7 Ways To Grow Your Audience (10YM4)

Publish Date

May 25, 2019

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Here are seven ways that you can use to go and reach more people and actually nurture those leads a bit more. Now, there are obviously lots and lots of ways to do this. I’m trying to focus on these seven to keep it simple, keep it short and actionable.

1 – Know Your Niche

Okay, that might sound quite obvious “knowing your niche“. But what I mean by that is don’t try and produce everything you can or be everything for everyone. If you know your niche, you should drill down within your niche to other sub-niches. And by doing that you’ll actually target your content for your audience more precisely.

Hopefully, people will then actually share your content with other people they know who really like the content, in that specific sub-niche. Try thinking of a niche then you go down to sub-niches within that niche. If you were looking at weight loss, you then might look at:

Niche – Weight loss for men

Niche within Niche: Weight loss for men over 40

Sub-niche: Weight loss for men over 40 who are 200 pounds

Sub-niche: Weight loss for men or fathers who are over 40.

So you’re drilling down, you’re not just going for weight loss for men who are over 40 then going for weight loss for like dads that are over 40. By drilling down your content and knowing your niche, it’ll help you reach more targetted people. It will grow your audience because it’s more refined.

2 – Utilize Other Channels

Now, this might seem quite obvious as well. You might be on Twitter and you share your stuff, then you jump over to Facebook and then you set up an Instagram account and you’re like, “Yay, I’m now across the main networks“.

But there are hundreds and hundreds of other channels to use to reach more people. And there are subgroups, you’ve got Reddit groups and our YouTube channels and communities if you’re doing video. There are also other video networks like Vimeo and these kinds of places where you can actually utilize these other channels to network and reach a new audience.

And that’s where forums are really popular. People don’t use them at first for marketing, but they are still hugely popular. Some forums, have over 10,000 plus members in who chat about a particular niche. So do your research, type in whatever your niche is + then forum, and you’ll dig up some forums within your niche.

weight loss for men 40 + forum

Now the idea of that is when you do utilize other channels, you should get involved in those forums. Don’t just use the top networks that we all hear about. Everyone wants to be on Instagram stories posting, they’re lovely pictures and all that kind of stuff. There are lots and lots of other places to reach people just because you’ve read something about Facebook stories or groups or Instagram that sounds good. Doesn’t mean you have to go there.

There are lots of other people who don’t use those platforms in your niche. Just remember that can utilize the other channels that are available.

3 – Survey Your Existing Customers

Look at your existing customers. Survey the existing people who visit your site. This could be your email list, you could have one of those popups that come up on your website in the corner. And there are a few different apps that do that.

By surveying, you can ask them exactly what types of content they want. And when you get specific like this and they actually tell you they’re looking for. Once you know that’s the kind of content they want, you can start producing that content and you’re again refining down to your niche.

Just like we mentioned in number one, we said about Knowing Your Niche better. This helps you know your niche. You can then produce more content and more refined and focused, which people then share.

The Yearly Survey

Never dismiss Surveying. Surveying is so important. If you can even try and get going with some kind of yearly survey for your own business, your niche market, whatever it is you do. If you can begin a yearly type of survey and it’s a great way to have a forecast that comes out every year for your business.

Actually, a great way to generate traffic as well, believe it or not. Or you can actually become quite established for having a yearly report that goes out. That report can obviously come from survey data. So a prime example might be if you had a wine shop, you could survey your audience every year, what type of wines they like, what they’re drinking and what they’re spending, what age group they are, where they live, where, what they earn, what jobs they’re in.

And by gathering all that data, you end up coming out with a big yearly report and that you then become established for a yearly wine report or whatever is. So surveying is very, very important.

You already know there are Facebook groups, there are LinkedIn groups and you’ve got all these places where people are already hanging out. Facebook groups are very popular, but there are also other groups you can get involved in.

Reddit groups. They are really big Reddit groups. It’s a huge, huge website. And some of the groups on there are large.

Tread carefully here. The crowd can be quite ruthless, especially if they smell someone spam poster.

Linkedin groups. If you’re in a business niche and you want business to business, LinkedIn groups are actually very good and they’re hugely popular. Nearly 500 Million users who are all trying to further their professional networks or grow a personal brand.

Some of those groups actually a massive, but people just don’t even go there. If you’re not in the business to business kind of network, you wouldn’t know.

Don’t dismiss social groups are a great way to grow your audience.

Success Of Your Groups

How you engage in those groups will depend on the type of people may follow you. Don’t just go into these groups and share your blog posts and tell people to come to your site.

Go in and actually engage and connect with those people and share likeminded stuff. Share valuable content, hugely valuable content in fact. Focus on what you’re sharing or even what you’re contributing towards and give good positive feedback. In turn, this will help grow your audience.

If you do want to share links early on when you go into these groups, share content as a post, don’t share stuff like a link back to your own website, blog, whatever it is you’re doing.

Go in and share valuable content. Give some tips, write down seven tips that can prove whatever is x they’re trying to do. But by using these social groups, they are a brilliant way to grow your audience. You can earn a lot of trust from them.

Facebook groups are big, they’re popular. There’s also slack channels slacks and another network. There are a few other sorts of workspace tools. Facebook of have one, Workplace by Facebook, but they’re like these workspace platforms. They’re like live chat groups and they’re really big for lots of different niches.

We use Slack.com just in business to communicate for a team of 30+ people and we can all chat with each other. It’s a live chat, but they’re the same kind of groups just for different niches and interests. Search open Slack Channel here.

5 – Guest Posting

This is a great way to grow your audience. Guest posting is so, so popular that people don’t do it enough and I’m guilty of not doing it enough. But reaching out, it can take a lot of work to reach out to bloggers to get a response.

You can find sites that are just looking for guest bloggers and you can get stuff out there. But if you want to really drill down to the big sites where you gonna get a lot of traffic from and, grow your audience and those sites are probably going a little bit harder.

You might find if you’re reaching out to 10 or 20 bloggers, asking for a guest post on their blog. You might only get a couple of replies. But don’t be disheartened by that. Keep moving on, keep going and keep growing your blog or your business, whatever it is.

If it’s in your niche and you want to get in front of their audience, the whole point of doing that is you provide content for their blog, a really good blog post you’re looking at 1500, 2000+ words and in-depth actionable article. If you get on their blog, they then link back to your blog and that helps grow your audience, gives you a bit of traffic and people can then discover you.

The whole point of that is you’re leveraging someone else’s audience. I did mention that actually in the previous podcast but do try out guest posting.

6 – Be Consistent

You’re probably gonna hear me mention this on every blog post, podcast episode or video but be consistent as possible. Make sure you are regularly showing up in front of your audience no matter what it is you do.

Podcasting, videoing, blogging, social media, all that kind of stuff. If you are doing something regularly enough there, people know where to find you. They know you’re around, they know you’re still here and you are being consistent. It’s the hardest thing to do in any kind of business, for yourself or if you don’t have a team.

I email out regularly. If I can get in front of people in their inbox every week they’ll remember me. If they expect something from us, set a certain time every week, that’s the best way to be consistent.

If you’re going to publish new content on your blog, do it every Thursday. If you’re going to launch a podcast, publish every Wednesday. If you’re gonna email your email list, do it every Saturday. They know every Saturday morning they’re going to get that email from you in their inbox when they wake up. Being consistent like that is huge for your reputation, a massive way to earn trust and it grows your audience because they see you’re always showing up.

7 – Be “Find-able”

If that is actually a word, find-able but be find-able, make it easy for people to find you.

Now there is a disadvantage to that like being everywhere on the Internet is not actually a great thing to try and be everywhere you can spread yourself too thin but make sure you are findable.

People who first find your site or find your blog posts or start reading something and they want to reach out to you. If it’s hard for that person to contact you there’s a high chance they’ll go away. I find this myself if I go to a company website, even some influences if I go to their site and I can’t contact them or I don’t even know where they’re from, where they’re living, to me that’s so frustrating.

Sometimes I would jump their social profiles cause it usually tells you the location in their Twitter account. If you can’t be found, it becomes questionable, is this person actually really online? Are they just a fake profile?

Whereas if you publish your address, your business address, your location or even if there’s social content that shows where you are or where you live. You become real. Make it easy for people to find you and then reach out to you so they can contact you or connect with you on social media. If you have a phone number, make that information available.

For myself, I, I put where I am, my address, I also make it clear that people can just reach out to me on social, Twitter and Instagram etc. They can send me a direct message or just contact me via the contact form on my site.

But being find-able is really important. People who first find you and don’t know where you are located can lose their trust before you’ve even earned it. You got to build trust with people if you want to run an online business.

Start checking that you’re actually coming up in search results. So check, people can find you in Google, on Facebook, on Instagram, on Twitter, using either your name or your business name. If someone mentions you in conversation and the other person they search for you, and can’t find you, you’re not going to grow your audience.

So make sure you can be found because if they can find you, hopefully, they’ll read your content, subscribe to your stuff, get on your email list, and share your content with their friends and that will grow your audience.

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I'm David Frosdick a content marketer & course creator. I spend my days working with OptimizePress, coaching clients, producing online courses, digital products and generally seeing what's working online with marketing. Thanks for visiting my blog and feel free to contact me if you have any questions.