make more money in your business. It's gonna be so much easier for you to grow your YouTube following, grow your Instagram following without even having to try harder. Because people will know exactly whether you're for them or not. Now step five and growing your audience is all about make connections. This is like old school pounding the pavement, right? Getting out there. You know, before 2020 there were mixers and networking events and stuff. But you can do this differently now online. And there are some so many great opportunities to really grow your audience by making connections. You can reach out to podcasts that you know your audience is listening to. Remember back on step four, we really talked about knowing your audience, making sure you're putting the time into the podcast that you know your audience is listening to. And you can pitch podcast hosts and ask them if you can be on their podcast. And if you have your messaging down clear, you can easily tell them why they want to have you on their podcast and what value you are going to bring to their audience. Because. Because that's really what podcast podcasters want, right? They want to know that the content that they are creating is super valuable to their listeners. And if you can tell them how your content or how your podcast interview is going to be super valuable to their audience, it's going to make it a much easier yes from them for you to be on their podcast. Same thing with pitching online summits. I probably did about 10 online summits last year alone. But again, to be able to pitch those online summits, you need to make sure you understand your target audience. And you are asking, asking to be on the summits that your target audience is watching because it would not benefit you or that online summit organizer if those audiences weren't the right people. Right? You can reach out to people that have coaching programs or like course programs that have guest experts. You can offer to do like guest expert training for them. Again, making sure you're clear on why their audience would value from your training. You can also get down into engaging in social media. You know, finding people on Instagram Instagram and having conversations in comments of posts or in comments of videos. This is literally like going to networking events. You can do it on social media and if you spend like 10 to 15 minutes every day or maybe 30 minutes a week, this could really help you grow your audience without needing to really spend any money behind it. Now I know this can be a lot when you are getting started to really figure out how to grow your audience even if you're starting at zero. So I broke down five tips to help you stay focused as you're getting started as an entrepreneur in this video on your screen right now. I highly recommend you click on it right now and see how you can continue to stay focused amongst all the other things that you're needing to do in your business while staying focused. Seriously, this video is a must watch for all new and growing online business owners. So you better click it.