5 Ways to Grow your Audience Faster
There are a lot of reasons why you might want to grow your audience. Maybe you have an online business and you're trying to grow your customer base, maybe you want to become an influencer, or maybe you just have something important that you want to share with the world.
However, growing your audience online can be tough! There's a lot of competition and noise out there, as well as a lot of different people who are also trying to grow their followers.
So how can you stand out and start growing your audience more quickly?
When I started trying to grow my audience, I worked at it for MANY months. My strategy was essentially posting consistently on social media… and it worked! BUT, when I looked at the numbers, I saw that they were growing, but they were growing so slowly that it was going to take me years before my audience would be big enough for me to be able to really have a substantial influence or to be able to generate enough customers for my business. So, I knew that something had to change.
In today’s blog, I'm going to share five different ways that you can grow your audience more quickly so that you can get out of that slow one-follower-at-a-time growth and start hitting your goals!
Let’s get started!
1. Be a guest on other people’s platforms
The very first way to grow your audience faster is to be a guest on other people's platforms. What do I mean by that? You could be a guest on a podcast or write as a guest on someone else's blog. Now, even if you aren't a podcaster or a blogger yourself, the fact is that people who have podcasts or blogs are building audiences of their own, and those people are also on Instagram, YouTube, or wherever you are trying to grow your fanbase. So if you are a guest on someone else's show, website, or social media, then you get to access a large number of people all at once!
To become a guest on someone else's platform, there are two things that you need to do:
Identify people who you might want to be guests with.
Find podcasts that your audience listens to, blogs that your audience reads, or find other influencers that your audience follows.
Reach out to those people and find out if they are interested or open to having guests.
Now, if it’s a podcast or a website, they probably regularly have people reach out to them about this sort of request and they will already have a policy and so it's really just a numbers game. You have to ask a lot of websites or accounts before you find one that will be the right fit for you and will say yes. But on the other hand, if it is a social media account, most people have guests occasionally, but it’s often not as a very regular thing, so they might not already have a policy about it.
One other thing to keep in mind is that the number one deciding factor beyond existing policies that will determine whether or not someone will say yes to you really is the QUALITY of your content which matters more than the number of followers that you have.
So for example, if someone wanted to come on my YouTube channel and be a guest or wanted to do some sort of collaboration with me, I really wouldn't care how many YouTube subscribers they had or followers on social media. I would look at their videos and see how good they were and how good of a fit their content is for my audience. And if their videos are amazing and they're a great fit, then I would say yes.
2. Collaborate with other people.
The next way that you can grow your audience faster is by doing collaborations with other people.
Now, doing collaborations has ALL of the same advantages as the first example in that you are able to reach a broader potential audience than if you're just posting on your own account — and there are LOTS of different ways that you can work with other influencers or other brands such as:
Be a guest on someone's show or have them be a guest on your show or account.
Do a giveaway with someone else who has a similar audience to you.
Create content on a similar topic and reference each other.
Do a project with another influencer such as a program or photoshoot and tag each other on social media.
3. Do a giveaway.
The third way to grow your audience faster is with giveaways. Now, you can do these giveaways as collaborations as I already mentioned, but you can also grow your audience quickly with giveaways that you would do on your own.
When you do giveaways, it is VERY important that you do them strategically. You have to make sure that you are giving away something that will really appeal to the followers you are trying to attract because if you give away something too generic, even if it's something really awesome, then you will have all sorts of people following you who aren't really interested in your content which actually decreases the engagement on your account — which can hurt your growth over time.
There are some places online where you can promote giveaways to a very broad audience and you can get a lot of followers or a lot of email subscribers doing this. But like I just mentioned, these followers will not necessarily be interested in your content.
So for example, if you were doing a giveaway on your Instagram account to grow your Instagram following and one of the requirements for entering the giveaway was to follow you on Instagram, one of the main ways you might want to promote this giveaway is just to use hashtags that the followers you want would be following plus giveaway-related hashtags.
4. Use trends.
The fourth way you can grow your audience faster is by using trends. But first, you need to find trends.
We all know what trends are; they’re things that become particularly popular at a particular time, so a bunch of people are interested in them all at once. Now, sometimes it's something random that just happens out of the blue like fidget spinners. But on the other hand, sometimes trends can be really predictable. Like every year, Christmas tends to trend in the month of December. So when you're looking for trends, it's much easier to look for those “predictable” trends for things that happen every single year at a certain time.
You can grow your audience more quickly using trends because if you talk about those trending topics when they're trending, then you can get found more easily on social media. You’ll use hashtags that relate to the trends or people will be watching lots of videos about that particular topic and then they'll find your video in their “suggestions.”
So if you want to take advantage of trends for growing your audience, then the first thing I would recommend is that you start with those predictable trends — those trends that happen every single year, like holidays or events, specifically industry-specific events. This could also be when a new season is starting and looking at things that people are consistently into in certain seasons.
So for example, in the summer, people are interested in vacationing and swimming, doing things in the sun, and doing outdoor activities. And so they're talking about those things more in the summertime.
In the fall, people are really interested in warm drinks, doing cozy things, wearing comfy sweaters and boots, and things like that. So you need to think about what your target audience is interested in at different times of the year in different seasons.
5. Master the algorithm.
Mastering the algorithm is really the MOST important thing that you can do if you want to grow your audience faster. If you don't do any of the other things, at least DO THIS!
Whatever platform you're trying to grow your audience on, you need to learn how the algorithm works and you need to learn how it works better than most people. Because if you want to rise above the competition, then you need to know what you need to do on that platform in order to get your content suggested. This is because, on most platforms, the number one way that people grow organically is when the algorithm of that platform suggests their content to new people.
If you're waiting for people to just stumble across your content or to find your content in a search, then you're going to have to work REALLY hard for every view, like or follower that you get. BUT if you can work with the algorithm and get it to actually promote your content for you, then your work will be a lot easier.
That’s how I've managed to grow my audience on YouTube — by studying the algorithm for months and months! I put SO many hours into just studying how the algorithm works, not necessarily because the algorithm was so complicated that it took me that much time to learn everything about it, but because there's not that much information about the deeper workings of the algorithm.
Now, you might be wondering — how do you master the algorithm?
To learn the deeper secrets, you really have to study the content. You have to see what other people are posting and how it is performing. And you have to study this content for a while to start noticing trends in how the content performs.
So for example, you could study a lot of different YouTube videos and track which lengths of videos are performing best on average. Or you could look at what different people are doing in the introductions of videos that are doing really well.
In this case, you might notice that people are often teasing content that will come later on in the video. And since we know, because you told us that one of the most important factors for ranking well with the algorithm is your watch-timer or view duration, then we can specifically look for things that might be increasing view duration.
So what exactly are successful YouTubers doing that are causing people to watch their videos for longer? One of the biggest things you can do is really just make interesting videos that keep people watching. I'm not just talking about YouTube. This works on any social media platform that has an algorithm that is suggesting content.
6. Bonus tip! Look for strategies that will give you disproportionate gains.
I'm including this as a bonus tip, and not as one of the main tips because it is admittedly a little bit vague — and that is to look for strategies for growing your audience that will give you disproportionate gains.
What do I mean by this?
I'm basically saying, look for good opportunities to grow your audience. For example:
Underpriced advertising.
Now, in general, I wouldn't recommend using paid advertising to grow your audience. However, there are times when it can work REALLY well, especially if you are running some sort of promotion for your business, or you're selling some sort of product. You might use paid advertising for that promotion and in the process, you can grow your audience really well because people are finding out about your brand for the first time. This is just one example, as there are plenty of other ways that you can get underpriced advertising by advertising in places that aren't the most popular places to advertise. This can be a cheap way to grow your audience quickly.
Use Pinterest.
Many bloggers use Pinterest to get a lot of traffic for their website. Whether you're a blogger or not, getting traffic to your website can help more people discover you, which can help to grow your audience.
Take advantage of new social media platforms.
Whenever a new social media platform comes out and starts to gain popularity, there will be a number of people who have downloaded the app and started to use it, but there are not that many creators on the platform yet. So, if you can get in early, then you can grow your audience on that platform relatively easily and quickly, and use that to leverage your audience growth on whichever platform you are actually interested in growing your audience on.
So there you have it! If you’re looking for new ways to increase the size of your audience online, whether it’s because you want to grow your customer base, become an influencer, or share an important message, then be sure to use these five (plus a bonus) tips to grow your audience faster!
Here’s to your success!
join 600+ entrepreneurs inside startup society!
As a Startup Society member, you're shown exactly what to do to grow your business and HOW to do it. You get access to live networking and mastermind events as well as an online community with coach feedback and peer support. Click below to learn more about how to join the #1 online program for action-taking entrepreneurs today!
