 So how do you build an audience from scratch? That's what I wanna talk about in this video. And as you probably know, if you've watched my other videos, I am building an audience from scratch on a secret project that I'll reveal at some point down the road when it has more traction so that I can truly experience building an audience from scratch. But I know a lot of you are in the shoes of, you know, in that situation of starting from nothing, or if you already have an audience, you might be interested in what I'm about to say on how to further grow your audience. All right, so the first thing to think about, to remember is that it's not just about the numbers. When you start reading other articles about building an audience, growing an audience, et cetera, they will tend to focus on tactics such as buying Facebook ads to get people to like your page or guest blogging, speaking on podcasts, and also search engine optimization. And these are all good tactics, and I'll talk about that later. But the first and most important thing to remember is that you want the right audience, don't you? You don't just, because I have seen probably at this point dozens of clients and colleagues who have built Facebook pages of thousands of followers, and almost none of those followers are engaging with their content. You might be saying, well, how can that be? Because it's easy to get a couple thousand Facebook fans. Did you know that? It's not hard. You pay about $100, and you get a couple thousand Facebook fans. Would you like to do that? It's easy. You just start a fan page, click on promote, say I want fans and just advertise to any random audience, people in North America, 18 plus, and you'll get a couple thousand fans with just, well, maybe not, I don't know what the pricing is these days because I don't do that because it's fake fans. But it's not hard. So when you look at people with an audience, please don't be impressed. Unless they're audience, you can publicly see that the audience is actually engaging with their content and finding benefit from it, et cetera. A lot of the audiences out there are just what's called vanity metrics. Have you ever heard that term? Vanity metrics is numbers that look impressive, but if you look under the hood, if you look at the behind the scenes, you realize, oh, it's not a real audience. It's just a lot of visitors to a website or a lot of Facebook fans or a lot of Twitter followers. And this is a real audience member right here, mango. Again, I've been working all morning here by myself and he has not jumped up and he's like, great, I've got an audience now. I'm gonna show up. I'm all about consistency of content. So he's here and I swear once I turn off the video, he jumps off, even though I'm just continuing my work here. He has a very weird sense of how to be on camera. Okay, so now he's jumped off already because it doesn't like how I'm talking about him. So please remember that a real audience is what we're going after, a true audience. I call that true fans or a true audience. And you know you have true fans when you can count on them to engage with your content and to take a real look at your product and services when you are offering them, okay? And how do you build a true audience? You don't just use Facebook ads to buy fans or Twitter ads to buy followers. You don't just do search engine optimization and you don't just guest blog and all these other things. These are all tactics, but it has to be under the right strategy. And the right strategy is this. A true audience cares about what you're talking about or writing about, okay? Or your images or whatever. They care about your content and they care about you, right? They are not just a, you know, drive by, hey, I'm searching online for a solution to a problem. I found your article, got the solution and I'm out of there. Well, we've all done this. We've all been fake fans to other people and there's nothing wrong with that. It's just we've all been drive by fans for other people, right? Cause we're just searching online for something. We find the solution, we find an answer and we're gone. That's it, right? But it's rare that we find somebody we actually want to follow and keep following. And how does that match happen? That match happens because they are talking about something we care about, number one. And they're talking about in the way that we really find resonates with us. So they're the content topics matter to us and the style really resonates with us. And thirdly, we feel like they actually care about what they're doing rather than trying to put us into a funnel, a marketing funnel. When you're in a marketing funnel, you kind of know that, oh, this marketer's trying to get me to do this and then get me to do that and get me to do this, right? Doesn't feel good, does it? It doesn't inspire trust and loyalty. But when you feel like somebody is sharing a message because they really care about their audience and then you notice they care because they engage back with you, wow, it makes such a difference and you become a loyal fan more and more as that happens. So it's first, the strategy has to be right. The strategy has to be, no, no, I just don't want numbers. I don't care about 10,000 Facebook fans. That's easy to get. Couple hundred bucks, 10,000 Facebook fans, the numbers are easy to get. They really are, honestly. To look impressive, it's really, really easy these days. But to have an actual business is not easy. To have people actually caring about what you say and then buying your thing and writing reviews, that's not easy and that's what we're really going after here. So, okay, so how do we get there? So as you probably can imagine what I'm about to say, content is king, okay? Consistent content is king and consistent distribution is queen. Content is king is not something I made up. That's well known. Even distribution is queen is not something I made up. That's well known as well. A lot of people don't know that second part. Content is king, distribution is queen. Some of you aren't even doing either one. You're not doing content consistently and you're certainly not knowing how to distribute your content. So let me talk about this here. Content is king and it needs to be consistent, needs to be authentic and it needs to be relevant. Okay, consistent. Why is that important? It's important, primarily consistency of content is important for you to get better at communicating your content. We all have this fantasy that just because we think something is good idea and we write about it, other people will think it's great content. The reality is that if you don't practice, okay? The reality is that if your content's not going viral, when I say viral, if your content is not being shared or liked or commented on, it's not that good. I'll be honest with you. And I say this to myself too. I have, I do, as you know, eight new content pieces every month and probably five out of the eight don't get much likes or comments compared to my maybe three or four out of the eight. People actually do like and want to share forward. But I'm the same person. In a single month, I don't grow that much, right? But it's because the topic is right or my style or skill of communicating it was good, but consistency creates skill over time. You can't expect to have good content in a month. First month you're out of the gate. Wow, great content. I mean, if you've been writing for a while or you've been making videos for a while, then maybe that's the case that you are skillful already. But most of us need to become skillful at writing or making videos, right? Consistency grows your skills. I promise you, if you do something every day, you grow your skills much faster than someone who's doing it once a week. If you're doing it once a week, your growth goes faster than someone who's doing it once a month. So consistency is key to becoming skillful and creating content that people find interesting. Okay, so consistency. Authenticity is gonna set you apart from everybody else who's just trying to copy what other people are doing and trying to write for search engines and all that stuff. So authenticity. So, and the great thing about authenticity is it's longevity. If you're authentic, you don't have to pretend and you just show up and you're energized because you are actually following your passion and you're energized from within rather than only seeking energy from outside from what other people are saying to you, right? So authenticity creates longevity and longevity of course creates true brilliance and skill and quality over time. You can't expect to be loved when you're first starting out the gate. You're just figuring out, you think you're smart, you're not. I mean, okay, I should say this. I have a growth mindset rather than a fixed mindset. I don't believe you are smart or dumb. I believe you can become brilliant. That's what I believe, truly. I think you can become incredibly brilliant and skillful at communicating and charismatic and amazing. But you don't start out that way. I don't care how smart you think you are, how good of a writer you think you are. Unless you're lucky, you don't start out with fans. You start out with silence, people. Okay, so let me talk about this. There's content creation and there's distribution, right? Of course, if you use money and use Facebook ads and you're smart about how to use Facebook ads, most people are not good at Facebook ads and they're like, George, I've tried Facebook ads, it doesn't work. It's not that it doesn't work. You don't know how to use it, right? So if you learn how to use Facebook ads skillfully and you use it to distribute your content, you can actually build a fan base pretty quickly who actually are loyal and actually like your content. That's what I'm doing with my secret project. I'm almost at 100 fans now. That's the second, I'm only in my second month. I'm almost at 100 true fans because people who don't, I didn't ask them to like my page. I just, I didn't ask them to leave and like my posts. I just shared, honestly, my postings. Didn't even ask for any likes or any signups or anything. Just shared my content. I distributed out there to certain audiences in a very skillful way and I'm almost at 100 fans of my page. They had to manually come to my page. They saw my content and they had to manually click on my page itself and decide that they want to like it, right? So anyway, skillful content takes time and then skillful distribution just takes learning. I have a Facebook ads course. You wanna learn from me how to distribute your content skillfully so consistency of content, authenticity and relevance is the third part. Relevance is basically as you get to know your audience, you find out what they really, really need and want from you. You then tune your content over time to what they need and want. Then that takes time to get to know your audience, right? So really the strategy overall, how to build an audience, George. George, please tell me in 10 seconds how to build an audience from scratch. 10 seconds, ready? Content is king, distribution is queen and the content needs to be consistent, authentic and relevant. Is that 10 seconds? It's about 10 seconds, right? End of video, okay? So that's the overall strategy. Now let's talk about the tactics now and the tactics are basically, it goes like this. What do you do? Now that you know the strategy is content is king, distribution is queen, consistency, authenticity, relevance, great. 10 seconds, strategy. Now what do I do? What do I actually do on a daily basis, okay? Paid distribution is the first tactic. If you have no audience yet, please don't expect that you're gonna post something on Facebook and somehow people will find it. Please don't expect that you're gonna just put a blog post up on your website and people will find it. It doesn't work like that on the internet. It doesn't work like that. You've got to pay money for people to see it. Okay, so that's one tactic. I'll give you several tactics. If you have zero money to pay for distribution, I'll talk about that next, but I please pray and hope that you will please spend at least a few dollars a month. I mean, if you can please spend $40 a month on Facebook ads, it will grow your audience so much faster. It will take you a few months instead of a few years. Would you like to take a few years or would you like to take a few months to grow a loyal audience? $40 a month can do that. I'm spending 150 to 300, closer to 300 a month right now on my new project, but you may not have that budget. So please spend $30 a month or $40 a month and it'll take you a year to build a loyal audience, but it won't take you 10 years. People who are not using paid advertising is taking a lot longer, okay? So paid ads, paid distribution, learn how to use Facebook ads, learn how to use Google. I'm gonna be teaching Google ads later this year, so you can learn from me too on how to do Google ads. If you like Twitter a lot, you can do Twitter ads. If you love Instagram, you can do Instagram ads. Twitter and Instagram ads are much easier, so I don't teach those courses. Honestly, they're really, really easy to use, but Facebook ads and Google ads are not that easy to learn how to use effectively, so that's why I teach courses on that, okay? So paid distribution is the number one tactic I recommend for you to build an audience from scratch. Please set aside some money every single month for paid distribution. Think of it as your ministry. Do you contribute money to a charity to your church? Can you take some of that charity and money and put it towards your ads for your Facebook? Do you believe in your message? Well, benefit people's lives, just like your church does, just like the charity, just like Red Cross or Greenpeace or whatever you wanna distribute, just like Habitat for Humanity. Do you believe your content can actually, maybe even change lives, maybe even save lives? Do you believe that? Well, why not give to your own charity called your own Facebook ads, your own Google ads because you reach people and you change their lives with your message? It's probably a better spend of your money. This sounds terrible, but it probably is a better spend of your money than putting it towards all of your money towards Habitat for Humanity, which is a worthy organization by the way, right? So take some of your charity money, put it towards your ads, okay? All right, and then, so paid distribution is one, are you doing that? Are you doing paid ads for your content? Not to get people to join your email list, not to sell your stuff for your message, for your, look at my content on my, I'm not asking people to join my email list or anything, I'm just blessing them with content, okay? Paid distribution, doing that. The second one is cross promotion. That's another tactic that can grow your audience from scratch and cross promotion is basically, if two people have a similar audience and they like each other and they like each other's content, then why doesn't person A promote person B's best piece of content and person B promotes person A's best piece of content? So you reach out to a peer and you say, hey, we have similar audiences, I really like your content. Take a look at my content. If you like it, here are my three best pieces. Tell me, if you like any one of these three best pieces, maybe we can trade a promotion. I will promote one of your best pieces to my audience so people can find out about you and you could promote one of my best pieces to your audience so people can find out about me. It's a win-win. And generally, to trade promotion means that you and that person has a similar sized audience, not the exact same number of Facebook fans, but maybe within several hundred. Okay, if you have a hundred Facebook fans and they have 300 or 500, that's similar enough, but I have 5,000, don't approach me if you have 500, right? It's not fair, right? It's not fair, but somebody who has 3,000 might approach me with 5,000. Within reasonable range, the promotion could work, right? So I have 5,000, I might reach out to someone with 7 or 8,000 or someone with 2 or 3,000, within range, right? That makes sense. So cross promotion, please do this. It's how I grew my audience really fast in the beginning before I knew how to use Facebook ads. This is 10 years ago before Facebook ads really existed. That's how I grew my audience the fastest. So cross promotion. Guest blogging and podcast speaking is another way to grow an audience. Podcast speaking less so. I know some of you like to speak on podcasts. The problem I have with podcast speaking is that people who listen to podcasts are not in the position to join your audience at that time. Think about it. When do you listen to a podcast? You listen to it when you're driving. You listen to it when I'm walking the dog. I might listen to it when I'm washing the dishes. None of those times are when I am at the computer ready to join someone's email list or to like their Facebook page or to go to their website even. I'll listen to a podcast. I'm like, watching my dishes. Listen to podcasts or, you know, like, oh yeah, that's a really, wow, what an amazing person. Wow, I really wanna follow that person. And then I finish my dishes and then I'm cooking dinner now or whatever I'm doing. I've forgotten. I mean, this happens all the time. Same thing. Your podcast listener is driving the car and then by the time they get home, they've forgotten about the guest speaker you had or whatever. So podcast speaking, in my opinion, is really good to network with the host of the podcast. I speak on podcasts on a regular basis because the host tends to then hire me to become their coach or whatever. That works pretty well. But the audience, unless it's a really big audience, actually this Sunday I'm promoting a podcast that I spoke on that had a pretty big audience and a lot of those folks decided to join my, they went to my website and joined my email list without any kind of coercion. They just mentioned, you know, the podcast host just mentioned the website, you know, that's it. It was a big enough audience where that worked. But most podcasts that you're gonna speak on don't have a giant audience like that. You know, they might have a couple hundred, a couple hundred downloads per episode. That's a tiny, tiny audience. But when a podcast has tens of thousands of downloads per episode, now you actually might build an audience doing that. But anyway, so podcasts speaking, not so much, but guest blogging for sure can build an audience. Meaning somebody who wants to create consistent content, but they don't want to be the one to always be creating it, you can then step in and say, hey, I'd love to write an article for your audience. Obviously it'll come from me and I'll put my bio at the bottom and people can then find me or learn about me on my website. So guest blogging is much more effective for building an audience than podcast speaking unless you're speaking to a giant audience on a podcast. But even a relatively small guest blog, somebody who has a couple hundred readers a month, you could build a little bit of an audience that way because guess what? When they're reading a blog post, they're at the computer or they're at their phone. They're reading and by the end of it, maybe you mentioned something, a post on your website, when you're writing a guest blog, I recommend that you try to link to your own website. Try to link to your website at least once during the article itself and of course in your bio as well at the bottom. And so they're reading and they'll click on the link and they'll go to your website. So when they're reading an article, they're capable of taking action, go into a website, signing up for a newsletter or something. Podcast listening, not so much. So anyway, guest blogging or podcast speaking. And then the last thing I'll say is SEO, search engine optimization is another way of building an audience. And the way to do SEO, and I'm gonna teach a whole class on this, but I'll just be really, really quick about it and I wanna end the video. Search engine optimization, first of all, is a black box. You have to first realize that. Google is not going to tell you what their algorithm, how they figure out their algorithm. Everybody is guessing. Just like Facebook does not tell any of us what their algorithm is, we are all just guessing. Why? Because if Facebook or Google or any other site tells us what their algorithm is, if they make it public, you know what happens? Spammers, well, there are very, very smart spammers who will then take advantage of the algorithm and then all the links, all the content will be spam. That's why all these companies have to make it secret. And we are all of us marketers, all of us are just guessing. Did you know that? We're just like, well, based on what we're finding, oh my God, how come this piece of content was so high on the algorithm? Well, compared to all the patterns that I'm seeing, it's probably this. Every marketer, every search engine expert is only guessing, but they're using educated estimates based on the pattern recognition they've noticed. So based on our guesses, our best guesses right now is that Google really cares about other websites linking to your website. So search engine optimization, people used to say, well, it's about keywords and it's about having the keywords and the title of your article. That still does help, okay? So you may want to do keywords research, keyword research, the simplest tool that I can give you is called Keywords Everywhere. So keywordseverywhere.com. Go there, it's a free tool, you install it, and then when you Google, you'll start to be able to easily do keyword research just by Googling once the plugin is installed on your browser, okay? Keywordseverywhere.com. Okay, I'm not affiliated with them, I'm just a user of their service. So keywords, so basically the way that search engines work is people type in what they're looking for and Google wants to help them finish their search as fast as possible, okay? So if they type in what they're looking for and your website comes up and Google notices they click onto your website and they don't come back to Google, Google says that was a success and we're gonna reward this website with higher search engine rankings. In other words, your website helped determinate the search. Google has done its job, that's what Google wants to do. Because if I search for something and I click on your website and I'm like, no, that wasn't helpful and I go back to Google and I keep searching, Google says, wow, that website wasn't helpful because this person is continuing their search. Like it's taking them longer to find what they're looking for. So they will downgrade the websites that don't help them fully, person has come back to Google and they will upgrade the websites that people don't come back from because they assume that they have finished. So that's one factor, that's really, really big. Another really big factor that Google says, well, how do we know it's not just a spam website that kept the person there? Well, we know that because other people, other websites are linking to this website using these keywords to link to that. So therefore we know that this website seems to be valuable and respected because other websites are linking to it. So essentially SEO is about trying to terminate people's searches when they find what they're looking for. You have to first figure out what people are looking for which is what keywords research is and then terminate the search by having such a valuable webpage. It's like, oh, I'm looking for blah, blah, blah. And when I went to your page, your blog article talking about or your page talking about, it was so valuable that I just decided to stay there. I didn't go back to Google, I just, it was so great. It was so helpful, so resourceful. That's all I needed, right? So that's why content is king, right? That's why content is king because if the content isn't good, people don't care and they don't link to it, they don't come, they come back to Google, they keep going. And then the second major factor, like I said, is backlinks, right? Which is basically going out to various bloggers and various websites and say, hey, I've written a really, really valuable article here. I thought maybe your audience would benefit if you decide it's valuable. I'd be grateful and honored if you were to link to it. So it's that kind of work, right? It's keywords research, it's modifying your article to meet the keywords. It's not so much the words anymore, it's the topic, it's the idea. Google is smart enough now that you don't have to use the exact words anymore. But if you're writing about that topic and it's really valuable, then they will bump it up in the search engines, right? So, and then if people are linking to it, they will bump it up. So anyway, so to summarize, okay, you first have to get the overall strategy right or maybe it's even values, right? Focus on content. Content is king. Distribution is queen. If you have content but you're not using any of distribution methods to get it out there, no one will ever see it, even if it's the most valuable article in the world, right? Nobody knows about it, right? So content is king, yes, but then distribution is queen, equally important, right? And the content's gotta be consistent for your own skills, really. It's really more for your own skills but also for your audience needs to be able to count on you. Remember an audience, a true audience is what we're looking for. A true audience says, you know what, I feel like I can count on you. I can always count on you to come back and you have got new and fresh and valuable content for me. So consistency is for your own skill building and for your audience's reliability on you, okay? Trust in you. Authenticity so that you can have longevity. You don't burn out. Authenticity, you show up as you are so you don't burn out. You don't pretend to be anybody else. You don't have to put on makeup if you don't like to put on makeup. Talk about women here. Some of you do like to put on makeup. You enjoy it. It's fun for you. Great, then that's part of your authenticity. But if you hate putting on makeup, you like doing it just for the video, it's not sustainable for you to do that. So stop doing it. People will love you anyway without makeup, believe it or not. Your true fans love you if you don't, again, if you don't love putting on makeup, don't put on makeup. Your true fans will love you anyway, okay? Hopefully I've just given you some of you women permission to be yourself, however that means for you, right? Authenticity and then relevance. Learn about your audience over time. Make more content for what their wants and needs are, matched with what yours are as well, okay? Overall strategy and then tactics, paid advertising, paid distribution, cross promotion, guest blogging and search and channel optimization. So those are the four key tactics for growing an audience once you get the strategy right. So anyway, I hope this is valuable and helpful and let me know if you have any questions. Want to thank some of you who are able to join me live. I see Captain and Alejandra, thank you so much. Let's see here, Alejandra wrote, yeah, let's see here, Alejandra wrote that, something I noticed is that the response I get from my Spanish speaking audience is way richer and more active than the English speaking. I may have to do with the fact that the English speaking world, there are many more people teaching what I teach versus the Spanish speaking world that is not saturated. That definitely has something to do with it. Yes, so that certainly in other words, it's less cost for you to distribute your content to the Spanish speaking world, right? It just versus you're competing with many more English speaking folks. So Alejandra says, would appreciate how to engage in English speaking. So Alejandra, the one thing I would say is this, you have to practice, I'm not saying it's you, but I'm just saying that what the evidence is showing is that your English speaking audience doesn't find your communication compelling enough yet, interesting enough. So the homework for you is to keep practicing different ways of communicating your message and noticing observing which pieces resonate with them and noticing the patterns over time. Oh, of all the things I talk about, these two or three things really resonate with my English speaking audience, then say more about those things. So visibility, observation, and then modifying your content based on your observations, right? That's really the thing for all of us to do. But so I'm not talking about you and not being skilled while I'm saying all of us can become more skillful, right? Captain, thanks for your comment says, I recently joined a couple of Facebook groups made up primarily a fellow bloggers trying to help each other get engagement for their content. So yes, cross promotion, right? With them, I jumped from page five, from five page likes to 121 right now. So the question is, this is a good strategy. I understand that not all of them are true fans, but I feel like I'm getting starting to get feedback from people. What do you think? Yeah, yeah, cross promotion. That's what we're talking about here. So however you can, brilliant. Thank you for mentioning. And Facebook groups, joining Facebook groups of peers, you can find people to cross promote with. So yes, no, I think it's a fine idea. But whether or not they're true fans, it's, yeah, I think you have to balance it. It's true. I mean, you don't want, over time, you don't want a bunch of people who just are fellow bloggers who are just trying to support you being nice. It's kind of like, that's why I don't invite my friends and family to like my fan pages on Facebook, or I don't send my blog posts to my friends and family, because they'll write back and say, oh, I'm proud of you, great way to go, but they're not my true fan. I mean, a few of them might be, a few of them might actually be seeking out my content, but most of them are just being nice. So you don't want people just to be nice to you. That's a thing to balance. Are they just being nice, or are they genuinely like interested in your content? Those are the true fans that you want, because the ones who are being nice, that's not sustainable, and that's actually gonna work against you over time, because the algorithms also say, based on how many people you're reaching, how many of them are engaging, you want a bigger percentage of those you're reaching, engaging with your content, for the algorithm that say, oh, this must be valuable, because let's say you have a 10,000 person Facebook fan page, and only 10 people like your posts, the algorithm says, well, this person must have crappy content, because out of 10,000 people, only 10 people like their post. So it works against you when you have fake fans. That's the irony of it. That's why you have to be really careful to build the true audience, right? So you just balance it out if it's a true cross promotion with a real audience of people who might like your stuff, then I think it's a good idea. So I hope this is helpful, and Ian, thanks for joining and saying hi, and Jill as well. So thanks everybody. Have a great, I wish you a joyful experience and consistency in your joy. Coming back to the reason why you're doing this is to serve people and to become a better person, to grow your own skills. Keep coming back to your purpose so that you can be truly sustainable in your audience building. Be well, take care. Any questions, let me know.