5 Mistakes You May Be Making When Building Your Audience

When it comes to building your audience, there are a lot of moving parts to get right. If you’re not growing as quickly as you’d like, you might be making one or more of these mistakes

Mistake #1 –

You try to please everyone and don’t focus on your target audience

When you’re building an audience, you want to have a targeted audience. It’s much more important to reach the people who actually want and need what you’re offering, than it is to build a huge list of anyone and everyone just to say you’ve got a big list.

The problem comes when you’re just starting out and are nervous about being yourself. Even when you know yourself and your audience, you don’t want to turn people away since your new. The truth is, you want people to self-select and turn away on their own.

Why? Because they’re never going to become your customers. And having them weed themselves out leaves you more time to focus on your core people.

So, how to you do that?

Easy…. You do it with your content!

Every piece of content you create, every product you develop, every word you say needs to consider your target audience. Did you create a customer avatar yet? If you did, focus everything you do on that person, and you’ll end up with a much more responsive audience than if you try to include everyone.

Mistake #2 –

You’re not tracking your numbers

I know I’ve talked about this before, but if you don’t know your numbers you don’t know what you’re missing.

Use the analytics features of your autoresponder software, as well as Google Analytics, to help you track the activities and actions of your audience based on your actions. When you find something that works, do more of that. When you know something is not working very well, do less or none of it.

If you don’t track the numbers, you'll never really know what's going on in your business.

create your content with repurposing in mind

Mistake #3 –

You’re making everything harder than it has to be

I’m always in awe of people who can simplify and just get stuff done. That’s not me. I’m the one who wants to do everything at once, build all these complex funnels and make everything harder than it has to be.

Don’t be like me!

The truth is, you can build an amazing business with a landing page, an autoresponder, and good content. And if you have to do your videos on your smartphone camera, then do it. As long as you start, use what you have, and improve as you go. Easy, right?

Mistake #4 –

You don’t create enough content

One of your most important jobs when building an audience is keeping up with the amount of content that you need. Start out creating all content with the idea that you’re going to repurpose it to use in other ways. If you create a how-to blog post, create a video to go with it. If you create a video first, transcribe it so that you can create other forms of content with it.

You can never really have enough content. Create a content strategy so that you always know what’s coming up in terms of products and promotions. If you have to, hire writers, graphics creators, and use done-for-you content in order to keep up. Because one of the worst things that can happen is you run out of content, and have no idea what to do next.

Mistake #5 –

You don’t communicate with your audience enough

When you start building your audience, get in the habit of contacting them regularly. It’s way too easy to fall into the trap of not contacting them because you ‘don’t want to annoy them.’

The truth is, you’re more likely to annoy them if they’ve signed up to get regular emails from you, and you don’t deliver. Then when you finally do get around to it, you’ll get a ton of unsubscribes because they’ll have forgotten all about you.

The more often you contact your audience and communicate with them in an email, on social media, via your blog and other methods, the better. Sure, some people may be mad to get two emails from you in a day. But that percentage will be small compared to the part of your audience that is waiting for your messages.

Create an email plan as part of your content strategy and you’ll always have things to mail. Use a tool like this Digital Marketer’s Planner to keep all your content and promotions organized.

Bonus Tip: Mistake #6 –

You wait to start monetizing

Even if you don’t have your own product yet while you are audience building, you can still monetize the content that you create based on your niche - sooner rather than later. In fact, one of my mentors teaches that you should learn how to sell other people’s products first, before you ever try to you’re your own.

Look at affiliate networks to find excellent products and services that your audience will enjoy using, and promote these to them. They’ll like being told what’s awesome and you’ll get a commission. And believe me, as someone who’s been doing affiliate marketing for 20 years, I still get a rush every morning when I see commission notices in my email.

Final Thoughts

Building a targeted audience doesn’t have to be hard. But it does take knowing your audience, knowing what works, and providing plenty of content for them to consume. Don’t let these common mistakes stop you from building your audience and creating your own success.

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Comments

Kathryn Maclean says

January 21, 2018 at 1:24 pm

Hi Ruth,
Great post. I think I have made all 5 mistakes but have learned from it.
Focus on your target audience with your content. Learned who they are.
Track your numbers with analytics on autoresponder software and Google.
I build landpages. content and have a great autoresponder.
Use my smartphone’s camera. I re-purpose content to video and transcribe it
to pictures for social media.
Contact audience, building an email list social media in my blog comments.
Monetizing with affiliate networks and starting my own services and products.
PS Checked out your postgopher
- ruth says
  
  January 22, 2018 at 10:36 am
  
  Thanks Kathryn! Great to see you here! You are doing amazing things with your blog these days! I don’t mind saying that I watch and learn from what you’re doing over there. :) What do you think of the post gopher?
Donna Merrill says

January 22, 2018 at 4:08 pm

Hi Ruth,

I think I made most of these mistakes when I started years back. Mistake of not making money asap was a huge one. I had to get over myself as well as learning the proper way to market. It took a while, but hey, as long as we can learn from our mistakes, we never go back.

-Donna
- ruth says
  
  February 2, 2018 at 11:48 am
  
  Hi Donna,
  
  For a lot of us, I think selling doesn’t come naturally and we don’t want to look like ‘snake oil salesmen’ so we don’t try to sell. And it’s so self-defeating isn’t it? Good that you learned from your mistakes and are so successful now! :)