26 2 / 2013
Building an audience for first-time entrepreneurs
Yesterday, I wrote about my failure to attract an audience at my last startup Parrotview. Building an audience is hard and is a full-time job. Once your product is ready to go, having a relevant audience to soft-launch to and test with makes your life a lot easier and reduces your chances of failure. There are a lot of different ways to build an audience but having tried a lot of them myself for various projects, these are ways I’d recommend testing first:
1) Write a blog and optimize distribution channels
This is really hard work, and it takes a while to build an audience with a blog. I’m not a great writer, so when I first started my personal blog or even our LaunchBit blog, it would often take me 8-10 hours to write a post. Seriously. It was frustrating. And, because it would take so long, and since I don’t just have 8-10 hours of spare time, I would only blog maybe once a month or even less frequently. Unfortunately, blogging infrequently is ineffective. You need to blog more to build an audience – to get people familiar with your content and to also practice writing more so that it doesn’t take as long to write a post. Blog at least once per week. These days, on a good day, I can think of a topic and write a post in about an hour. On a bad day, it still takes me about 4 hours to write a post. But, it’s getting faster.
In part, it’s hard to justify blogging in the beginning, because the ROI on your blog will be awful. You spend about 10 hours working on a post that maybe your mom will read. Maybe. So, distribution channels are also important to build from day 1. Set up a newsletter signup widget so that people can subscribe to your blog. Optimize it. Set up tweet this links in your posts. Optimize. It’s just as important to work on growing your distribution channels so that you can build your blog reach. We are certainly not there yet, but you can see the growth.
2) Guest post on other major blogs who already have distribution
While your blog is slowly building an audience, guest blogging for others who already have an audience is a good way to increase your audience. Find blogs who share a similar audience but offer complementary products or no products. Everyone loves having high quality guest writers, because it’s a free content for them. Leo Widrich of BufferApp grew their customer base to 100k+ through guest posting via these easy tips. Once you start blogging on your own blog, others can see a portfolio of your past writings. My friend Walter Chen of iDoneThis recommends mixing and matching content you’ve already written to reduce the time it takes you to write, which I’ve personally found to be a great tip.
Once you get a large enough audience, your blog strategy will really scale, because everyone will want to guest blog for you. :)
3) Hold events and partner with popular organizations for distribution
Holding events is another really effective way to build an audience. Arguably, this is a path that requires way less work than starting a blog. But, it doesn’t have the potential to scale in the way that a blog can.
When we launched our first iteration of LaunchBit, which was a product geared towards entrepreneurs, we partnered with organizations like Women 2.0, Tech Stars, and various entrepreneurship clubs at MIT, Stanford, Babson and others to put together a meetup. Just an informative presentation on starting a business over pizza. And, each time, we had a sold out crowd of ~30-60 people, because of those partnerships. We spent about 8 hours on our slides, and about 1-3 hours at each meetup, which led to reaching a couple hundred people over just a few different meetups. The return on our time was much larger than starting a blog. It certainly doesn’t scale. But it was a great way to get our first audience. When we were ready to launch our first iteration of LaunchBit, we reached out to the lists of people who signed up for our events. There are tons of interest groups around the country on all kinds of topics on meetup.com that would be probably be a good fit to partner with.
Much like guest blogging, you can also find complementary companies who already have an audience to do a joint event or webinar with. You do the work to run the event, and they do the distribution, and you both share the leads.
4) Run ads
Lastly, I’m obviously biased since I run an ad company for email, but running ads can be a good way to build an audience immediately. Build a landing page asking people to sign up for your meetup or an ebook that’s a compilation of your blog content. It’s important to make sure that you have a strong, clear call to action that people will want to sign up for. It’s also important to note that in the beginning you’re not trying to achieve profitability – you’re just trying to build an audience to launch to in order to get immediate feedback so that you can iterate quickly.
There are lots of different kinds of ads that you can buy, but that’s a whole set of posts in themselves. Shameless promotion: at LaunchBit, we enjoy working with startup founders, so if you want to take out any ads with us, we’ll offer you a 15% discount off the price of your clicks through April 30, 2013 if you email us: hello [at] launchbit [dot] com and mention this post.
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