Audience Building
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What s Inside? Introduction 4 Why Most Internet Marketers Fail... and Why You CAN (and Will!) Succeed 7 Why Internet Marketers Absolutely NEED an Audience 14 What Does an Internet Marketer s Audience Look Like? 17 So, How Do You Build an Audience of Fans? 22 Enjoy these Resources 45 Further Reading to Help You Grow Your Audience 46 3
Introduction Every minute, thousands of blog posts are written. Hundreds of thousands of tweets are posted. Millions of Facebook posts are shared. And new social media networks are created every day. But that s just the tip of the iceberg of one small part of internet marketing. Add in complications like Google algorithms and Facebook ads, and it s clear the internet is changing at a breakneck pace. As an internet marketer, it s your job to carve out a place for yourself in a constantly shifting landscape. You know you re good at what you do, but that isn t enough to build a successful Internet Marketing business. Sure, you can dream of overnight success, but the truth is, you can t win without putting yourself out there and building an audience for yourself. Most people who come across you won t trust you at first. And with so many options to choose from when it comes to buying information and products online, 4
standing out is incredibly difficult unless you already have a large audience. But with the speed that everything is changing, it can seem like an overwhelming challenge to build a name for yourself before the rug gets pulled out from under the whole industry again. It doesn t have to be that way. We want to help. You CAN build by yourself! an audience of interested people who respect what you do. You CAN get feedback from people about what they want to pay for before making a single sales call. You CAN have people approaching you ASKING if you will work for them. You CAN make a living doing what you ve always wanted to on your own terms. 5
It just takes a little shift in focus, and a few tips, tools and strategies. Are you ready to take your Internet Marketing business to the next level? Good. Let s go. 6
Why Most Internet Marketers 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. 7
Can you guess the most common complaint we hear from Internet Marketers? I m not getting enough traffic and the traffic I do get doesn t convert! It makes sense, in a way. The internet is full of sleazy, one-trick-pony scam artists trying to make a buck. It s glutted with your competitors. Why should anybody listen to you? But you re different. You re NOT sleazy you have valuable expertise to share. And you know there must be a way to get your numbers up so you run ad campaigns, make free offers, network with bigger bloggers, participate in forums, attend conferences, and even buy training, always keeping up with the latest tactics and techniques. You do everything you re supposed to do to build a thriving and profitable business. But it s just not working. Some people are trickling in, but not enough and they aren t the kind of customers who will ever buy your higher value items and offerings. 8
There s a reason all of this is happening, and the reason is that that you re trying to build an online marketing business without the most important ingredient. You re trying to do things the way they used to be done, to rely on the best practices established by Internet Marketers over the last decade. In our digital, connected world, the traditional ways of building a name for yourself just don t work! This doesn t take into account the fact that a LOT has changed since these rules were first made (even though they came into being only a few short years ago). You know the rules I m talking about: You implement the latest SEO strategies to try to get backlinks and traffic. You hone your copywriting and really stress the benefits of what you can offer. 9
You make sure all of your technology runs smoothly. You Tweet and Share and Pin and Link and join every new social network. You test out different headlines and landing pages and buttons until you re blue (although red might work better ) in the face. The problem here is that you re chasing traffic, trying to convince a world of strangers that you can do what you say you can do. Wouldn t it be better to have people coming after you? Approaching you for advice, and asking how much you charge (and being thrilled with your high price tag)? Wouldn t you rather be speaking from a position of authority, with hordes of people backing you up when you say, I can solve your problem. You can have that but it will take a real change. Not just in your actions, but in your thinking about your business. You ll need to change the way you frame yourself and your services. 10
But it s worth it. Because if you make this change, it can transform you from the chaser to the chased. From the seeker to the sought-after. From just another online pretender to a recognized, respected authority. But to do that, you ll need to learn a few truths that most internet marketers don t know. These could shift the foundation of your business. Here s what you need to know: What you provide and what people need might be different. What people need and what they think they need might be different. You ll never know whether a potential customer is looking for something you can t provide or doesn t know what they need till you have a relationship with them. You can't ask for money until you prove that you can deliver value. And proof is in actions, not words. It takes lots of preparation, research and trial and error before you start making sales and getting the conversions you deserve but it s within your grasp. 11
Now, I don t want you to get overwhelmed with all of this; you don t need to do and learn everything today, but without an audience, you re going to be chasing along after the coat-tails of people who get it and struggling to make a name and a living for yourself for a long time like most other Internet Marketers. Let s get back to the main idea in this section: what almost everyone gets wrong when they get into this business. Talent and skill simply aren t enough to attract your best customers. It isn t that they aren t good at what they do, and it isn t even necessarily that they don t want to learn new things and really market themselves. It s that they are playing by the old rules, trying to build an online business the way you had to a dozen, or even five years ago, when what they really need is an audience business. 12
That s the key difference right there: successful Internet Marketers have audiences unsuccessful ones don t. 13
Why Internet Marketers 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
I m going to start with the bad news. No matter how dedicated, talented or innovative you are, you can t reach every person or organization who will be interested in what you re doing on the hundreds and thousands of online spaces, forums, communities, social networks, and on and on and on across the net. What s more, when your online business is focused on scrambling for traffic and bringing in new customers, the burden of proof is all on you. You start from scratch with every new person: they don't know who you are or why they should trust you. Having an audience takes the burden of proof off your shoulders. Not only will your audience spread the word about you, they ll also keep buying from you as you create new products, because they already know and trust you. Having an audience will help you grow your business in many ways. You can draw on your audience to do things like: Test ideas and new service offerings. Validate that your offers are good ones. 15
Improve your delivery and performance. Get your message out to hundreds and thousands more people than you could alone. Get new recommendations and referrals Find out EXACTLY what your customers want to buy (which may be a product that doesn't exist yet). So what is an audience, exactly? An engaged audience for your business is a group of people who have self-selected to be your best customers, colleagues and even friends. 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? 16
What Does an Internet Marketer s Audience Look Like? Building your audience doesn t need to be overwhelming, especially when you know how to do it. 17
If you re sold on the idea of building your audience, then the next question is clear: who should be in your audience? What are the most important characteristics of your audience as an internet marketer? To answer that question, you need to look at the big picture of what your business is doing. Ultimately, your key product as an internet marketer is your specialized knowledge about online business. You may sell this as a service, or a product, but either way, you need an audience who respects you and what you have to say about the online industry. This means that having the attention of not just buyers, but of people who give you feedback, share your information and promote your message is critical. So your audience can include a variety of different types of people: Potential customers People who want to do what you do Other internet marketers People who are just interested in what you re passionate about 18
It s YOU that makes the difference here. You re the one gathering these people together for a common purpose, guiding the community towards success for their benefit as well as yours. Because of that and because your audience gives you the precious gift of their time and attention you should be prepared to give a lot of yourself to help them as well. Having engaged readers and community members who are interested in not just what you do, but YOU yourself, is a priceless resource. As your standing in your community grows, so does your authority. 19
If you can do this if you can gather together people of all sorts and needs and interests under the banner of your expertise you ll find that your blog posts get shared far and wide and generate lots of great discussion, ideas and attention. As your community grows, you will come to be seen as a really authoritative source of information, and people will ask you questions about your area of interest. Your audience will challenge you, learn from you, teach you, and buy from you or direct others who can. This is hugely significant when it comes to developing new product offerings that are so in tune with what a client needs that they won t bat an eye when you charge them twice what you make now. Your audience will suggest things to you, challenge your assumptions and treat you like a mentor and you will be able to see the impact that you have not just 20
with your customers, but with a large, constantly evolving group. Your audience will teach you things, too! If you ve connected with people who are colleagues as well as audience members, you ll be able to share tips, instruct each other, and even refer business back and forth. Lastly, an Internet Marketer s audience will buy things, or direct people who can to you. Whether it s a one-off training or a pricey membership, if you ve invested the time in making real relationships, they will pay off in terms of real dollars. 21
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 22
Consider what you want your life to look like in a couple of years. Do you want to be running an online marketing business? Would you rather move into coaching or consulting? Do you want to set everything on auto-pilot and go live on a beach somewhere? Do you want to be in negotiations for a big buyout of what you built? All of these scenarios are possible, but knowing which one you re seeking will make a big difference when it comes to building your audience. Let s break down what kind of audience you would need for each and then we ll go over the process that transfers pretty easily across all of them. 23
Situation 1 Keep Doing What You re Doing If you re in this business for the long haul, then you want to be looking for people who have an equally long-term interest in your subject matter. If you are all about converting traffic, then you want to be creating relationships with people at a certain level (which one is up to you: beginner, intermediate, or expert). Next, you want to become the absolute best resource for people at that level, and maybe even in a specific industry like ecommerce or Freelancers. You can create and refine processes that, Google updates notwithstanding, will stand the test of time. Situation 2 Move Into Coaching or Consulting If this is your long term goal, then you want to be looking for people who have an equally long-term interest in your subject matter. 24
If you re an SEO specialist, for instance, that would mean career bloggers, perhaps, or companies that do a lot of sales online (basically, anyone whose need for your expertise will grow as they learn more). When you can educate an audience enough that they become sophisticated enough to see the dollar value of your expertise, you ve basically hit gold. Situation 3 Set It on Autopilot This is a scenario that takes a LOT of work to set up over the first couple of years, but it can eventually be an income stream that only requires a few hours a week. For this type of goal, you want a big, broad audience that loves being online and sharing what they find. You want to become the expert s expert, so set your sights on an audience that is already reasonably familiar with the space, and make them shine so they ll direct new people to you as their own businesses grow. 25
Situation 4 Build It to Sell It If your end-goal for your Internet Marketing business is to sell it to someone else, then you want to really specialize your audience. Make them very cohesive, specifically attuned to one market or theme so it s easy to explain to someone else (and for your audience to explain to someone else) what is expected at any given time. Having lots of related content that generates a lot of audience involvement will be a KILLER selling feature not to speak of your beautifully curated email list. Okay, does one of these more or less fit? Whichever type of audience you need to build, the following will apply, with tweaks that become obvious as you grow. 26
The basic steps are these: 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. Now, we ll go into them in a bit more detail. 27
1. Who You Serve and What You Provide First things first, you need to know what you offer and who the perfect person is to take advantage of it. This sounds obvious I mean, you re doing it already! But what this really means is identifying (in much more detail than you d expect at first) who your one single ideal customer is. Who is that one buyer you desperately wish all of your clients could be exactly like? Start by identifying your one single ideal customer. 28
Think about things like their age, family situation and income, and then delve into their hopes, fears, opinions and dreams. It sounds a bit out there but trust me this works. Once you have a really clear idea of who you will be working with, think about your services. What element of what you do is the most important to your future customer? What do they care about the most? What is causing them the greatest pain or difficulty right now? This will tell you how you need to approach them, and help you understand how to frame your offering so it 29
speaks to your customer in terms of the benefits they will get from it. Write down your answers to the questions about who you serve and what you provide, and post them near your computer so you remember who you re blogging for. 2. Solve ONE Problem Next, think of one specific problem your customers have, one you can solve quickly and thoroughly with a single piece of content. Remember in the previous step where we talked about benefits? That s where your analysis begins. Pick one problem you can solve. If you succeed, you will forever be regarded as a hero in the minds of your subscribers! We call this problem-solving piece of content a first impression incentive, and it is one of the very first steps to building that thriving income-producing business you want. 30
There is a temptation here to try and go after a big, intricate problem after all, you have so much insight into your customers and your services that it seems natural and easy to help them solve major issues. But that s what your paid stuff is for. With your First impression Incentive, you want to prove your credibility. You do that most easily by solving a smaller but bothersome issue you know your readers have. 31
Some examples might be: First Impression Incentives Suitable for Internet Marketers The five things people hate to see when they re about to buy something. The color psychology of landing page conversions. How to cut your research time in half. Why you re getting no juice from your Twitter campaigns. Rule of thumb: Keep it simple, applicable, and valuable. These examples will appeal to more people than just your ideal client, and that s good. While you re always going to keep the end- game of a steady stream of reliable, pleasant clients in mind, fleshing out your audience with other interested parties provides huge value to you as well. 32
3. Crafting the Incentive Once you ve decided what annoying and persistent issue you re going to be helping your new audience members with, you have to figure out how to best present the information. You can make an ebook, a free report, a video, an audio recording whatever you think will help people absorb and use the information you re giving them. 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. So 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! 33
Like making the content available. You ll do this through a landing page and email autoresponder. A landing page is a simple part of your website that only has information about the incentive, and a chance to subscribe with their name and email to get it. Anything else is a distraction. You want them to sign up for your first impression incentive, and at the same time, give their permission for you to contact them in the future... which is 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 valuable messages. It encourages your subscribers to respond to you. It shows that you re interested in whether or not the incentive is working for them. It show s you re a real person not just a moneygrubbing shill. 34
So have emails that go out in the days and weeks after they subscribe, asking them how it s going, if it s working, sending them other resources, and asking for their opinions. All of this is managed by an email service provider such as AWeber. It allows you to create the all-important opt-in boxes and schedule your emails in advance. Landing pages can be tricky, but there are free and premium WordPress plugins that work right out of the box, and they don t take much time to get the hang of. 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 start finding and connecting with the people you identified as your perfect customers (and the myriad others who will just think you re cool and interesting). Go back to the research you did when you were identifying them, and try to step into their shoes. 35
If you were them, what blogs would you 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 religiously follows the personal blogs of industry notables for example, 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. I m not going to lie to you; this part of building an audience is long, and sometimes it feels like absolute drudgery but you are building a very strong foundation for everything that comes after. 36
It s not just the readers of these other blog and communities that are going to notice your comments; it s the owners as well which is absolutely critical to your next step 5. Contributing to Communities Once you ve done your time with commenting (you ll know you have when you get to a hundred to three hundred 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 that the owners of those other blogs will be reading your comments. That s important because when you go to pitch them a guest post, you ll be able to say, I ve been happily commenting on your articles and they will know it s true. Writing guest posts on popular blogs helps you move from a participant and follower to a leader. This puts you miles ahead of other Internet Marketers who haven t done the preliminary work. (From long, killingly annoying experience, I can tell you that blog 37
owners know whether a pitch is genuine or from a sleaze ball within the first 10 seconds.) Let s step back for a moment. What Is a Guest Post? It s when a blogger lets a guest author write a post for their blog that will be seen and shared by their audience. It s an amazing way to get attention and build relationships with both readers and fellow colleagues in your field. If you re not sure you have anything to write about for the blogs your ideal customer spends their time on, look for the intersections. 38
Say you re an SEO specialist whose ideal customer, a new small business owner perhaps, reads a lot of marketing blogs. A possible intersection between those two ideas would be: 4 Way to Protect Your Posts from Google Updates. If you re a social media strategist whose ideal clients hang out in technology news sites, you might want to write about the 12 Tech Twitter Accounts you NEED to be Following. Your goal as a guest blogger is to impress your future readers so they follow your byline back to your landing page. Remember: the main goal is to impress your future readers so they follow your byline back to your landing page! You ll ideally do all of this before you actually start a blog in fact, until you have close to a thousand people on your list, we don t recommend blogging on your own site much at all. 39
If you already have a functioning blog, however, it can still work for you; just make sure to create a landing page and spend more of your energy guest posting and building relationships than you do posting on your own space. 6. Finally, You Can Launch I bet you thought we were never going to let you actually launch (or re-launch) your business, right? Not at all we just want to make sure your launch is a successful one. For best success, wait until you have around 1,000 subscribers before you launch. Waiting until you have around a thousand subscribers (not to mention healthy relationships with a host of other bloggers and professionals) before you launch means that when you officially open your doors, there is a crowd of people effectively waiting to celebrate 40
with you sharing the news and spreading your message. To launch, pick a date at least a couple of months in the future and reach out to all of the bloggers that you ve been in contact with. Ask them for another chance to guest post during the week you ll be opening your doors. Most of them will say yes, and running several guest posts in one week will ensure maximum site traffic. Okay, that s it; that s the basic formula for building an audience and getting your online business going. 41
I d like to recap this briefly, because we covered a TON of ground, and this stuff is really 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. 42
So, what happens after you launch? You continue your community-building exercises, and you also get ready to start offering your services to your audience. Remember, up until this point, you ve mostly been giving, giving, giving, and asking for fairly small things in return, like comments and social shares. Now is the time to think about offering something a little bigger in scale. Namely, your paid offers! If your 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 almost irresistible offer. You have two goals for this offer: 1. You want to get a few people to pay you for your services 2. You want GLOWING testimonials that you can use on your landing pages. If your business is already established, it s time to start testing higher prices, using all you ve learned about your ideal clients' needs to make the sale. 43
This is really just the beginning. There are obviously many more details to creating a thriving audience business too many for one ebook but these really are the basics. If these ideas appeal to you, check out our Audience Business Masterclass, where we take you through this process step-by-step with all of the detailed, customized support your Internet Marketing heart could desire. 44
Enjoy these Resources Engagement from Scratch! The Audience Revolution Teach and Grow Rich 45
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 46