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A Simple + Soulful Framework for Audience Growth

A Simple + Soulful Framework for Audience Growth

“The best content in the world won’t drive revenue if nobody sees it.”

~ Anonymous

Growing your audience is essential to the long-term sustainability of your business. Given that only a small percentage of your audience will ever buy from you, if you don’t continue to grow your audience over time, you will reach a point where you’re no longer able to generate revenue. If you are at a stage where you’re yet to even start selling your products or services, then growing your audience is an essential step to achieving that all important first sale.

Of course, with a simple Google search, you’ll find a gazillion different ways to grow your audience, many of which involve doing everything you can to stand out from the crowd and attract your ideal client. From having the perfect brand, to implementing fancy and complex sales funnels with expertly designed squeeze pages, along with irresistible freebies and opt-ins, plus suggestions that you spend the bulk of your business day posting endlessly on social media.

As you might have guessed it, I advocate a different approach.

In this post I share with you the exact framework I use to grow my audience from a place of genuine service.

Depending on how long you’ve been following my work, you may well have heard me talk about the importance of content creation for business growth. In this post I want to go deep into how exactly I do this and share with you the 3 key elements my framework includes that has, this year, been having a huge impact on my audience growth as well as the level of interaction on my content, at the same time as feeling fun, fulfilling and easy to implement.

These 3 elements are CREATE – REPURPOSE – PROMOTE. Allow me to talk you though each of these in more detail.

Create

It would be so easy to take up the mantle of content creation and end up overwhelming yourself or getting burned out. If we listen to conventional advice on the topic, the amount of content we should be creating on a daily basis feels not only punishing but frankly unsustainable for many busy business owners.

What I do, and what I recommend you do, is get into a rhythm of creating just 1 or 2 new pieces of content a week. My two new pieces of content are my weekly Soulful Strategies e-letter (usually created and sent on Mondays) and a weekly video (created and shared on my Facebook page on Thursdays). If you’re currently not creating content consistently then I highly recommend that you start with just one new piece of content and work to get consistent with that before attempting to bring in a second. I didn’t start creating my weekly videos until I was well into a consistent rhythm of sending out my weekly letters. If you’re serious about growing your business, then one piece of content a week should be pretty achievable.

Now with these two new pieces of content I have a content schedule that sees me sharing content on a daily basis. So how do I create all that content from just two original pieces? Read on to find out.

Repurpose

Repurposing content is one of those secrets that people either don’t know about or overlook the importance of. You may have heard me mention before how few people are seeing the content you create. If you send a newsletter, you’re lucky if even a quarter of your list are opening your emails. If you post on your Facebook business page you’re lucky if even 10% of your followers see the post. With stats like these, it’s absolutely essential that you get better at making your content visible (or you’re in danger of completely wasting your time). Repurposing is a key element to this.

In my business, I take the content I write for my weekly letters and 2 weeks after they go out as an email, I repurpose them into a blog post (just like this one!). All this usually takes is a few tweaks to the copy to make it read as a blog and the creation of a branded graphic to accompany the post. After publishing on my blog, I then share a link to it on my Facebook page and a few weeks after that I tweak the content again (usually to shorten it by a few hundred words) and re-publish it as a text post on my Facebook page.

So you see, from just one initial piece of content I now have 4 pieces (newsletter, blog post, linked post on FB and an FB text post) with nothing more than a few tweaks to the copy along the way. What this does essentially is increase the visibility of my content across my audience. This alone, however, is not enough to grow your audience. For that read on for the third element.

Promote

To make my content even more visible, I have implemented a FB advertising strategy to promote my content. Hat tip here to George Kao’s incredible FB Marketing Course. The strategy in a nutshell is to advertise my free content (mainly the repurposed text posts I mentioned earlier and my weekly FB Lives) to my warm audience. Warm meaning people who have visited my website, signed up for my updates or engaged with my FB page. I’m not selling anything with these “adverts” I’m simply making sure that more than the usual 10% of my audience see what I’ve created for them. As well as this, I advertise the exact same content to a cool audience. By cool, I mean an audience I have created based on the demographics and interests of my target audience.

With just €100 a month, I create 3 content promotions a week and reach hundreds more people than I would otherwise.

The results

Since embarking on this strategy the results have been amazing. More subscribers, more sales, more likes, more engagement, more personal messages from people thanking me for my content and telling me how useful they are finding it.

It’s been wonderful and as a result I’m excited to share this strategy with you. Content creation is definitely a core part of my day-to-day activities in my business, but with this strategy it doesn’t feel arduous or pointless, by streamlining what I create and making sure that I spend adequate time on the sharing/promotion of my content is allowing me to reach (and support) more people than ever and the positive feedback this brings works wonders for motivation.

When you hear from people that they appreciate what you are creating, it’s far easier to stick to your content creation schedule than when you publish to crickets and wonder if anyone is even reading it.

Kinder Content Marketing Workshop

If you want to go deeper into my content marketing strategy, you may want to consider purchasing the recording of the 3-part Kinder Content Marketing Workshop I ran earlier in 2021. To get all the details and immediate access to the recordings and workbooks head here or click the image below.

Doing The “Edge Work” in Your Business

Doing The “Edge Work” in Your Business

“He who is not everyday conquering some fear has not learned the secret of life.”

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

In this post I talk about the importance of being courageous in your business and share a few ideas on how you might lean into your edge with your work.

Like all good messages from the Universe, a few things have happened in my business recently that have led me to realise that I’ve been playing it safe in my business (and life) lately and helped me to see how that isn’t serving my personal or professional growth.

The first was a coaching session I had with one of my clients which resulted in her taking on a personal “10 Courageous Acts Challenge” in July. I felt inspired to join her and wrote out my own list of courageous acts to be completed in July.

As is often the way, my intention to be more courageous, was immediately met by an opportunity to be so. My favourite business mentor, George Kao, asked me if he could interview me for his Facebook business page and Youtube channel. Of course I said yes and you can watch the recording of it here. Even though I’ve been interviewed before and have, myself, interviewed many people, I definitely noticed the nerves before this one, which felt good once I reminded myself that “Fear is excitement without breath” (Robert Heller)

The third thing was reading a blog post by another client of mine, in which she talks about the importance of edge work and says this:“Edge work is some of the hardest work you will have to do. It’ll require you to go right the edge of your comfort zone. It’ll push you beyond that comfy place in incremental little baby steps and in big, bold, powerful moves, time and time and time again.”

As a coach, I’ve always been about the edge work. I’ve known for the longest time that the best experience we can have of being alive comes when we’re prepared to venture beyond the edges of our comfort zone.

Building and growing a business is a pursuit rife with opportunities for edge work and our willingness to be courageous is instrumental in our business success. If you want to truly succeed in business, you have to be willing to face your fears, take risks and step into the unknown. Failure to do so will undoubtedly impact your ability to grow a business that is not only impactful but also sustainable over the long term.

So what kind of fears am I talking about? Allow me to share a couple that I see come up on a regular basis.

  • Being visible online.
  • Reaching out and 1:1 making connections.
  • Marketing your products and services widely and consistently.
  • Being honest and direct with clients.
  • Setting and maintaining boundaries.

When we avoid facing our fears in business the net result tends to be that we keep ourselves and our work hidden, which obviously impacts our reach and our bottom line and means that we enjoy working in our business far less (I mean who genuinely feels good when they’re in hiding!?)

I’d love you to consider where in your business you are playing it safe and how you might lean into your edge there. Where are you yearning to do more of but stop yourself short because of fear. Perhaps it’s one of the below.

  • Reaching out to people you admire in your field and asking them if you can interview them.
  • Making yourself more visible online by using Facebook Live, Instagram stories, videos or podcasting.
  • Setting up 1:1 calls with ideal clients from within your audience.
  • Truly sharing your opinion and point of view in your content and marketing, regardless of the fact that it may turn some people off.
  • Getting on stage and speaking about the incredible work you do in the world.
  • Moving beyond 1:1 and into group work.

There are so many other things I could list here but the truth is your edge is personal to you. What you might find challenging someone else wouldn’t so the real key is to tune in to where you know, deep in your heart, you need to go with your work to take it to the next level.

If fear of what people might think is what stops you, the quote below is for you. I also recommend Brené Brown’s wonderful book Daring Greatly.

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

~ Theodore Roosevelt

If you know fear is holding you back in business, feel free to be brave and reach out to me and share what you’re dealing with. I promise to do what I can to help. I also know several life coaches who specifically support business owners with this sort of stuff and would be happy to share their details with you.  

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