4 No-Cost Strategies to Grow Your Audience

As someone focused on helping others be heard in such a noisy world, I'm often asked how to stand out. In the process of writing a book on that topic, I realized that one of the key elements in getting your voice heard is developing an audience that is eager to hear from you regularly.

John Corcoran is the co-founder of Rise25, a company that helps businesses expand their networks through done-for-you podcasts. Over the span of just two years, John grew his audience base from about 1,000 email subscribers up to 25,000. I interviewed John about his growth process for my most recent book, Entrepreneurial You.

Originally, John was dependent on service-based revenue, working strictly as a lawyer. He found that his potential earnings were limited by the number of hours available in the day: there was only so much work he could do. By growing his audience base, he found multiple revenue streams to generate greater income and reduce his workload. Here are four tips John offers about how to build an audience.

If you want to receive more advice on how to grow your audience and build up your career with multiple revenue streams, be sure to sign up for my 88 Question Entrepreneurial You self-assessment, available here.

Write guest posts. One of the strategies that kickstarted John’s growth was writing on other people’s publications and blogs. He said “During 2014, my primary source of growth was from guest posting. At the beginning of 2014, I had about 1,000 email subscribers. By the end of that year, I'd gotten to about 5,800.” This works well for initial recognition to audiences that may just be meeting you for the first time. John grew his audience nearly 600% in a year!

Conduct informational webinars. After a year of growing his audience through guest posts, John found webinars to be a slingshot for his growth: “I discovered webinars in the beginning of 2015. Not just doing webinars for my own audience, but going out and doing webinars for other audiences out there. That's what really lit a fire under everything for me. If you're doing webinars for other audiences, it can be a tremendous way to grow your email list.” Over the course of a year, he did a total of 83 webinars. Some were for his own audience, but most were for the audiences of colleagues he partnered with.  “I had as many as 1,500 email subscribers that I got from a single webinar. By the end of the year, I'd grown to about 26,000 subscribers."

Segment your email list strategically. There are plenty of mailing list services that can segment your subscribers to receive offers they are interested in, and exclude what they are not. (I personally use ConvertKit.) John utilized this technique to promote his online courses: “I have automated campaigns for a couple of my courses, so that people get a bunch of educational content, and then they get the offer to buy a course. My goal with that is to create a more sustainable, consistent flow of lead acquisition to grow my email list, and also sales, of course." Segmenting his list enables him to provide useful and relevant information to people about subjects they're interested, and avoid alienating people who don't care about that particular topic. If you'd like to see a targeted email campaign in action (and you happen to be interested in the concept of writing articles and blog posts more quickly & effectively), you can check out the process I use for my Rapid Content Creation Masterclass here.

Use your unique voice to promote affiliates. One of John’s more reliable revenue streams comes from affiliate sales - i.e., selling other people's products or services, which he endorses, to his audience. John recognized the importance of not making his affiliate sales feel like a generic sales pitch by writing his own promotional copy, explaining in a personalized way through his email messages why he believes a given product or service is useful. “I personally don't believe in copying and pasting emails that someone gives you and just sending it out," says John. "I interweave my narrative and my own, personal story and explain why I think it's relevant to my audience. I focus on how to build better relationships in business since that's the theme of everything that goes through everything that I do. If I want to promote something else, I want to make sure that theme is front and center.”

If you put the time in to grow your audience from several different sources, you set yourself up to expand your career exponentially.

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Take care,

Dorie