Q&A: Your questions about audience growth answered (Part 1)

Recently I surveyed all of my email lists and more than a hundred of you replied to my survey. And a lot of you were asking some awesome questions about growing your audience. A lot of it was about social media. A lot of it was about content creation. So I've rounded up some of the audience growth questions into today's blog.

 

 

Question #1: What is the best platform to grow my audience on?

The best platform to grow your audience is one that you can stay consistent with and that you enjoy, that suits your strengths, and that your audience is going to be present on. So for example, there's no point in being on Facebook if you're trying to reach 15-year-old kids because they just don't go on Facebook anymore. So we want to make sure that we are aligned with where our audience is hanging out.

But we also want to make sure that we are playing to our strengths. So if you are really good at speaking maybe podcasting is for you. If you're really good at writing, maybe blogging is for you. If you enjoy dancing, maybe do TikTok or Instagram reels. So wherever you enjoy showing up, there is no one best thing.

I wouldn't want you to build a business where you feel like you have to do something. Ever since I took the pressure off myself, where I stopped feeling like I have to show up on Instagram, I have now felt more inspired to show up on Instagram again, I had lost all that inspiration because it became something I had to do.

And now that it's no longer something I have to do, I love doing it. The content I create on there when I do show up is so much better and I get better results. So by picking something that plays to your strengths, you're going to be able to show up naturally a lot better and you're going to get those better results.

 

Question #2: What is a realistic routine and strategy I can stick to consistently?

We want to look at how can you do fewer things consistently rather than trying to do everything for a week. And then giving up or getting sick of it, burning out. It's hard to keep doing something for four weeks, eight weeks when you're not seeing the results you want to see yet, but it's only after you've been doing things for a long time. That you start to get that momentum and you hit that sort of tipping point where you get those results. So it's really hard for me to say.

It's tough to say what is a realistic routine and strategy you can stick to consistently, but I will talk you through mine a little bit. I do three podcast episodes a week. It's quite a lot, I know, but that is the main role in my business to create content and my main role is creating content, creating courses and teaching those courses

And for me to create three podcast episodes a week, that is like all of the content creation that I really need to do because those podcast episodes then become emails to my email list. Those emails to my email list sometimes become Instagram captions and I make sure that I'm repurposing everything. I make sure that I'm promoting every podcast episode so I can send more people back to this show because I know if they listen to this podcast. Then I get to help them and it moves them closer to buying from me.

So I'm not trying to do all of the different things. I'm not trying to make sure that I'm posting to LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, all of the different things I was for a while. Also recording video versions of this podcast. But I found that it was that extra barrier between me just hitting the record and talking versus I had to suddenly making sure my hair looked nice. I had to put some makeup on. I had to make sure I was wearing a nice top for the video.

And it became this thing where suddenly there was a huge barrier between me just recording a podcast and that's why I'm back to just doing audio only because I want it to be as simple as possible. But yeah, so we repurposed everything. So find that one-call type of content that you can create that you enjoy creating.

And that's going to probably be a longer form. It's probably going to be a podcast or a blog or a video and then think about how you can cascade that into other types of content. How can you turn that into emails to your list? Or how can you turn that into social media posts, but don't try and do everything start with that core content. Keep coming back to that core content and commit to one blog post a week or two podcast episodes or whatever it is that you can commit to and then everything else on top of that is added bonus.

 

Question #3: Is there a way to get people to subscribe to my email list without using lead magnets?

Yes, people will subscribe to your email list if they like what you're talking about. If you have some kind of almost a selling point, I suppose, for them to be getting your emails, like why do they want to get your emails? I grow my email list with my daily biz boosters. That's not a lead magnet.

So if you can create some kind of email that makes people want to sign up for the experience of receiving those emails and not just because they've opted in for your ebook or your mini costs, then yes, you can do that.

Otherwise, you're going to need to have some kind of incentive to get people to grow it and honestly, I've still found that having a lead magnet has been the most effective way to grow my email list.

 

Question #4: Do lead magnets still work?

Yes. But they need to be a really good strategy behind them and this is something that I've spent quite a lot of time teaching in Launch Magic and it's been really fun because, at the time of recording this, we've just finished modules four and five, which module four is where my students have been creating their lead magnets.

And it's been really fun watching them go through the lessons in module four and realising everything that they learned about lead magnets so far. I'm not going to say wrong, but they haven't really known about the strategy behind it. Everyone always says, oh, make sure your lead magnets are a super valuable piece of content that people want to hand over their email address for.

But nobody really talks about what to actually put in that lead magnet to move people closer to buying from you because yeah, it's great having people on our email list. But how can we also nudge them closer to buying from you? Without paying customers, you don't have a business. So yes, your lead magnets are not just about giving away all of this free value, we want to give away free value but we also want to move people closer to being paying customers and clients.

 

Question #5: Should I just go back to old-school marketing, letterbox, drop pamphlets, etc?

There are times when I questioned this as well, because I'm like, I'm so sick of the internet. But the fact is that we are in a time when we can reach people on the other side of the world, I mean, chances are like most of you listening to this podcast, aren't in Australia. So chances are that you found me online and we can be very targeted in who we are reaching and that's the power of the internet.

Now it might feel like online marketing doesn't work anymore and in some ways, the old model of just post to social media and people will find you and follow you and use the right hashtags and you'll get more followers and that's how you will build your business. That is a broken strategy. It doesn't work anymore. It worked five plus years ago, it worked. But now it doesn't.

Unfortunately, people are still hearing these stories and taking advice from people who are like, yeah, just post the right stuff and get the right hashtags rather than proactively get in front of the right people online. So you would find a much better return on your time invested if you were using that time to pitch podcasts, pitch collaborations, and partner with brands who have the same audience you are trying to reach out rather than blindly going and putting pamphlets in people's letterboxes hoping that maybe they are your target audience.

 

Question #6: What is the best platform to use to gain great leads?

There are so many different platforms out there. But the problem is that a lot of them don't put you in front of new audiences anymore. Instagram and Facebook, I am looking at your Instagram and Facebook. The algorithm is not designed to help you build your email list as a business, their algorithms, or all of the social media algorithms are designed to keep the users of the app on that app, as long as possible.

Think about the format, think about how TikTok is structured, right? It auto scrolls for you after each video, because they just want to keep you hooked. They're working on those quick little dopamine hits each time you see a video and it's really addictive.

For them, they know that people don't really want to see a lot of promotions so they are not really working for your business. They are working for their users. So having said that the best platform to gain great leads is going to be one way you can get in front of new people and it might seem like you are reaching a smaller group of people.

So the best platform to gain great leads is where you are getting in front of other people's audiences that's going to be your best sort of method for gaining those great leads and then in terms of the actual platform, it really depends. For me,

 

Question #7: Do I have to boost posts?

No. The first thing I'm going to say is, do not boost your posts. If you are going to boost your posts, your money is better spent on actual Facebook ads and there is a big difference. I'm not going to sit here and explain the difference. Basically boosted posts is Facebook trying to make ads really simple for people who don't know how to run ads, but in doing so, they take away a lot of the features, the options, and the settings that make Facebook ads so effective.

So paid ads definitely speed up the entire process. You don't have to run paid ads, but they will speed up the process and this is one of the reasons why I say if you're thinking of launching a digital product, don't be afraid of launching to a small audience, because even if it brings in like a thousand dollars, you can go and reinvest into Facebook ads to grow your audience and have a bigger launch the next time.

 

Question #8: Can I reuse content on different channels?

Yes, please reuse your content on different channels. As I mentioned earlier in this episode, each podcast becomes an email to my email list. It might not be word for word, but generally, I'll wrap a story around it and send people to listen to this podcast. The email that I send to my list, I'll copy and paste it, shorten it, posted on Instagram. I used to record YouTube video versions of each podcast. I will probably take these questions that I've answered here and maybe record a short reel or a video clip of some kind.

So absolutely, please reuse your content on different channels. There are only so many ways you can say the same thing over and over again. So you might as well reuse that content and nobody is seeing it across every single channel that you are on and if they are seeing it across every channel you're on. Well, that's probably a sign that they are big fans and if they're big fans then they probably want to see all of your content, that's the first thing.

The other thing that I want to say is we get really afraid of repeating ourselves. We think that if we repeat ourselves too much, our audience will get sick of hearing it and they will unfollow us, or they will unsubscribe from us. But in reality, people need to hear the same thing multiple times before it sinks in. They need to hear it, explained in different ways before that makes sense.

 

Question #9: How do I use my social audience to sell?

This one's interesting because I personally do not find that I make many sales from social media. The one exception was when I launched my small group intensive back in April and I wasn't sending people to a sales page. It was DM me for more information and then we had a chat in the DMS and then I sent them to a checkout page but I don't make many sales. It's not like I put a post up on Instagram and people go and buy from me. I can see how many people click on my links.

You know, sometimes I get like five clicks on a link and it's a bit disheartening, but I don't look at Instagram as a platform to sell anymore. I don't look at any of my social media platforms as a platform to sell anymore. I look at them more as a community, as a place to nurture my audience and that has taken a lot of pressure off because it's not like, I need to be selling on here. It's like, cool, this is my little community place, my place. I get to hang out on the internet and share stuff when I feel like it.

But I sell from email. If I were you, I would use your social media audience to grow your email list. Send them onto your email list so that you've got them in another space as well because Instagram might shut down tomorrow night who knows we've had little scares with Facebook and Instagram.

They might shut down and then where are you going to reach your audience if you don't have that email list? Now you have them on another platform. You can communicate with them in another way and I find that if I were to hazard a guess, I would say like 90% of our sales come from email lists.

 

Question #10: How do I reach more people organically?

We believe that growing our business is a matter of posting the right content to Instagram and if we post that right content, Instagram will make us go viral and we'll get hundreds or thousands of followers and we've suddenly magically reached more people. I've been posting on this Instagram account for like four or five years and I've never posted something that has got hundreds of followers.

You could spend your entire life creating content for Instagram hoping that it's going to go viral but it's probably not. And that means that we now need to be proactive about how we're going to reach those people organically and that means proactively reaching out to people who have access to the audience you want to reach.

That is other brands that have that audience. Maybe they're not competitors but they are like a complimentary product or complimentary service that compliments what you do. Maybe they are another small business owner who has a similar skill set to you but you don't have an overlap and you guys can help each other out.

This is what I mean by proactively reaching more people rather than doing the easy thing, which is trying to be on social media, trying to constantly come up with content ideas and post them there and then sit back.

 

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