Multiplying the Value of Your Audience Every Month

And they don’t need to spend months getting to know you before they buy. 

I see lots of businesses “churn and burn” audience members. They spend money on ads, sell to those leads, and then spend more on ads to find more leads. 

BIG MISTAKE. 

Your audience can buy multiple products from you, refer other audience members, and make it easier for you to sell newer leads.

And if you’re not spending time expanding your funnel, making your work more viral, and building social proof, then you are fumbling your audience.

Becoming viral isn’t about recording a hilarious video that gets shared around the world. Just create something good enough that groups feel internally compelled to share it within their particular niche. 

Then, as you build quality content and products that people want to share… accelerate this with incentives. Have fun contests, give bonuses to evangelists, and encourage people to be enthusiastic about your work by privately interacting with them. 

Treasure each piece of positive feedback. The reviews, testimonials, case studies, client results, and audience figures… should all be shared shamelessly. 

Your newsletter is for broadcasting enough about yourself and what you can do to naturally pre-sold your audience on how wonderful it would be to work with you. 

Do this, and you no longer need a huge audience. Instead, you've got a primed audience. 

But Before That, Isolate Your Core Value-Add

The idea of creating a “personal brand” is icky to some people because it sounds so self-indulgent. Yes, many brands focus on exaggerated personality traits and a firehose of entertaining content. But you don’t have to do that. Make it about your core value-add, and only reveal the parts of yourself that demonstrate why what you do works. 

One of the simplest paths you could follow as a freelancer is to go…

1. Start a service business

2. Create SOPs for for yourself

3. Turn those SOPs into digital products

Look at me, for instance. My true value add is in team building and process management. Creating departments for early-stage companies, early seeds of them. It's a mix between strategy and ops. There are tons of opportunities for me to follow the process I outlined above.

And it doesn’t need to be unique. If you execute well and your audience sees that, they will trust you. It doesn’t have to be a viral hit; it has to engage the people who already thought you could help them.

You’re delivering a result. Most grocery stores aren’t differentiated… they fulfill a need and are located in the right place. At the low end, this is what you need to be: reliable and competent. 

This is good for understanding the true value of skills in the market. If you want to move from lifestyle business to business owner, developing this core value-add is the first step to developing something that may even require a team one day. 

Extend your funnel and capture more value

Now, it’s time to add more offers to your funnel. This could mean products or something a bit more involved, like coaching. 

Coaching offers are great because they start you on the path of selling yourself passively. It’s a link in your bio that you market and deliver on, and it feels more like a product than an ongoing service. 

But it’s limited. Everyone hits a saturation point on consultancy hours in a month. The goal is to add to the consistent part of your income, like a subscription offer or a retainer client. These coaching calls are a great way to sell into those. 

That’s all great, but the sooner you divest yourself of your time from your business, the sooner you turn it into a true business that's built right. This is where products come in. 

Products are just lines of revenue that are not dependent on our time. 

Adding products to your funnel is a must for the simple reason that it allows you to continually sell to the same leads for years. 

This could be anything. A workflow, Chat-GPT prompts, an over-the-shoulder recording of you working, or a list of extra leads that won’t work for you. 

Building products is a muscle. I often tell people to just give away the first few products as lead magnets to build their audience. Then, if these are effective enough, put a price on them! 

There are millions of options for low-level products at the top of your funnel that have value and build basic trust. Your audience will tell you what they like based on what they buy and what works for them. 

That's a marketing funnel. We'd be dumb not to spend time doing that. But why don't we do it? 

As small business owners, we become so dependent on our salesmanship through networking, direct sales, and job applications that if we were smart, we'd spend a third of the time marketing our business by building in products since that becomes time-independent.

From Lifestyle Business to Something Bigger

Your business plan (and your ability to execute it) will determine its progress over the next few years. 

Soon, we’ll see more people become small- to mid-sized versions of Gary Vee, Paris Hilton, or Mr. Beast. They’re taking that content creator model and running smaller versions focused on audience niches. 

Every time I scroll through Twitter, I find one of these. Like Matt Gray. You probably haven’t heard of him… which is sort of the point. Scrolling through his page makes it abundantly clear how many different funnel options are available here. He’s got a high-end coaching offer of almost $2k an hour and then a course with a price that isn’t revealed until the sales call. 

His offering targets people who want to build companies with teams, which isn’t everyone. As you consume his content, you’re either more or less attracted to him and his work. That’s the nature of selling here, and it shows how much space there is for different offers to the same audience as well as serving a different audience. 

Most of us will only ever build lifestyle businesses. Some of us will be effective enough to make small businesses, and very few of us will be able to be like Mr. Beast and create true behemoths. 

If you have the motivation to move beyond where you are today, which many direct-employed people are, you always have to be thinking about scaling your audience.Every day is a challenge, and ultimately, our decision-making keeps us in business. Sharpening the focus of your execution and concentrating on building and retaining audiences that we can support many times with products is key to building a scaleable empire. Appreciate your daily decisions and the execution you moving you forward. Until next time entrepreneurs, Grady