Recently, a private group coaching member from Maryland wrote to ask:
Moose, I am writing a book and would love to hear your take on how to establish a brand while simultaneously building an audience. How do I build my platform?”
– Julia, Baltimore, Maryland
Julia,
From our coaching conversations together, I know:
KNOWNS
- You are making sense of your experience by writing through your experience.
- The book idea was borne from “heart-to-heart” conversations with your friends. Afterwards, unprompted, they say:
You are so well-spoken! These stories have been life-changing! You should write a book.”
- You are writing these stories down because you want to scale your impact.
- You’ve already “come up with“ a target audience” for your book. (18-35 year old women)
- HOWEVER, when you spoke with someone outside your target audience and they LOVED IT! your story still resonated with her, you connected with someone from a completely different generation.
So, to answer your question, for your specific case:
“…how to establish a brand while simultaneously building an audience?”
SHORT ANSWER
– Build what’s “right under your nose”.
– Utilize the resources and the foundation ALREADY built.
– Let your audience compound organically!
– Connection-by-connection; Story-by-story.
– Digitize your audience using software like ConvertKit.
– BUT before you buy the software, grow into it!
– By starting with just a simple email group email in Outlook/Gmail.
– Until ultimately THEY (your audience members) pull the book out of you
LONG ANSWER:
- The 2 answers are:
ANSWER 1: Trust
Trust is the SINGULAR core requisite to building your audience.
The keystone your entire audience will be build around!
Everything else is secondary!
Trust is what will allow people to share with you.
- To laugh with you.
- To cry with you.
- To be moved by you.
As you build your audience, each action you do, MUST do one of the following:
- Respect their existing trust (they have in you.)
- Have their best interests at heart (In negotiating they call that idea, integrative agreements.)
- Grow their existing trust.
ANSWER 2: Start with the platform you’ve ALREADY built.
You are not looking “to build your platform”, you are looking to capture the platform you’ve ALREADY built.
A key distinction!
The former, “Building your platform”, implies building from scratch, whereas, the latter assumes you already have people in your platform.
In your case, Julia, you are the latter!
- You ALREADY have “readers” interested in your stories. [Think the friends who’ve already share the stories with.]
- You’ve ALREADY had a series of conversations.
- You ALREADY have people who want to hear from you.
- you’ve ALREADY done the hard part!
Fanning the smoldering flame of an audience—one conversation at a time!
Thus, you don’t have to build “from scratch!”
CONTINUE the spellbinding dialogue that drew them in.
the only thing you’re doing now—that’s different now from what you were doing—is just taking your spoken words and crystallizing them.
(Effectively, digitizing it! So you can reach out at scale.)
You simply have to CONTINUE to grow—ORGANICALLY!
Now here is the real kicker of this situation, when you know you’ve found something that fits for you:
You were going to have these conversations ANYWAY!
Because they are important to YOU and your lived experience.
Making your process of growing an audience, SUSTAINABLE—which is key!
They’ll COMPOUND over time. Just like a flywheel.
Before you know it, you’ll have an “audience”.
Congratulations, Julia! You’ve unlocked part of your personal flywheel!
Where people are now EXPECTING to hear about someone of the stories that you’ve talked about. (i.e Fans)
Now, you just need a way an easy way to consistently COMM-UUNI-CATE with them.
Let’s get tactical and talk about it.
The Tiered Approach (to Talking to Your Audience)
I recommend taking a tiered approach.
Tier 1: Email Group FREE & EASY
This is simple, it’s easy and doesn’t take a lot of your time.
Set up an email list/contact list in Outlook or Gmail.
Send out your first five emails.
The goal here is to just get writing.
To be in a consistent communication with your audience.
To find a rhythm that works for you and doesn’t feel like a lot of effort.
At this stage, you don’t worry about the software.
You worry about your audience!
Tier 2: ConvertKit PAID & EASY!
This is where the pain of writing and staying in touch has become extremely difficult.
Also, you might find yourself “mailing it in” (literally) because you are starting to get the same question again and again.
You’re saying to yourself:
“DAMN! not this question again! I wish I just had single email I could send to people when I get this question. That way, we can be further along in the conversation. Plus, it would save me some SERIOUS time.”
That’s where ConvertKit and the email automation flows that have come in.
Good news ConvertKit is really inexpensive for how much time they save you.
Plus, they can grow with you as you grow your audience.
For the price of two trips to Chipotle where you get Chicken Burrito bowl with Guac and chips on the side, you’ve got yourself all the infrastructure you need to build an audience.
$29/month is a no-brainer.
Tiered Approach Success Story: Maria Popova, The Marginalian
From a small 7-person email newsletter to a GARGANTUAN 7 Million Readers Per Month WEBSITE
Maria serves as this beautiful role model for creative freedom AND starting small and growing big.
First, by recognizing her two pain points:
“About eight years ago I found myself facing two parallel frustrations.
[1] I was growing increasing disillusioned, disenchanted, with my experience of higher education. It seemed so focused on rote memorization and standardized testing…The industrialized normalization of people. IT seemed so much more preoccupied with the accumulation of information rather than the cultivation of wisdom.”
[2] I was working four jobs at a time to pay my way through this education, one of them was at this little creative agency that consisted of 7 guys Really smart, driven, idealistic, creative people and me. What I noticed over time, even though there was an extraordinary sort of intellect and creative spirits comma that they were circulating for inspiration around the agency office emails all of that came from within their own industry period communication Arts, design something about that felt off to me! this idea of how can we hope to create and contribute to the world in new and meaningful ways if we only look to what’s been done inside of our own field for inspiration.
so I took these two challenges the academic and the creative, decided to start a little Friday email newsletter. That I would send to my seven friends at work and every Friday I would share with them five things I had learned this week that were really interesting and also felt important things that I had learned outside the classroom. It could be anything from a groundbreaking piece of Neuroscience to gorgeous Japanese woodcuts from the 12th century to Aristotle’s views on happiness and government the Richer and more diverse mental pool of resources those Lego bricks of the Mind, interesting are combinatorial ideas.
Second, by displaying her freedom of curiosity:
“I write about a very wide array of disciplines, eras, sensibilities because that I think about.”
“Anything from art and science to philosophy, psychology, history, design, you name it! The common denominator for me is this very simple question of:
Does this illuminate the question of how to live well?”
Third, with staggering results.
So, in any case, I kept doing this little newsletter which was in part a tool for that kind of, tutorial creativity at work and parked a record of just my own learning and personal growth.
What I noticed overtime what’s my seven friends at work forwarding those emails to friends of theirs. That were in wildy different disciplines and walks of life.
Their former college roommates their girlfriends or boyfriends, their parents. and I felt maybe there was something there that was helpful for people in their own journeys even though it was a record of my own that there’s something about this kind of cross-disciplinary indiscriminate curiosity that cut across boundary lines of background age occupation and just anything. I wanted to take this online and so in addition to my academic course load, and my four jobs, I took a very basic web design course and the newsletter became a website.
At the time I had no idea that the seven friends would one day become 7 million readers a month and this once tiny newsletter would be a website that is included in the library of congress’s archive of culturally valuable materials
So, in any case, I kept doing this little newsletter which was in part a tool for that kind of, tutorial creativity at work and parked a record of just my own learning and personal growth. What I noticed overtime what’s my seven friends at work forwarding those emails to friends of theirs. That were in wildy different disciplines and walks of life.
Maria’s small newsletter is the quintessential example of the power of a small newsletter.
Recap: The Step-By-Step Method
What are the actual STEP-BY-STEP things you can do to grow and move forward?
Step 1: Make a list of 2 “HELL YES” names.
These are the names that’ll you IMMEDIATELY think of when you ask yourself, “Who’ll sign up for my e-mail?“
You KNOW “Hell yes!” will be their response.
If you have more than two, great! Add them to the list and invite them.
Step 2: Ask the “HELL YES” list
Use the following script:
Hey {{First name}}, I really have enjoyed our conversations about {{the topic you are writing about}}! So much so, I’m writing a book about the topic. I’d love to keep you in the loop. Would you mind if I added you to a {{weekly/monthly/quarterly}} email where I shared with you {{some of my writing/ my thoughts/ my illustrations}} -{{Your First Name}}
Step 3: Create a simple email list.
This step is <72 hours-MAX.
Authors like Ryan Holiday and Maria Popova have started from small lists like this that have then compounded over time.
Step 4: When it hurts enough, graduate to email automation software.
Hopefully that helps!
Sincerely,
Moose