How Do I Build a Bigger Audience Around My Content?

by Tinu

I just read a com­ment on Google+ in response to some great advice Google+ John Jantsch shared from his blog.

The gist of it was that the idea that the results John gets on plat­forms like Google+ only applies to peo­ple with large audi­ences already, like Tom Ander­son, John, Guy Kawasaki, etc.

To which my response is always — how do you think those peo­ple got those audi­ences, really? They weren’t born with mil­lions of read­ers. Some­one had to do some work, and the result is that the core audi­ence will often fol­low them from plat­form to plat­form, and the momen­tum they once started will con­tinue to build the audi­ence they want.

Here’s the exact response:

If it’s quiet in G+ville, I’d have more dis­cus­sions, and add more peo­ple from dis­cus­sions. John and peo­ple like him have built higher fol­lower counts because they have dif­fer­ent habits — they weren’t always popular.

And one of the things peo­ple who become pop­u­lar in one of these sys­tems do is con­stant dis­cov­ery and engage­ment with new and diverse groups of peo­ple — in other words, they con­tinue to do what the rest of us don’t after the toy is no longer new and shiny.

In many years of teach­ing peo­ple in small busi­nesses how to engage with peo­ple, regard­less of the plat­form, that’s the one thing that remains con­stant. Study these folks you named — at some point some­one did the hard work of find­ing new peo­ple and touch­ing them at the points that matter.

After a while, you may not have as much time to engage, but it begins to build on its own momen­tum after a while. Then you just have to make sure your one-to-many con­tent still speaks to the widest swatch of your audience.

Go pick up one of John’s books on this, or at least read his blog… it really isn’t rocket sci­ence, you can have that audi­ence. It’s just a mat­ter of how hard, and for how long you’re will­ing to work for it, or find some­one who will.

Which begs the ques­tion — what work is that? What other spe­cific things do they do that we aren’t, and how can we all have those audiences?

What extra steps do they take that we don’t?

I’ll be explor­ing answers to those ques­tions on an on-going basis. Stay tuned.