Build An Audience First Before You Begin Marketing Your Products (10YM2)

Publish Date

May 19, 2019

I want to talk about is building an audience for your business, for your products, whatever it is you want to sell.

I try to speak to as many of my email subscribers as I can. Each month I email out a link to my calendar and they can schedule a call with me to dig over their business and make a plan out what they should do next.

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Some of them have great ideas, some of them just starting out. But one thing I found lately is that they don’t have an audience to talk to.

It’s the same as some clients I work. You hear people talking about a new idea they want to do or create something.

And if you say to them; “well, who you’re going to sell that to?”

They generally go silent…

I’m just gonna put it online and sell it! – [This is when I take a deep breath]

And it really, really isn’t that easy at all. You can’t just think, right I’m going to creating a clothing brand tomorrow here’s my ethos behind it, here the designs, get something out and put it online and sell it.

To do that and think that is really, really, really naive. You can’t just create a brand and put it on the Internet and make sales. Okay? People, you’ve got to get people to your website. It’s quite obvious you don’t get people there. A lot of people have to have certain amounts of touch points with you before they even buy from you. Do they want to know a bit more about you?

With An Audience You Can Sell Anything

Whereas, someone who already has an audience can pretty much create anything and sell it. You are probably thinking, well, how do I start an audience?

What is this?

What are the next step?

And in most cases, creating some kind of blog or a platform where you publish regular content to, is the key thing to start doing. If you’re a writer, for example, you might want to blog, if you’re good on camera you might want to start a vlog like YouTube channel or you could even start a Podcast.

You’ve got to have somewhere where you distribute some training and educational content to try and grow your audience. I have a blog, for example, I put videos on YouTube and then embed those videos on my blog and that’s what helped me build up my audience. That’s just one example of using another platform to reach new people.

I just started teaching people things that I was learning at the time to help grow my audience in the WordPress space. This applies to anything. If you already have an audience, you can pretty much create anything and sell it.

And by that, what I mean is, if you’ve got a huge Instagram following right now and you should start trying to get some of those people off Instagram onto your email list. When the time comes, if they are following you and the content you are producing is topic related. If it’s a niche topic they are really interested in it and they love everything you do, there’s a high chance that you can create something that those people are going to buy from you.

What Could You Sell?

Some examples could be:

Workbooks

Calendars

Planners

Clothing

Mugs

Print journals

Once you have an audience ready already digesting your content, it’s so much easier to suddenly put something in front of them and say:

“Hey, do you want to get access to my course. Would you like to preorder this product from me?”

And that allows you to test products and test pricing. But my point here is don’t just think, well hang on, I’m going to start up this business tomorrow. I’m going to start selling something.

You want to be thinking, is this is what I love doing? Is this is the route I want to go? Try and build an audience around a topic or niche you love, that interests you and then start blogging and start putting out content to build a following.

There are heaps and heaps of examples of people online who have done this. Nathan Barry from ConvertKit. He was writing about and coding, software, and APP development for a long time growing his audience.

Because he’d already built up a huge, huge following from blogging and about coding his audience were hungry for more. When he came to sell his book, he already had people ready to buy it, just as I said, it applies to everything. If you build an audience first, it’s much, much easier to sell your stuff. Obviously, the hard bit is building that audience but consistently publishing educational content is the first thing to start with.

Ways To Build An Audience

You could start reaching out and trying to do things like guest blogging and getting in front of other people’s audiences, getting onto other people’s podcasts, other people’s youtube channels, all these kinds of things.

You’ve got to try and leverage other people’s networks, it’s a very fast route. Otherwise, you’ve got to do it yourself, which is putting out your own content, getting that content out on social media, getting it shared. Creating content that involves other people’s content in a way.

You can follow someone’s particular training or a blog post and if you had good results with it, reach out to them and say, “look, I had those results“.

And then you write up your results (based on the training you learned) and if it has the impact they might share it with their audience.

Just being a real person and getting out there and getting involved and, but that’s what you’ve got to start doing. Creating regular content publishing it out on your blogs or podcast. It’s hard, hard work to build an audience. I don’t want you to think, this is going to be easy.

Some people should wind back a little. Doing it this way allows you to discover if you even like the topic that you are creating content around or the product you think you want to sell.

Physical Products (?)

Obviously, this is different if you have a product idea and you can make something physically like a Kickstarter type product where you design the product. You know where I can get it made or a template made or some kind of proof or a draft of this product, then you can launch on places like Kickstarter and actually build an audience quickly. There are people on Kickstarter looking for products to invest in. You can get a physical product in front of a lot of people, quickly on those types of platforms.

People who suddenly want to create something and start selling it from scratch again, that’s a different kind of market completely! You’re trying to create a physical product, get it into a shop or even get it mass produced and then you’ve got to start selling it. But the same applies when it comes to selling it. If you already have an audience that one or in the niche of that product related to, it’s much easier to sell the product to them.

So mostly of content, I share about is online products, online courses, digital products, those kinds of things. So for you guys that are just starting out, creating an audience of people who and read your content, respond to your emails and interact with you if it was ever platform is that you do most, you know, you’re distributing your content on.

Remember it can take 7 to 10 times before you even come to sell something. People just don’t come to your site and buy from you. There are some customers who can be on your email list for six months or a year before they buy from you.

I love this recent Tweet from Jeff Walker. Someone purchase after a decade on his email list!

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