(Waving Arms) Hey over here! Look at me! Check out this cool thing I made!
That’s how you get people’s attention face to face in the real world. And like those merchants at the mall trying to get you to try their free samples, it can be very awkward and painful.
Online it seems so hard to get anyone to even see your stuff. You are at the mercy of the algorithms of Google and Facebook. What is a person to do? I’ve got some thoughts and a free worksheet to help you get your customer’s attention.
I said in the intro to this series that “If you build it they will come.” is BS, and anyone who has started a blog, YouTube channel, podcast, or made a cool new product knows this is true. It is very, very hard to get attention online.
And you don’t just do it once. You have to keep getting people’s attention and make them interested enough to go check out what you are doing.
To do this, you need to get your message in front of an audience. A following. A tribe. A customer base. Whatever term connects with you.
There are a lot of ways to do this, but a core distinction is
Who’s audience it is. Yours or someone else’s?
Many of the ambitious people I help in my speeches and mentoring say they will build their own audience. They are going to post to social media and get people to come to their page and buy their product.
The truth is that building an audience for yourself or your product is hard. It takes a lot of time.
Let’s take YouTube for example. My research has shown that getting your first 1000 subscribers generally seems to take about a year. A year! Can you go that long with out having anyone look at your product? Is that how long you thought it was going to take to start really building your business?
On top of that, 1000 subs isn’t that big. It does though seem to be a tipping point. I recently watched a video by a woman who took 2 years to get to 1000. Then she wen’t from 1000 to 50,000 in one more year.
The other way to get in front of an audience is the buy or earn your way in front of someone else’s audience. Which we’ll talk about in a minute.
First, let’s talk about building an audience. I’d also suggest reviewing my video Fast, Cheap, Good – Pick two because it is very relevant here.
Here are 3 tips for building an audience.
- Pick a channel
- Make content
- Syndicate to other channels.
Let’s go a little deeper here.
First, pick a channel. You needed to create awesome, deep, valuable content. If you think you are going to throw up random crap and build an audience, you are mistaken. You’ve got to make stuff that is valuable all by itself to get people to pay attention and really join your tribe.
For this reason you need to pick a way of delivering your content that you are most comfortable with.
In general this is going to be in one of three formats:
- Written Words
- Spoken Words
- Performed Words
Everything starts as written words.
At least by people of the highest quality with whom you are competing. You may think top YouTubers, for example, are just winging it. But the reality is they generally have a script, they just make it look easy.
Crafting your content in written form is the beginning.
But it can also be the end. Then you can distribute your written content in a number of ways. Blogs being the online format you may think of first, but there are still newspapers, magazines and books in the real world.
You could take those high quality words and speak them. Either live when you give a speech or do a live broadcast or stream. Or you can record them and distribute them through audio media. Online that is a podcast, and in the real world that’s radio.
Lastly, you can perform your words including body language and movement. This is done on video in some form, and online that is generally YouTube. Offline it can be TV.
I listed these in the order of ease of production, not ease of creation. It take 1x time to write something. Then 2-3x that for audio recording and editing. Then 4x-5x that for video recording and editing.
Now you understand how hard it can be to create one piece of attention grabbing, audience building content. Which brings us to step 2.
Consistently develop and release content for your channel.
You have to do all that on a regular basis. Audiences are looking for a long term commitment, just like you are. You want those 1000 True Fans that will buy everything you are selling. To do that you have to consistently – meaning on a regular basis – release new stuff that gives them value.
Which makes you think about what medium you want to use. If you have the knowledge base, you could probably put out a new blog post every day of the week. But recording and editing high quality audio every day would be a challenge. Just doing high quality video once a week is a serious challenge.
Now you understand how hard it can be to build an audience. But once you do, you can much more easily get people’s attention. You are also building Desire and Trust during the whole process, which is the next step in the Money Flow Framework and we’ll be talking about how do it next week.
I told you to pick a primary channel to create content for. But once you do, you can develop a system to use it in multiple places. Which is step 3.
Syndicate as much as you can.
You are always starting with written content. That written content can be used on Social Networks to get attention and point people back to the core piece of content. You can quote it on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. You can create quote images for Instagram.
If you make a video, you can strip out the audio and make a podcast as well. Or use small clips from the video for Instagram and Facebook stories.
You just need to develop a system for doing this so that it is automated and doesn’t take a lot of your time and effort to execute.
That is a very simplified, high level view of how to build an audience “organically” through content creation. You should now see how valuable an audience is given, how long it takes to build one.
The other option is to side step all of that and let someone else do it. Find people who already have an audience and earn your way in front of them.
You have to earn your way there and in a extremely simplified explanation, there are two ways to do that. Doing something of interest to their audience, or buy the attention.
Being interesting is a whole other video. But here’s a question to ask yourself if you are wondering how to do it. “Why would Joe Rogan want ME on his show?” Substitute the top podcaster in your niche for Joe.
Think long and hard on that.
The other way is to buy a place in front of someone else’s audience. Maybe that’s Google’s audience for search, Facebook’s social network audience, an Instagram star’s 10,000 followers, or just the people that read your local newspaper.
Just realize the bigger the audience, the bigger the cost.
And once you get there, make sure you’ve got the right message and the right call to action.
Once you have an attention opportunity, you need to know what you are going to say. What is your message? What are you trying to do for those people.
And once you say your message, you need to be very very clear what you want them to do next. What is your Call to Action? What is the one thing you want people to do next.
Generally this is to send them somewhere you can start building their desire and trust.
Which is the subject of the next episode in the DFL Money Flow Framework. Click that bell below to make sure you are notified as soon as the Desire and Trust video comes out.
Question of the Day: How do you get your audience’s attention?
