You have built your membership. You created your first content. You got your first members. Now it is time to grow the dang thing. We can help you with that!
In this article we are going to break down the three main ways you can grow your audience and get members in the door. We call it the Build, Borrow, Buy method. We will also break down all the different tactics you can implement in your marketing so you can start growing your audience and getting leads for your next membership launch. Let’s begin 🥳
1. BUILD: Craft Your Online Presence
This means creating content on one or more social media platforms that attracts your ideal members and grows your own following. Building your own audience takes time, but it’s time well spent because having your own following is an asset you can always rely on. We like to call it your insurance policy. Let’s say you are working a job and the economy goes south so you get let go of. If you have an audience on social media you immediately have income insurance because you have half the equation of an online business ready to go- traffic. All you would need to do is create an offer to share with them (or become an affiliate of someone else’s that already exists). Building your own audience should always be a goal. Theres a reason billionaires like Elon Musk and Grant Cardone still find time in their busy schedules to post on social media- they know that attention is the modern day currency, and now you do too. If you want to learn about how to find your social platform you can go here. First let’s talk about the other ways to build traffic.
2. BORROW: Leverage Existing Audiences
The next strategy to grow your audience is Borrow. This means partnering with someone that has an audience of ideal members already and get in front of them. This could be an official business partnership where a person or business agrees to launch your product to their audience for a percentage or profits, an affiliate agreement where you allow other creators to become an affiliate of your product and earn a percentage of each sale they refer, PR placement on a website that gets traffic from your ideal members, or something as simple as doing a podcast with someone that has an ideal audience.
3. BUY: The Paid Approach
This means using paid ads like google, YouTube or facebook ads to grow your audience. We don’t recommend starting with paid ads. You can my business 100% organically to multiple 7 figures in revenue before we ever added on paid ads. Why? Because you’re here to make money, not spend money. So let’s focus on making it first, then if and when you have the budget to dive into paid media, we can cross that bridge then. An audience also tends to respond slightly differently to paid media that organic. With paid ads, it’s kind of like when you go to your letter box and get the mail- your mind filters out the junk mail because you know you’re being marketed to. But when you focus on developing a relationship with an audience and building your own, it feels very different and you’re more likely to have a higher conversion rate.
Our recommendation? Borrow an audience, while you build your audience, then eventually decide if you’d like to buy an audience.
Public Relations
Want to increase brand awareness by getting published on top media outlets? Create a list of the top 100 writers/editors on those outlets and go through the Dream 100 process with them. For the publications where that doesn’t work, you might still be able to run ads or buy your way in through sponsorships. Since this is buying an audience we don’t recommend starting with this option but it is a great tactic to incorporate once you have some traction with organic marketing
Influencer marketing
This is one of the best uses of the Dream 100. Make a list of the top influencers that your target market follows and try to connect with them organically. For influencers who you can’t connect with organically, you can probably still pay them to promote your products or services to their followers. You can also leverage collaborations where you partner with influencers and do a revenue share model.
Search Engine Optimization
You can easily apply the Dream 100 method to SEO. Identify the top 100 keyword phrases that your target market is already searching for in Google and make it your mission to rank on the first page for those keywords — you can do that by writing optimized content on your blog (or by paying to rank using google adwords, but since this would be classified as buying an audience, we’ll discuss that later).
Social Media
Social media is one of the best places to apply the Dream 100 strategy and grow your audience. You can find influencers, groups, or forums where your target market congregates. From there you could either develop a relationship with the creator and see if they’d be interested in becoming an affiliate for your offer, collaborating on a post, or simply by commenting on their posts in a valuable way. If you find someone in their comments that seems to be an ideal member for your community, you can Dm them and establish a relationship before presenting your offer.
Affiliate army
What if influencers in your market were selling your products or services for you? Better yet, what if you only had to pay those people when they made a sale? That’s how influencer marketing works and the Dream 100 is a wonderful strategy for finding and building relationships with potential affiliates.
Podcasts/Newsletters
Getting mentioned in podcasts or newsletters is a great way to build brand awareness. And the Dream 100 is how you make it happen systematically. Make a list of the top 100 podcasts or newsletters that you want to get promoted in and start gunning for them. Start by trying to get mentioned organically and consider paying for sponsorship when you’re ready to buy media if that doesn’t work out.
Guest blogging
Want to guest post for other publications in your market to promote your products and services? Make a list of the top 100 publications you want to write for and then start sending pitches. If that doesn’t work, there’s usually a pay-to-play option as well.
Facebook Group
Remember in the beginning of this course when you created your INFINITE community idea and did a search to see if there were any facebook groups on your topic? Now is a great time to become a member of those facebook groups and provide value within them. Most groups won’t allow direct promotion, which is why your goal is to become valuable enough that people within those groups will see you as a trusted resource and reach out to you for recommendations, which is when you can send them your lead magnet (more on that in the next lesson), and get them onto your email list.
Conclusion
Now that you have all the information to get started on growing your audience, The next step is to learn how to convert that traffic into loyal fans, and then into members. We break this down in MemberUp University and give you all the tools you need to build an extraordinary community. The best part is, it is entirely free when you sign up for Memberup.
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