Audience Building
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What s Inside? Introduction 4 Why Most ecommerce Businesses Fail... and Why You CAN (and Will!) Succeed 8 Why ecommerce Businesses Absolutely NEED an Audience 14 What Does an ecommerce Audience Look Like? 18 So, How Do You Build an Audience of Fans? 24 Enjoy these Resources 42 Further Reading to Help You Grow Your Audience 43 3
Introduction As the owner of an ecommerce business, you offer something special. Your products are fresh, innovative, useful and in-demand, if only you could get them in front of the people who need them. Whether you sell clothing or decor, supplies or novelties, foodstuffs or stationary, your products deserve attention. You know they re good enough to sell themselves but, unfortunately, that isn t enough to build a successful ecommerce business. You may just be getting a handle on sales, marketing and audience building, and that s okay. They re essential to expanding your business. Getting new customers, charging higher prices, taking more and higher-value orders will help you make the income you need to live the lifestyle you ve always wanted. We can help. 4
We created this free report was created especially for retailers like you who sells physical products on- or offline. You have a great product, and you know people need (perhaps badly) what you offer. Knowing people need your products and finding them, however, are two different things, especially if you re new to online marketing. Your potential buyers are out there and they have the money to pay, but finding and connecting with them (not to speak of getting them to buy something!) isn t always easy. It s fun to dream of overnight success, like becoming a Shark Tank entrepreneur or being featured on Oprah s Christmas show, but that s not the norm. The truth is you have to put in the time and effort to create an audience for yourself and your products. Sales success doesn t happen overnight, and there are a lot more elements to a successful ecommerce business than having phenomenal products. 5
If you ignore key business elements or approach them the wrong way, you can wind up frustrated, disheartened, and broke! But that s not your only challenge. When you consider all the competition out there, from boutiques to popular marketplaces, it can be overwhelming. How will anyone ever find you? This can cause a real crisis in confidence, and make you wonder why you re trying to compete at all. It doesn t have to be that way. You CAN build an audience of interested prospective customers and partners. You CAN get feedback from people about what and how they want to buy from you, maybe opening up whole new avenues and streams of revenue in the process. You CAN have a thriving, incomeproducing business that fits your lifestyle. 6
You CAN make a living getting your products into the hands of happy customers all over the world. It just takes a shift in focus and a few tips, tools and strategies. Are you ready to take your ecommerce business to the next level? Let s go! 7
Why Most ecommerce Businesses Fail... and Why You CAN (and Will!) Succeed The rules have changed. There s a new way to make a name for yourself, and it a proven way to achieve success. 8
Can you guess the most common complaint we hear from people trying to sell physical goods online? I just can t get enough traffic to make any sales! Virtually every new ecommerce business has this problem. You re not alone in feeling intimidated and frustrated. You may have years of experience selling offline. You may know everything about successful retailing. You may sourced products, made products, managed inventory, or run stores, and so much more! You thought you d be able to continue doing more of the same online, and you might even have a beautiful web store, but no one is buying. You may not even be getting that many visitors to your online store! Sure, you re getting the occasional bite. You may even have a few regular customers, but nowhere near enough to justify your investment of time, energy and money. This is happening because you re trying to build a traditional business in a non-traditional age! You re 9
trying to fit your new business into an old mold what used to be considered best practice for retailers. In our digital, connected world, the traditional ways of building a business just don t work! These rules don t work anymore: You offer the best items you can, at the most competitive price you can afford. You anticipate what people need and when, and genuinely want to be the answer to their problems. You provide an above-and-beyond buying experience, meticulously paying attention to every detail, from first visit to checkout. You make yourself available to answer questions, give support, be flexible and follow up. But you re still not selling enough! The problem is, you re chasing customers, trying to convince them you have what they re looking for. 10
Wouldn t it be better to have customers coming after you, searching for the exact products you offer and whipping out their credit cards as soon as they find you (not to mention being thrilled with your premium prices)? Wouldn t you rather be speaking from a position of authority, with hordes of people backing you up when you say, I ve got what you need. I thought so. So you need make a real change, not just in the actions you take but how you think about your whole business. What you ve been doing or what you might be setting out to do isn t viable anymore. You have to be the innovator and the visionary now, but you don t have to do it alone. You can build an audience. It s not going to be easy, quite the opposite! It s going to be a lot of hard work, but it s work that, if done right and in the right order, can transform you from the 11
chaser to the chased, from the seeker to the soughtafter. Here s what you need to know that your fellow ecommerce owners probably don t: What you sell and what people need might be different. You ll never know if your prospective clients want something you aren t providing until you have a relationship with them. People want and need what you re selling, but they are overwhelmed with options, and often can t see where their best solution lies. Traffic and attention can come from more places than you might imagine. You re not really selling products; you re selling solutions or sources of delight. It takes lots of preparation, research, and trial and error before you can start making sales and getting the kind of customers you deserve, but they are out there. Don t let all this overwhelm you. You don t need to learn everything today, but you ve got to understand this: 12
without an audience, you re going to be chasing one-off customers and struggling to make a name and a living for yourself for a long time, like most of the other ecommerce sites out there. Let s get back to what most other ecommerce businesses get wrong. It isn t that they aren t good at what they do and don t want to learn new things and effectively market themselves. It s that they play by the old rules, building a traditional business like they did five, maybe 10, years ago, when what they need is an audience business. That s the key difference: successful ecommerce businesses have audiences, and unsuccessful ones don t. 13
Why ecommerce Businesses Absolutely NEED an Audience Learn the real value of an engaged, loyal audience and how it helps you turn your talent into a real business. 14
Let s start with the bad news. No matter how dedicated you are, you re unlikely to reach potential buyer on the many online spaces, forums, communities, online directories, social media platforms, classifieds and blogs. And when you run a traditional business and pursue prospective buyers, the burden of proof is all on you. An audience takes that burden off your shoulders, helping you spread the word about your services and acting as living testimonials to the quality of your products and service. Without an audience, your stream of traffic is restricted to what you can attract on your own and pay for out of pocket. An audience is genuinely interested in you, and what you have to offer. You ll constantly be playing catch up, and you may never see the results you want, whether those results are financial or related to your lifestyle. That won t do. 15
Hopefully, you re coming around to the idea that building your ecommerce store without an audience will not create a profitable and sustainable business. Knowing that, you afford to miss out on an audience who will help you: Test ideas and new product offerings Validate that your offers are good ones Improve your delivery and performance Get your brand out to hundreds and thousands more people than you could alone Send you recommendations and referrals Write glowing testimonials and reviews Act as social proof that you re the best in the business Tell you exactly what they want to buy An engaged audience is a group of people who have chosen to be your customers, colleagues, and even friends. 16
They will support you as you move forward, comfort you when you fall, and help you build your business into something great. Are you ready to start building yours? 17
What Does an ecommerce Audience Look Like? Building your audience doesn t need to be overwhelming, especially when you know how to do it. 18
It may be a little hard to imagine what an ecommerce audience looks like. If your main business is selling things, what is a community centered around a blog and a mailing list going to do for you? That s an excellent question. An ecommerce audience isn t just a group of people staring at their screens, waiting for your new products to show up in their inbox. It works differently than that, but the results are even better. The difference between an audience for an ecommerce business and everyone else s is the nature of the relationship. It s unlikely that your audience will be entirely composed of people who want to do nothing but buy, buy, buy your stuff! Instead, they re going to be the people who engage with you about your passion, provide the evidence that you re a consummate professional, and possibly, become customers of a different sort than you re used to. This means you have freedom in deciding what your audience looks like and who it s made up of. 19
Keep the following in mind as you read this report and start building your own audience: Relationships can be valuable even if they re non-transactional. The more people you have paying attention to you, the more authority you command in the marketplace. You may be leaving a lot of money on the table if you refuse to consider new options as they present themselves. An audience, once built, will bend over backwards to help you build the kind of business you want, but you have to put in the time to build relationships first. If you can find people who will value information you give away about the type of product you sell (and topics related to it), they will repay you by making your products better and more visible to people who can afford them. An ecommerce audience could be composed of: Potential customers 20
People who are curious about your products or have the problem they solve Other business owners in the same, related, or totally different spaces People who are just interested in what you re passionate about Each of these people is valuable in their own way, and brings different qualities to your community. The more viewpoints you have to draw upon, the more insightful your offers to customer will be. You make the difference, not your product. You re the one who gathers people together for a common purpose and guides the community towards success for themselves and for yourself. Because of that, and because your audience gives you the precious gifts of their time and attention, you should be prepared to give a lot of yourself to help them. Having engaged readers and community members who 21
are interested not just in your products but YOU yourself is a priceless resource. You accomplish this with a blog and a landing page that feed into a mailing list. If you can gather people with varying needs and interests under the banner of your products and market area, you ll find that your blog posts get shared far and wide. They ll also generate lots of great discussions, ideas, and attention (something that leads to some of the biggest and best traffic jumps you ll ever experience). As your community grows, you will be seen as an authoritative source of information, and people will ask you about your area of expertise. This is significant when it comes to developing new product offerings that are so aligned with your customers needs that they won t bat an eye when you charge them premium prices. Your audience will make suggestions, challenge your assumptions, and treat you like a mentor, and as you 22
engage with them, you ll be able to impact them all not just the ones who buy from you. Your audience will teach you, too! If you ve connected with people who are colleagues as well as audience members, you ll share tips and strategies, and refer business back and forth as well. Lastly, an ecommerce audience will buy your products or recommend you to their friends. So the time you invest in building relationships can pay off in dividends. 23
So, How Do You Build an Audience of Fans? It starts with finding the link between your areas of expertise and your audience s areas of interest. But that s only the beginning 24
Consider why you got into this business. It could have been: An interest or passion The need for flexibility and freedom The desire to shake things up in your industry It could have been all three or something else entirely. Whatever your reason, you began this business because you have intelligence, gumption, and something you want to share with the world. Whether it s the gorgeous accessories you make or the computer parts you source from around the globe, you re competent at bringing products to the world. Building your audience starts with finding the intersection between what you do and what people want to learn more about. Being able to provide something that solves a problem or creates a delight means you understand what your audience wants and needs. This means you also have a wealth of ways to talk about it and share what you know. 25
So you need to find the links between your expertise and what people want to learn more about. This is the bridge between you and your audience. The basic steps are: How to Build an Audience of Raving Fans 1. Identify who you want to serve and what you want to provide. 2. Provide one unique and irresistible bit of insight or delight. 3. Create that content, and put it on a landing page, connected to an auto-responder that has a series of engagement emails that will be delivered at intervals. 4. Start connecting with people on blogs, social media, and other online spaces they inhabit. 5. Contribute to communities by guest posting on blogs your ideal customers read. 6. Once you reach critical mass (at least 1,000 people) on your email list, launch or re-launch your blog and continue to engage people there. 26
Let s go into each step in more detail. 1. Who You Serve and What You Provide First things first: know what you offer and who will find it most useful. This means identifying (in much more detail than you d expect) your one single ideal customer. Who is that one person you wish all of your customers could be exactly like? Think about things like their age, family situation and income, and then delve into their hopes, fears, opinions and dreams. Start by identifying your one single ideal customer. 27
Once you have a clear idea of who you will be working with, think about your products: What element is the most important to your possible customers? What do they care about the most? What causes them the greatest pain or difficulty right now? This will tell you how you need to frame your offers to perfectly communicate how much value people will get when they buy from you. Write down your answers to the questions about who you serve and what you provide, and keep them close as a reminder of who you re selling to. 28
2. Solve ONE Problem Next, think of one specific problem your audience has. It needs to be something you can solve quickly and thoroughly with a single piece of content. Remember in the previous step when we talked about the benefits your customers get from you? That s where your analysis begins. Pick one problem you can solve. If you succeed, your subscribers will forever regard you as their hero! And by the way, don t make this a sale or one-time discount. Think outside the box and consider the reasons people want or need what you offer. It might also help to think of something that could make them a better, more sophisticated customer down the line. We call this problem-solving piece of content a First Impression Incentive, and it s one of the first steps to building the thriving, income-producing business you want. Again, resist the temptation to use a sale as your incentive. You ll make more higher-value sales later on if you give first. 29
With the First Impression Incentive, you want to prove your credibility. You do that most easily by solving a small but bothersome issue you know people have. Some examples might be: First Impression Incentives Suitable for ecommerce 7 ways to spot the difference between handmade and mass- produced items Why a custom part will save you money in the long run 3 amazing hacks to fix what you already own Surprising new uses for these common items Keep it simple, applicable, and valuable. These examples will appeal to more people than just your ideal customers. That s good. While you re aiming to have a steady stream of loyal customers, attracting other interested parties is valuable as well. 30
3. Crafting the Incentive Once you ve decided what annoying and persistent issue you want to help your new audience members with, you have to figure out how to present the information. You can make an ebook, a free report, a video, an audio recording, or whatever format you think will best help people absorb and use the information. If you re not sure which format to use, keep this in mind: use the minimum richness to get the job done. Always use the minimum richness to achieve the best possible outcome. That means if you need a video to demonstrate a technique, then make a video. But if a description would be as good, then write a report or an ebook. You don t want to invest more of your time or resources than necessary, because you ve got plenty of other things to worry about! 31
Like making the content available. Once your content is ready, you ll offer it to people on a landing page and through an email autoresponder. A landing page is a page on your website that tells people what you re offering, plus the benefits, and has a form that people can fill out to access your information. It s simple, because anything else would be a distraction. You want readers to sign up for your First Impression Incentive and give you their permission to contact them in the future. That s where your Engagement Sequence comes in. The Engagement Sequence is a series of emails that does a few things: It gets people in the habit of opening your emails. It encourages your subscribers to respond to you. It shows that you re interested in whether or not the incentive is working for them. 32
It shows you re a real person and not just a computer program. Set up your emails to deliver in the days and weeks after people subscribe. In these emails, you can ask them if the information you ve shared is working, send other resources, and ask for their opinions. You manage all this with an email service provider like AWeber, which allows you to create opt-in boxes and schedule your emails in advance. Landing pages can be tricky, but free and premium WordPress plugins work right out of the box and don t take much time to learn. 4. Finding Your Tribe Once you ve got your landing page set up, your First Impression Incentive created, and your Engagement Sequence ready to go, you ve got to find and connect with your potential buyers (and others who might like your Incentive). 33
Go back to the research you did when you were identifying them, and try to step into their shoes. What blogs do they read? What magazines? What forums? Where would you look for answers to your problems? Make as long a list as possible, and start joining conversations in those spaces. If your ideal customer is addicted to lifestyle blogs, start reading them too, and leave interesting, insightful comments on as many posts as possible. Do this for a while, and you will start to see subscribers trickling in. Do you see why the first step is so important now? Your audience is the foundation for everything else you do to build your business. This part of building an audience is long and can sometimes feel like drudgery, but you re building a strong foundation for everything that comes after. 34
The readers of these blogs aren t the only ones who will notice your comments. The blog owners will notice, too, which is critical to your next step. 5. Contributing to Communities Once you ve established yourself through commenting (which is when you have 100 to 300 subscribers), you ll need to step up your game, and start leading the conversations on these other blogs, not just participating in them. You do this by guest posting. Remember, the owners of those other blogs Writing guest posts will be reading your comments. That s on popular blogs important because when you go to pitch them helps you move a guest post, you ll be able to say, I ve been from a participant happily commenting on your articles and and follower to a they will know it s true. leader. This puts you miles ahead of other guest bloggers who haven t done the preliminary work. Let s step back for a moment. 35
What Is a Guest Post? Guest posting is when a blogger lets a guest author write a post for their blog. It s an amazing way to get attention and build relationships with both customers and bloggers who will help promote your work down the line. If you re not sure you have anything to write about for the blogs your best customers spend their time on, look for the intersections. Say you sell custom-designed car decals and your ideal customer is a high school student with her first set of wheels who reads lots of blogs about saving money. A possible intersection might be Take Years Off the Look of Your Car for Less Than the Cost of a Bus Pass! 36
If you sell homemade body products and your ideal clients read cooking blogs, you might want to write about the 6 Recipes for Popular Beauty Remedies You Can Make at Home Today. Remember, the main goal is to impress your future readers so they follow your byline back to your landing page! Ideally, you ll do all of this before you start your own blog. In fact, until you have close to a thousand people on your list, we don t recommend blogging much on your own site at all. If you already have a functioning blog attached to your ecommerce site, however, it can still work for you. Create a landing page and spend more of your energy guest posting and building relationships than you do posting on your own space. Rule of Thumb: In the beginning, you need to put more energy into guest posting than into posting on your own space. 37
6. Finally, You Can Launch Did you think you would never get to launch (or relaunch) your blog? Not at all. We just want to make sure your launch is a successful one. By waiting until you have around 1,000 subscribers before you launch (not to mention healthy relationships with a host of bloggers and professionals), when you officially open your doors, you can ensure there s a crowd of people waiting to celebrate with you, share the news, and spread your message. To launch, pick a date at least a couple of months in the future and reach out to all the bloggers you ve been in contact with. Ask them for another chance to guest post during launch week. Most of them will say yes, and running several guest posts in one week will ensure maximum site traffic. And that s the basic formula for building an audience and growing your ecommerce business. 38
Let s recap, because we ve covered a lot, and this stuff is vital: The 6-Step Formula for Building Your Audience Business 1. Identify who you want to serve and what you want to provide. 2. Provide one unique and irresistible bit of insight or delight in the form of a First Impression Incentive. 3. Create that content, put it on a landing page, and connect it to an autoresponder that has a series of engagement emails that will be delivered at intervals. 4. Start connecting with people on blogs and other online spaces your target audience inhabits. 5. Contribute to communities by guest posting on blogs your ideal customers read. 6. Once you reach critical mass (at least 1,000 people) on your email list, launch or re-launch your blog and continue to engage people there. 39
What happens after you launch your blog? You continue your community- building efforts and start directing your audience to your products. Remember, up until this point, you ve been giving, giving, giving, and asking for fairly small things in return, like comments and social shares. Now it s time to think about offering something bigger in scale. Namely, the cool stuff you sell! If your ecommerce business is new, then you ll want to start with a small, reasonably discounted offer to your list. Make it special, make it exclusive, and make it an irresistible offer. You have two goals for this offer: (1) to get a few people to buy things, and (2) glowing testimonials you can use to attract higher-end customers. If your ecommerce business is already established, then it s time to start testing higher-end products, using everything you ve learned about your ideal clients wants and needs to make the sale. This is just the beginning. There are obviously many more details to creating a thriving audience-based 40
business too much to cover in one ebook but these are the basics. If these ideas appeal to you, look into the Audience Business Masterclass, where we take you through this process step-by-step with all of the detailed, customized support your ecommerce heart could desire. 41
Enjoy these Resources Engagement from Scratch! The Audience Revolution Teach and Grow Rich 42
Further Reading to Help You Grow Your Audience Creativity: The Essential Discipline for Entrepreneurs I used Instagram for Business and Doubled my Sales in One Month 3 Reasons to Use Pop-Up Retail: Curiosity, Cost Cuts and Carving a Niche Blogging 101: The Most Advanced Blogging Technique You Can Master 43