The common thread between people who hire me to do websites, consulting, buy my books, listen to my podcast, or take my courses is this: they want a bigger audience. Hell, I too wouldn't mind a bigger audience of rat people sometimes.
I recently gave a talk on audience growth, and while I don't have all the answers, I do know a few things. I've learned both from my own experience and that of the people I work with (some of whom have much larger audiences than mine).
First things first, this information falls entirely short if you do not start with the audience you've already got.
Your current audience--the people who are already listening, buying, engaging--these should be the most important people to you. Far above anyone you wish you were reaching. If it's 10 people, 100 people, or even 1,000 people--if you're not doing right by them, right now, none of this will make a lick of difference (aside: do differences lick?). Make sure you're listening, communicating, and helping the people who are already paying attention to you.
The next thing to think about is your message.
This isn't what you're selling or what you're writing about. It's not even who you are. Your message is what you stand for. It is bigger than any single thing you do or say. It's like a rallying flag that you use to direct your forward motion. It's what makes you stand out beyond anyone else who has similar skills as yours.
Your message helps craft what makes your unique voice cut through the noise. It's what draws people to you (even if many other people are talking about the same topic or building similar products).
Unless your message is interesting to both you and your audience, one of you will get bored and drop off.
You may think that developing your own unique voice is easy, since, hell, it's your voice. Sadly, this is not the case, especially in writing. Finding your voice takes work. It's part internalization, part confidence, and part a damn lot of practice. I'm not sure developing your voice as a creator is something you can ever completely win at--you have to continually check in with yourself to see if it consistently aligns.
Your current audience, your message, and your voice are the groundwork. Next you need to consider why audiences grow. Why do some people build sizeable groups of people who pay attention to them, and some people aren't able to?
Growth happens when your audience shares what you do with their own audience.
Think about it. In order for your numbers to grow, people need to first hear about you. How do they do that? By listening to people they already listen to. If those people they're already listening to mention you, you've got a good chance of adding them to your audience ranks.
In order for someone to want to share you with their own people, think about why you would share someone else's work. Chances are, they said something smart, interesting, entertaining, or useful. You feel good about learning from them, you align with their message, so you want to tell others (and you do). Now you're helping them grow their audience.
At the heart of it, audience growth requires each of the following things to be present:
- Value: if someone is not getting value from you, they're not going to pay attention. So value must to be present in order for your audience to grow. How do you figure out what's valuable to your audience? You listen to them.
- Message: what makes what you have to say unique? What do you stand for? An audience needs to react with, "Yes! This!" or there's no hope they'll tell their own people.
- Consistency: want to show your audience you give a damn about them? Show up for them. Regularly. This is why I write and share every Sunday. And it's why other creators set schedules for sharing, because if it's not a schedule somewhere, chances are it won't happen.
- Generosity: trust and gratitude are built when you do something nice for someone else, with no strings attached. Do enough genuinely nice and helpful things for people, and they'll start talking. You should want to do good things for your audience, because they are your audience.
- Evolution: one trick ponies never see audience growth because they're one-trick ponies. It might be exciting to watch the trick the first time, but by the 1,547th time, it's kind of boring. Unless there's newness, change, and exploration on your end, there'll never be growth in your numbers. Creators can't sit on their past work and coast for every long. Especially not online where our attention spans barely eclipse that of goldfish.
Your audience is not made up of numbers or stats or metrics.
Your audience is a group of individuals who share a common idea, value, motivation, or pain. Each one is more unique than they are similar. It's easy to overlook the humanity when staring at numbers on a screen, but there are people on the other end of each of those numbers. People, each with their own lives, struggles, and satisfactions.
Looking merely for growth is not enough, and frankly, it's a horrible goal. You can't just wish it into being. You need to take lots and lots of small steps towards it: test ideas, analyze results, and adapt/change as necessary. Save the magic bullet for infomercials (they're awful blenders at any rate).
Why do you even need growth? When I was doing just web design, I only needed a few dozen clients a year. That was the perfect number of people paying attention for me to make a living.
For smaller products or services (like $5-10 ebooks), more are required. But, there's also enough. Enough people where it still feels like a friendly small town and not a hostile city. Enough people where you can make a difference, and moreover, help them succeed. Because if you can help your audience truly succeed, they'll reward you for it.
So when you're thinking about what you can do to grow your own audience, consider these points we've just covered. I don't have "5 easy tips to get the numbers you want, guaranteed," but these ideas are worth thinking about if you want more people to pay attention to your work.