 So, three months ago I started to build a brand new audience. This audience doesn't know who I am, doesn't know my background, doesn't know that I have this channel, I haven't revealed my name, I haven't revealed to you what that new project is so that there's no cross-pollination between the audiences at all so that I can create a real experiment and experience of building a new audience from scratch, having integrity doing that without saying, well, you know, what I don't want is for you to tell me a year or two later, well, George, of course your new thing is successful because you already are successful. No, no, this new audience doesn't know who I am yet, so I started doing this three months ago and now I want to share with you where I am now with that and what the learnings are. I'm still not going to reveal it to you for another, probably nine months, so you got to be patient and I'm being patient as well because I do want to make some sales with a new audience before I reveal it again to have the integrity of saying, nope, I did it from scratch not because they knew who I was, does that make sense? So that you can learn from my lessons of starting from scratch again. All right, so the first, by the way, if you haven't yet followed my lessons from month one and month two, I'll put the links in the notes of the video later after I get those together. Those have been written already, but I'll put the links later. So now in month three, what I'm coming up with is, you know, I'm dreaming about what I could offer this new audience, by the way, I should mention I only have a Facebook business page for that new audience and I don't have a website yet. I don't have any other social media channels, just a Facebook business page. So because I only have less than two hours per week to work on that new project. And so I'm being really strategic about it. And Facebook business pages are, in my experience, the easiest way to build a relevant new audience that can measure engagement and can really engage with them in a thoughtful way. So that's what I'm doing. Now in three months in, I'm now able to reach, in terms of a warm audience who has engaged with my content for the past three months, three to 500 people, depending on how much I want to spend. But basically, if I spend between $10 to $30 on an ad, I can reach three to 500 of them at least once, the people who have already been engaging with my stuff. So that's pretty cool. So three to 500 person warm audience in three months with less than two hours per week of work. And of course, I have been spending about $150 to $250 a month. So about $200 a month in Facebook ads for that new audience. Now if you don't have that money to spend, then you just need to spend more time. You need to spend more time distributing your posts in other ways. I have a whole other blog post called How to Build an Audience from Scratch. Just Google it right now as of September 28, 2018. It's my blog post. That's the newest blog post on my website, georgecow.com. But if you are watching this months and months later, just Google How to Build an Audience from Scratch, George Cow, and you'll find that blog post. So that's my wisdom in how to do that. But as I'm now having a warm audience, I'm now dreaming about what I could offer them. I could offer them a membership program, like absolutely little time, right? So I can't really take on clients in that new business unless I start taking some time away from this business. So I'm thinking the first thing I offer them is probably not going to be one-on-one. Now you might be saying, George, but your 10-year plan, those of you who don't know my 10-year plan, Google that, 10-year plan, 10-year business plan, George Cow, and you'll see my 10-year plan, which I recommend to everybody to consider following the 10-year business plan for semi-retirement. And my first-year plan is to build an audience with content. Second-year plan, my recommendation is to do one-on-one services first because that makes money the fastest, and that's sort of the easiest to sell. But I don't need to make money in this new business yet. I mean, I have a full-time income here. I don't need to make money there, and I don't have much time there. So I'm thinking of offering more passive income products to them first. So probably a membership site, maybe start with 25 bucks a month or 50 bucks a month, I guess some additional premium content, something like that. Maybe a group coaching program if I can swing it with my time. Maybe I would do thoughtful, relevant, authentic affiliate marketing to that audience. And some of you who followed me a couple years ago when I was really anti-affiliate marketing may be shocked to hear this. Because I was really, a couple years ago, I came out with a strong stance against affiliate marketing, but I've softened that stance a bit. I think that if I do it from a very thoughtful perspective and, of course, letting them know that, hey, I'm sponsoring this, meaning I believe in it, and I'm going to be earning a commission if you buy this, I believe in it. So I'm a user myself of the product or whatever it is, I think if it's unthoughtfully and not with trickery, it can be a very good source of income. I've experienced that in the past, and I might try that for this new audience. But the thing is this, there's so many options of things I could offer my audience. I'm starting to dream about it, but the key that I have to realize, and I am applying this key, is to not get distracted from audience building. The potential problem is when I say, oh, I've got to figure out what I want to offer before I continue to create content and build an audience. Have you ever experienced that? Oh, I got to figure out what my offering's going to be before I write the next blog post, before I make the next video, before I continue to build out my brand? Mistake, almost always it is better to keep building an audience before you figure anything else out. Before you figure out your brand, before you figure out your logo, before you figure out even your name, before you figure out your offerings, product services, anything. In fact, I am now undergoing a very likely change in the business name of that new business, of that new brand, of that new community. I started with a particular phrase that I was going to build a movement around. And three months in, I'm like, may not be the best phrase, may not be the best name of the business page, and the best topic that I'm building the whole thing around. So I took a poll of my warm audience existing, and I said, hey, what about this other idea, this other unifying theme instead of this original idea? And thus far, everyone who's responded to the poll likes the new idea better than the original one that I thought was going to be my legacy and whatever. Yeah, I thought I had a really cool name, and then this new name, this new idea is even better. So I am actually in the next month going to be switching the business page name of the new business and the theme is going to be surrounding something different. I mean, it's all still around spiritual growth and personal development, but it's framed differently going forward. So am I sad that I've already built the warm audience of three to 500? No, I'm glad because you see, authentic business is one that keeps up with your own personal evolution. And authentic business is not something that is only left brain. You plan everything out and then you hit the button and it runs. Now, of course, later on, I will scale this authentic business and use ads to scale sales of products so that it can become a full-time passive income. Fine, I could do that if I want to. But in the beginning, especially when you're still figuring out your voice, you're still figuring out what you're calling really is. You're still figuring out who you really want to serve and what you really want to talk about. That's not the time to limit yourself and say, well, it has to be figured out before I take the next steps. That's unfortunate. That would be foolishness. No, you keep taking steps of building an audience, saying whatever comes out of your mouth and then adjusting with your audience's feedback on what you're calling really is. Because you're calling is the intersection of your understanding of your passion and your audience's excitement and needs and wants for what they want to buy, particularly. So that's not to be figured out in your own journaling. That's not to be figured out in your own closet with your own naval gazing, right? No, it's with your own business coach, with your own marketing expert. No, you don't, as a business coach, marketing coach, I always tell my clients, no, we can't figure out what your audience really wants. Only your audience can tell you what they really want. And the only way for them to tell you is for you to humbly present to them what you have and to see if they'll take it. This is true marketing. This is the truth, the absolute truth. If there was anything as close to an absolute truth and the absolute formula for success, for business and for marketing, there is one word only, experiment. There is nobody can tell you, no matter how smart the marketing expert, they cannot tell you, oh, this product is gonna work. Oh, you've got this brand right. Oh, this name is the perfect name. Oh, this blog post is gonna go viral. Oh, this membership program, this product launch, your program launch is gonna go really well. If they're telling you that, they're lying to you. I have 10 years of experience marketing now with thousands of entrepreneurs having worked with, the only word is experiment, the only word. Now, of course, the business coach, the marketing expert can help you hold your hand while you experiment together and can experiment more wisely, but the only word is experiment, that's it. So I'm applying that to my new business. I'm experimenting a lot with different types of content. Well, I already, if you read my previous post about this new business, you'll know that I experimented with different types of content and turns out they like my writing, they don't like my videos, okay? So I stopped doing videos there for now. At least with a cold audience, I'm only posting writings to them and then with my warm audience soon, I'm gonna start adding videos because I'll force them to watch my videos so that I can really build a relationship with them, my warm audience and eventually enroll them into a kind of program or something like that. So the lesson here is do not get distracted from audience building, do not figure things out, build your audience while you are figuring out, let them help you figure it out based on the response. Does that make sense? Super, super, super important to remember and to keep going. So don't stop audience building. If you've stopped audience building, you may be misled by some other marketing person, honestly. It's not the right time to stop. The time to keep audience building is always, okay? And then figure out the offerings later, figure out the brand later, figure out the content later, keep audience building with whatever comes out of your mouth, whatever comes out of your fingertips with your writing or whatever comes out of your camera, whatever content you're creating. Okay, keep going. Second lesson I'm learning here, I've written some notes, so I'm kind of referring to the notes from my monthly learnings here. Remember to go into what you've already written. You have already been journaling, writing little post-it notes or writing journals or what, writing things for years, writing documents, maybe it's in your Google Docs, Google Drive, maybe it's in your Word Docs and your computer. It's time to pull those out to get some inspiration and ideas for repurposing those things. And so that's what I'm doing now. I don't have to create everything from scratch, right? I just go back to, because the thing is this, whatever you wanna build an authentic business on, you've already been thinking about it for years. It's not something that you just learned about today and you're gonna start building a business around. No, it's been something that you've been studying for years or talking to people about for years or journaling about for years or a peak experience you had years ago, whatever it is. And now you're building a business around it. Come get back to that old notes, those old notes, bring it out and then write and then create content and go from there. And then the next lesson is just write, just speak. Perfection is not allowed. Even in this business, as you can see, my videos are very imperfect. I've said this before and I'll say it again. I am purposely trying to be not polished in front of you so that those of you who care about a polished George Cow will leave, okay? And those of you who like me as I am will stay and you're the ones I would love to work with. Do you see what I mean? Purposely dressed down. I don't wear any suits. I just recently saw some other guys, some other marketing expert, like he's in this fancy car, wearing a suit, his hair is perfect. And I'm like, oh man, I hope I never become like that because I would be exhausted having to dress up like that and having to look so perfect. And I just show up, dude, I'm here. I open my mouth and I start talking and you like me. It's like, wasn't that great? Some of you don't like me, some of you leave. And that's great because you can go to that perfect guy who has to show up perfectly all the time and that's his brand and that's fine. Maybe he's not exhausted. Maybe he loves it, more power to him. But what I'm saying is we all need to find our authentic style. Maybe that is his authentic style and that's great. Keep going. For me, that's exhausting. For me, what gives me energy, what gives me excitement is to be able to show up with my heart, first and foremost, that needs to be, that's where I put my energy. With my heart, with my authentic style, not pretending, not having to be anybody, not having to be a guru. I don't wanna be anybody's guru. I show up, no perfection is allowed, I speak. I make mistakes, I stumble. I go, wait, I wanted to say this instead. I keep going, just right, okay? And speaking is easier for me now because I've been practicing making mistakes speaking for years and I'm now very comfortable making mistakes in front of you, right? Making a fool of myself. And I have to, I really have to give credit to, and this might sound surprising, I give credit to my evangelical Christian past. I used to identify as an evangelical Christian, I no longer do. Sorry for those of you who are, you might, George, you lost your faith. I lost my dogmatism, I would say. And I lost my, yes, it's true. I lost my Jesus is the only way faith, but I've expanded it, you might say. I know some of you who are Christians are like aghast right now, but those of you who aren't Christians are probably quite happy. But what I did learn for my Christian days is to be a fool for Christ, right? That's a wonderful, wonderful term from Christianity that we can all, if you're Buddhist, be a fool for Buddha, right? If you're Hindu, be a fool for Krishna or whatever. But if you're a shaman, be a fool for the earth, for Mother Earth. But it's the idea of being so secure, being so secure in your eternal security, in your eternal destiny, that you can act as a fool in front of others, and not mind, because you are pursuing your mission. You are pursuing, be a fool for your business mission, you know? I don't mind showing up as a fool. I don't care, you know? What I care about is service. I don't care how I look. I care if I serve you. Now, of course, if how I look is distracting to you, because my hair is literally, I spend a second to comb my hair. I spend a few seconds, so it's not distracting, but I don't mind being a fool in authenticity. So anyway, yeah, don't be a distracting, but don't be perfect and just right. And so what's harder for me now, what's easy is to speak with mistakes. What's harder is to write with mistakes, because when I am presented with a blank screen, I'm still intimidated, but I still do it twice a week. As you know, as you follow my blog, it's quite consistent. Now I'm finally blogging my website instead of on medium.com, I'll talk about that next, but I'm still intimidated, and I still ignore the intimidation, and I still say just write, perfection is not allowed. I just write, I just say whatever. It's not gonna be a award-winning essay. It doesn't have to be brilliant writing. I just share what's on my mind. I just share what might be useful. I don't know. I don't know if it's useful, but I'm just going to share, okay? So perfection is not allowed, just write. Third, third, next lesson I've been learning is I started a medium.com profile for this new business, and I spent about a month posting on medium.com, and I've said this before, and I'll say it again, medium.com is terrible for visibility. Do not expect that you can just post on medium.com, and suddenly you'll get traffic from Google or from the medium community. If you've tried it, you know that it's crickets, crickets, just like Google+, right, crickets. So I've got zero views on all of my articles on medium.com for my new business, so I've stopped doing medium.com for the new business. Now for my current business, and you know I post on medium all the time, and it's because I've been sending lots of my email subscribers over to my medium.com profile for years, and so because a lot of you are following me there now, now of course I'm going to keep it up, but if you're brand new, and you don't want to bother your own current network and try to bring them over to medium.com, it takes a lot of, it takes really engaging with the medium.com community. If you're willing to do that, if you're willing to comment on other people's posts on medium.com and really engage there a lot to finally build up an audience there, fine, do it, fine, good, but please do not be under the fantasy that you can just post there and suddenly get traffic. It's not going to happen, zero. Okay, so I hope that helps. Okay, and so, oh, another lesson here is I am, for my new business, I am posting really long articles, boosting those to cold audiences, rather than trying to build an audience with memes that are really attractive and that, so here's the lesson. The lesson is when you're building an audience, you want to build a true audience, not just building an audience for the numbers. So I filter out the people who aren't going to be the right people for me by writing super long articles, not super long, I mean, they're usually 500 plus words as a status update, no image, no images on Facebook. Now, you might say, what? Facebook images are the best for engagement. Yes, but for a cold audience, I really question that. Okay, for me anyway, I question that because think about it, what kind of people do you want who follow you? Do you want people who are easy to please or easy to get when you post a wonderful image, it looks great, but they might be liking the image, but not reading your thing. I want people who are patient enough to read my 500 to 1,000 word blog post and engage with it, that's who I want. And so that's what I'm paying the advertising dollars to get. I don't want people who just like a quote, a roomy quote. Who doesn't like a roomy quote? Who doesn't like a quote from Buddha or from Jesus or from whatever famous person? Everybody likes it, it's easy to like it and therefore you build a really irrelevant audience. You spend all this money advertising to build an irrelevant audience of anybody who likes roomy quotes, come on. No, build an audience of people who like your writing or build an audience of people who like your videos. Now that's much harder, that's much harder. Building an audience of people who like your writing is much easier, okay? So that's another lesson that might be useful for you. Next lesson for me right now is I've made a decision. I started with this new business, I'm like, well, maybe I should go global. I've got this country, that country, a bunch of different countries I could become famous in for this new thing, came to realization in the future as I, excuse me, as I offer coaching in that new business, as I offer live events, virtual events in that new business. I want people in my time zone. One of the challenges in my current business is some of you are all over the world and I've had to now do things in different time zones with some of you are in Europe, some of you are in Australia. Also Europe and Australia and North America, oh my God, Asia, I was like, oh, all these different time zones I have to think about. It's, to be honest, it's kind of a hassle, right? So in my new business, I've decided just to focus on North America, just North America. So US and Canada, I'm restricting my ads just to US and Canada in my new business so that as I build that one out, I can just relax and go, okay, basically US time zones, Canadian time zones are gonna be great for that new one. So you have to make a decision. If you're gonna build an audience, you might as well build an audience in your time zone, okay? Let's stop this madness of this fantasy of building a global audience, globally known leader. I don't wanna be a globally known leader anymore. I wanna be a North American known leader who could do stuff at his time zone and be very happy with doing that, okay? So there's more than enough people. There are more than enough people in your time zone. I don't know what is the craze about being a globally known leader. It sounded really cool in the beginning and now I, to be honest, kind of regret being a globally known person. Now I wish I was a North American known person. Time zone is much, much simpler and travel is much, much simpler too. If I wanna go travel and do conferences or whatever. So there's more than enough people in any time zone and you just have to, thankfully, with Facebook ads or Google ads or whatever ads you wanna do, Instagram ads, you can restrict to your time zone, okay? All right, so the last final lesson is three months in. I am finally starting to have a rhythm that's easier to focus just on my creativity. So this is true for any new business, any new audience building effort. It's gonna take you time to figure out what your rhythm is. So don't assume that, oh, I haven't figured it out so something must be wrong with me. No, nothing is wrong. It just takes time to figure out what your process is now. And now I've figured it out. Now I have a process. I wrote about that in my second month report. So that's my process and now I'm settling into that process and now I can focus on the creativity part or focus on the writing part of it. Focus on the audience engagement part of it. So anyway, I hope this is helpful. I know it's kind of a rambling video, sharing all these various lessons but I think for any of you who are building a brand new audience, it should be interesting at the very least. And anyway, any questions you have, let me know if I can answer. I know there's a lot of things that are obvious to me about building a new audience that might not be obvious to you. So please feel free to ask me, comment below what your questions are and I'd be happy to address that in a future video. So thanks for those of you who are able to join me live. Thank you, Shelley, for your great comments. And thank you to Roy as well and Yule and Captain and Nadia. Actually, I never know how to pronounce your first name. You gotta pronounce it for me. Nad Yeda, I think. So thank you, Michelle, thank you. Jeremy, thanks for joining. Stacey, thank you. Karen, who else is here? Becky and Catherine. So thank you all so much. All right, have a great rest of your day and keep building your audience. Keep building it. And that way you will have a true fan base you can engage with to make offerings that they will love. Blessings.