Building An Audience to Buy From You

Building an audience is the single best thing you can do for your career as an athlete, author, speaker or even business owner. It’s also one of the hardest. You have to be good at your craft as well as good behind the scenes in getting people to join your audience.

So, of course, you have to be resilient.  But more importantly, you have to do the long, slow, painstaking work of establishing a brand, a community, and a marketing plan.

The skills involved in accomplishing this other task are very similar to the twin requirements for an author not only to write a great book but also to market that book to an increasingly overwhelmed, distracted, and shrinking reading public.  You have to figure out what the key elements of your message are, decide who should hear them, and plan how to reach those people in ways that are sufficiently compelling.

We have found that the single most powerful form of communication to an audience is through: your email list.

In the case of the speaker or author, it’s absolutely essential to have a group of like-minded people who talk you up and put you forward as a great author or keynoter in one venue after another. 

They’re going to be animated by the ideas you share and that they’re keen on as well, but they also have to have a strong sense that you’re the best spokesperson for those ideas.  When the opportunity comes, then, they’ll be the ones who say, “Hire Joe, because he understands the debate about X better than anyone.”  Or perhaps, “Hire Jane because she gets us, our particular interests, better than anyone.”

Too many creators hope for a viral tweet or video or blog post that will put their name in front of the public and make the rest easy. Instead of waiting, you can be creating and building your audience.

But the deeper reason not to count on the viral is the very nature of that sort of publicity itself.  What do you recall about the last viral tweet, video, or post you saw? Boom, roasted. The truth is that people move on from the viral as fast as they glom on to it, and that’s not helpful to you.

What you want is sustained attention, not very occasional bursts of interest.  That’s a much slower, more deliberate process, which involves starting an authentic conversation with a public that cares about the same thing that you do, and that you (and that slice of the public) are willing to engage in for a long, long time.

Here’s a sample from our CG Sports Publishing Client, Dudley Duncan!