How to grow your audience for your online business

Of all the critical online business building activities, audience building is likely the most important. After all, if there’s no audience, you don’t create any traffic to see any of your offers. As a result, there’s no interest, and there’s no sales.

Imagine if there was a Starbucks in the middle of nowhere and nobody knew it existed and therefore nobody drove by. It wouldn’t stay in business very long! 

But sadly, this is the primary skill that most online business owners lack, and it leads to the end of their business. This is one of 5 critical business building skills that I’ll cover over the next 5 weeks.

When stated so plainly like this, it sounds so obvious. So why aren’t people doing it? The tricky part is that there are so many places to grow an audience that people get overwhelmed and simply shut down. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, SnapChat, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube, Google, messenger, email, etc.

Overwhelm is a real problem. The key is FOCUS.

The key is not to put your energy around where to grow an audience and to multiply your efforts across multiple platforms, but rather to FOCUS on how to build that audience in just one location. Once you’ve found success and entered a place of steady state daily operations, you can consider other platforms.

So whatever your go-to social platform is, start there. For many people, it’s Facebook, but they assume that Facebook is “over saturated” with businesses and it’s a better move to jump to another platform. But that’s not true!

There are many advantages of starting on Facebook (including the separation of personal + business pages, the option to run ads, and the free functionality of groups). Despite what many “experts” say, there are huge advantages of having a business page on Facebook, which we will cover in future blogs.

For now, just know that once you FOCUS and find an audience growth system that works, the only way to SCALE that success beyond your warm market is with ads - and THAT requires a business page.

Do LESS to accomplish MORE

If you haven’t added new friends/contacts, new followers, or new likes on your business page, it’s time to streamline and simplify. Think through any and all activities you can remove from your plate so that you can focus on audience growth for a short time.

Grow your audience + engage with your audience + sell to your audience

As you can see, the very first step is growing your audience. So if you are spinning your wheels trying to create fancy content that nobody will see or engage with, and you have the same small audience you’ve had for months on end……. you’re likely not seeing any interest from them in regards to your business, and you’re getting ahead of yourself.

Start with building and growing your audience! 

For the sake of argument, let’s assume that you are starting your learning on Facebook (which I would advise). There are many aspects of Facebook, and you could go down the rabbit hole farther than you need to if you’re not careful. Here’s where I advise starting:

As you can see, we narrowed down a huge list of potential locations to build an audience from 12+ locations down to three! And in all honesty, if that feels overwhelming to you, cross off Facebook groups as well and just focus on your personal Facebook profile and building an email list..

But I cannot stress the importance of creating an email list enough. It is a fundamental MUST for your business, and it’s something I wish I had started from day 1 rather than waiting as long as I did.

You don’t own your Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter friends lists. They could disappear any time these social platforms decide to change their terms of service or their privacy policies. THEY own your account and your list. An email list cannot be taken away from you, so it is one of the few assets you OWN in your business!

An email list cannot be taken away from you, so it is one of the few assets you OWN in your business!

In next week’s blog I’ll cover Key Skill #2: Creating Engaging Content. In the meantime, if you’re realizing that you’re in over your head and need to dig deeper into these fundamental principles, you can access the same training platform I use to grow my own business by clicking here.

This training community covers everything from list management & calling leads to Attraction Marketing, content creation, and paid ads (when you’re ready).