There are multiple ways to build an audience, and you can use more than one.
Step 1. Find your point of view.
Some people are afraid to say what they think because they don’t want to alienate potential customers who have a different (especially opposite) point of view.
However, not everyone will be your customer, and having a strong point of view will attract people who agree with you or are interested in it, and that will help you get started.
Find the root of what you’re passionate about. Talk to your parents and your childhood friends about what you were interested in and what they remember about you.
Read “Building a StoryBrand” by Donald Miller to learn more about how to tell stories and share your point of view to attract customers.
Step 2. Pick your medium
Once you know what you want to say, you need to figure out how to say it. Some people are comfortable with talking so they can do audio shows like podcasts (or radio). Other people are comfortable with video too so they can make videos, either short or long. Other people are more comfortable writing so they can do blogs and articles and books (short or long).
Videos of you talking or audio voiceover an image or video that is not you:
- YouTube
- Vimeo
- Nerdeon
Audio-only:
- Apple Podcasts
- Google Play Music
Writing (long):
- Substack
- Medium
Writing (short):
- Bluesky
- Twitter/X
Images and photos:
Step 3. Talk to your audience
Make a calendar with daily and weekly routines to create and share your content in your chosen medium.
This is a step in the plan but it’s really a routine. Once you have some content and you proceed to the next steps, you don’t stop doing this one. Continue to talk to your audience by creating more content for as long as you want to have an audience.
Eventually there will be opportunities to talk to the same or adjacent audience in a different medium, going back to step 2. For example if you’re successful building an audience for your writing, at some point someone might want to interview you and you can share the link to that video (in the other creator’s channel) with your audience and possibly attract new audience members from the other creator’s video channel to your writing channel.
Step 4. Gather insights from the audience
When you are regularly producing and disseminating content, people will watch or listen or read and some of them will comment. Get into conversations there and invite them to your community site for additional conversation. That’s where you learn what’s bothering them, what are the unsolved problems, and what are the unmet needs.
Community sites:
- Discord
- Facebook Group
- Create your own
Also, track how many views or listens each of your videos or writing or podcasts attract so you can start to understand what your audience is interested in. You can do some more of that but don’t do only that because then you might miss other opportunities — so even while doing more of something that works, always try new things to find out what else might be very popular.
Step 5. Provide value before you sell
You’re already providing some value with the content that attracted your audience. Do something a little bit more for them, such as:
- Do a survey about a topic and then publish the results
- Create a cheatsheet for something
- Create a brief free course about something
- Find a guest speaker or writer that your audience is interested in also hearing or seeing, and during the interview or guest piece ask them to include something about your audience or incorporate a mention of a very popular content piece you did in the past and talk about it