Do you want to know how to grow an audience starting from scratch?
Everybody has an expertise that they can develop, create, and market — use your knowledge to help others.
Most people quit after 2 weeks because they aren’t seeing any progress. I used to be this kind of person and I got tired of myself for not getting anywhere.
It’s not very difficult to spot the problem here: the lack of perseverance and consistency. With all crafts, consistency is key, and practice is needed to get better.
Here are 3 steps to learn how to build an audience online.
Decide Your Path and Strategy
Before you get started with creating content you need to set a path and decide what your strategy will be.
Do you want to
- Write about money or making money?
- Write about self-care and self-improvement.
- Write about history, philosophy, or art?
- Create videos about one of the topics above?
- Curate content in a newsletter?
- Write local news and inform people?
It doesn’t matter what your choice is but you need to pick a certain strategy on how to achieve your goal.
A goal could be: I want to help people make money online by sending out a weekly newsletter with tips, tricks & recommendations.
If you want to succeed in growing an audience online it’s crucial to do this.
Find a Platform to Host Your Content
For years I’ve struggled to build WordPress blogs that didn’t gain any traction and visitors because I didn’t understand anything about SEO and writing techniques in general.
I wouldn’t recommend going that way.
But you need a place to host your content. Preferably a place that’s free to use and easy to find for people.
- Medium is a great place to start writing if you want it to look like a blog. There’s an audience for almost anybody.
- NewsBreak is a good platform to host your local news content and you could start monetizing straight away.
- Substack is a writing platform and has newsletter functionality built-in. You can gain an audience by their algorithm and send you “already existing” audience your posts.
- TikTok could be great to share quick videos and reach a broad audience without having one beforehand.
- Twitter is great for quick writing. You’re practicing your writing and you build connections on the platform.
If you use one of these platforms you can borrow their audience and reach a lot of people.
But now you want to monetize your content and own your audience.
Launch a Newsletter
Now that you have a “borrowed” audience on one of the platforms listed above, you’d want to save them in your own “database” — and email list.
Launching a newsletter is a classic example of how you keep your audience updated about your content. Ideally, you’d want to use those platforms to collect e-mail addresses in exchange for information or tools.
I’ve already mentioned Substack.
This is a great tool for starters and I’d recommend you sign up for a creator account right now to start collecting e-mail addresses.
For the more advanced content creators among us, use a kit that satisfies all your needs.
- ConvertKit is a very good toolkit that’s easy to use and affordable.
- Mailchimp is the more complicated tool and can get quite expensive.
The content rule you should apply is: give away 99% for free and monetize 1% as Nicholas Cole says it.
People get tired of your call to buy something.
They want value. Buying something will only happen if they have a big amount of faith and trust in you. You’d need to build that trust by sending them free valuable content.
That’s how you monetize your newsletter.
Final Takeaways
Once you start creating content, you start building an audience. Your name becomes a “brand” and you must deliver.
Every single time.
You need to be consistent and publish often enough. Otherwise, people can’t rely on you and they’ll be gone.
- Pick a strategy and stick to it.
- Find a good place to distribute your content.
- Find a way to collect your audience and monetize it.
- Be consistent (most important)