Once you have a vibrant Who in mind, let’s get to work building an audience of them. So before you start trying tactics to get more new visitors, make sure that: You have at least a few interesting other bits of content for visitors to look at Your site doesn’t look like a dog’s breakfast If you’re making something interesting, you may well find that those first subscribers go on to become some of your most loyal fans. These quick Q&A posts don’t need as much promotion, but it’s still a good opportunity to practice your process on lower-risk content. But most likely, your venture into the realm of epic is going to involve creating a seriously good piece of content. But two well-planned, 10-minute sessions every day can do you a world of good. Your time is typically better spent optimizing your content to get more shares and building up a good volume of high-value content. #6: Buy a little traffic with money So if you have a steady, consistent stream of useful material (your question and answer content), along with a few epic pieces, and you’ve taken a stand in your topic … is there anything else to do to get the ball rolling? Pick the most financially viable platform of the moment (right now it’s Facebook) and buy a little bit of traffic. #7: Buy a little more traffic with time The other way to “buy” some traffic is to put time and energy into writing guest post content for other sites. Found any great strategies for building an audience in the early days?
The early days of a new blog, podcast, or video channel are actually a sort of magical time.
It’s quiet. No one has shown up yet. You can say or do nearly anything. You have the opportunity to experiment and play without fear.
And, let’s face it … we all want to get past it as quickly as humanly possible.
While I truly would encourage you to stop and smell those roses, I also appreciate that we start websites because we want to build and serve audiences.
If you have something cooking and you’d like to accelerate the process of pulling your audience together, here are seven things I’ve found useful for my own projects.
Before we start on that, though, you must absolutely understand who you want to serve. What they believe, what they fear, what they know, what they don’t know. Keep digging and keep researching until you have someone in mind who feels like a genuine individual person.
Once you have a vibrant Who in mind, let’s get to work building an audience of them.
#1: Be ready for the traffic you get
At the beginning, when we’re squeaking along with just a few site visitors, it’s particularly important to capture every little scrap of attention we can.
So before you start trying tactics to get more new visitors, make sure that:
- You have at least a few interesting other bits of content for visitors to look at
- Your site doesn’t look like a dog’s breakfast
If you’re making something interesting, you may well find that those first subscribers go on to become some of your most loyal fans. Give them a way to stay in touch by offering a smart email subscription that delivers plenty of value.
You’re not going to get a zillion visitors in the early days. But if you can spark and maintain solid relationships with the ones you do get, you’ll start to pick up momentum.
#2: Answer the right questions
Once you (truly, madly, deeply) understand your Who, you’re ready to think about how to best serve them.
One time-honored tactic comes from sales consultant Marcus Sheridan — answer every question you’ve ever seen, received, or heard of in your topic.
The idea isn’t to write a 150,000-word manual. Instead, make each answer a single blog post — and keep the answers simple and useful.
This does a few things for you:
- It gets you past that dread of the “blank page.” Answering questions is pretty straightforward.
- It reveals any knowledge gaps that you need to work on.
- It spurs you to head out into the digital world and start hunting for those questions. That’s a great way to learn a lot about your audience.
- It creates a steady stream of fresh content. This is helpful for search engine optimization, but, more importantly, it makes your site interesting for human beings.
Figure out a calendar you can stick to for these. Since they’re fairly easy to create, you might publish two of them a week for six months or more. Every other week, swap in a more in-depth article that’s got more meat to it.
You may want to have a few of these done in advance, because I promise you’ll have days when even a 10-minute post is going to be tough to get created and published.
This is also a great way for you to start developing good publishing habits.
I refer folks all the time to Pamela Wilson’s post on publishing one strong piece of content a week, as a model for the steps you want to go through. These quick Q&A posts don’t need as much promotion, but it’s still a good opportunity to practice your process…
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