I’m currently on a road trip in the US this month. I’m literally writing this on my laptop on a 7 hour drive from Orlando to Atlanta.
As we landed in Orlando last night, I flicked onto YouTube and was scrolling as we made our way to the hotel.As I scrolled, I landed upon a vlog from a personal branding coach.
They didn’t have a million subscribers.
But they had 10k more than me.
Every video they put out outperformed mine by a factor of 10.
Yet, their vlog confession was shocking and at the same time, unsurprising.
“My business failed”
This wasn’t clickbait.
It wasn’t a hook for a video.
He was honest that he wasn’t making money.
He had racked up debts and was quitting the influencer life and moving back home with his parents.
Props to him for admitting it, most wouldn’t.
They guy was admitting what many playing the online marketing game don’t…
Audience ≠ Clients
Stop building an audience and start winning clients.
Gary V, Alex Hormozi, Chris Do, Tom Bilyeu, Tim Denning all have two things in common.
They got in early.
They scaled with a team.
I love what they do.
But I also feel that they make it look easier than it really is.
Try to replicate their success without the early advantage or a team and you will implode with the workload and run out of cash.
Think about it, they are giving great advice, but do we seriously believe they are implementing this advice day-to-day?
If they do, who handles all the other shit they have to do?
It’s a little unrealistic to expect to replicate if you don’t have their team and resources.
You need people and money to build an audience.
If you think about most major content production businesses (think TV, Movies, Streaming channels etc), they have to be able to invest heavy time and resources to get traction. They might have to spend millions before they see a dime.
The same is true for audience building on social media.
So, you need to invest to get that….that means either being prepared to sink tons of time to build it (often with little financial return for 18months.
The only shortcut to this is sink a ton of cash doing it.
But don’t lose hope. There is a better approach for you.
My belief is this: For the majority to build an audience, you need profitable clients first, so you have money to invest in building an audience.
Make money first (then build the audience)
I have over 300,000 followers across my social media channels and email list, that audience makes things easier for me, I reach more people, I can talk to more people at one time.
But here is what nobody tells you:
As you get a bigger audience, your conversion rate goes down.
A smaller audience has a higher conversion rate than a larger audience.
There is something called the small audience advantage, which you should be leveraging.
If you’ve got 100,000 followers, it’s hard to resonate with all of them.
If you’ve got an email list of a million people, it’s hard to appeal to them all at once.
The small audience advantage is simple…
It’s about staying on a focused topic / pain point
It’s about leveraging the personal touch.
It’s about resonating deeply with your perfect-fit clients
You can’t do this when you amass a big audience.
But leveraging this with a small audience will convert like crazy.
Let me give you some examples of what I do…
Personalised video messages - Every day I send 5 video messages to perfect-fit prospects that follow or engage with me. I book one call per day - close 40% which is just shy over a 9% conversion rate.
Zoom Calls - I will host open Zoom calls talking about issues faced by my ideal clients. I get 70+ people showing up and we connect and I share my ideas - offering them a next step to work with me.
These are two very simple things you can do with a small audience.
This approach keeps you revenue positive as you scale.
But let me give you one more piece of advice…
Save to scale
Growing an audience will require time investment and cash.
You can’t get around that.
But with a small audience (which anyone can build), it’s about leveraging proximity and relevance.
If you leverage your small audience advantage, you need to be storing some cash to one side to invest into audience building down the road.
Whether that is for content production, lead generation campaigns or hiring team to manage it all, you need time for that and you’ll need to buy that time somehow.
So, whilst you leverage your small audience, bank a % of your profit for reinvesting. Lock it away. Don’t get tempted by the promises of virality, secret strategies and the like.
Bank it.
Then, 6 months down the line, you can ask yourself serious questions like…
How do we take this from X to Y?
What has worked that we could scale?
What is holding us back?
Pick off a couple of those challenges and use your reinvestment pot to take them on.
The dirty little secret
The dirty little secret of the online marketing world is this: It’s easier to make money selling growth than achieving growth.
Social media gurus give lots of good advice, but you’ll notice that they often produce “mini-me’s” other social media gurus. Many of their followers quit the original business idea and just become mini-hormozi’s or mini Vee’s. Why? It’s p*ss easy compared to building a coaching business or marketing legal services.
So whilst you can admire and appreciate the advice of gurus, remember that the easiest gig in town is selling social media growth. It’s something everyone wants.
Stop building the audience, start making money.
Leverage your small audience advantage.
That’s how you’ll win….
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