The key to having a profitable online business is to have a steadily growing online audience, but how do you do that? Many new entrepreneurs wondering how to promote their online business immediately think of posting on social media and quickly become burnt out when their efforts don’t result in sales. In this article I’ll share how to grow an online audience WITHOUT posting on social media, as well as how to effectively use social media for marketing.
Who Sees Your Posts on Social Media
To understand why just posting on social media without a strategy doesn’t work for growing an online audience, it’s important to first understand the three types of people who see what you post on social media.
1. People who already follow you
The people who are most likely to see your posts are those who already follow you…provided they have interacted with your content before. When people see your posts and quickly scroll on by, Facebook, Instagram and other social media platforms assume they aren’t interested and start showing your content less often.
To make sure your posts are seen by your followers, you have to post consistently (a few times per week at minimum), and you have to actively encourage people to engage with (like or comment on) your posts. Ways to do this include asking questions that elicit comments, posting polls (on Instagram stories) or asking people “vote” with their reaction (on Facebook).
Even if you have a highly engaged social media following, your reach will still be limited (especially on Facebook) because social media platforms are more inclined to show ads than anything else. Just scroll through your Facebook feed and you’ll see what I mean. I count about 9 ads or “suggested posts” for every post I actually want to see.
2. People who Don’t Follow You
Most new online business owners who post on social media are hoping to grow their audience, not just post to people who already know about them. But your chances of having your content seen by people who don’t follow you are slim to none unless you consistently create a LOT of new, highly engaging content.
Organically growing an online audience through social media requires posting new, engaging content every day. There are ways to do this more efficiently and automate part of the process so you’re not spending hours per day on social media, but you will still need to spend several hours each week creating content and scheduling posts for this online audience growth method to work.
3. Paid Social Media Ads
The best way, by far, to have you posts seen on social media is to pay for advertising. Many new entrepreneurs either don’t consider running ads for audience acquisition because of the cost, or they may try an ad for just a few dollars, get zero results, and conclude that they don’t work.
Having successfully run Meta (Facebook + Instagram) ads that resulted in a net profit, I can share these tips for using paid advertising to grow an online audience:
- Facebook has to have a lot of data to learn who is likely to click on your ad. Therefore, you have to spend a lot of money up front before you start seeing a return.
- Facebook ads must be treated like a scientific experiement: you must change and test just one variable at a time and measure the results in order to figure out what works.
- Facebook ads are complicated to set up properly. It’s easy for beginners to make choices due to lack of knowledge that will negatively impact the results.
- The key to paid ads being profitable is to have a reliable system in place for converting leads to customers, and you have to make enough money from each sale to pay for the ads and still leave room for profit margin. One way to do this is to advertise a cheap offer that only offets your ad spend before upselling a more expensive product or service.
My advice to new online business owners is to focus on getting a working sales funnel in place before experimenting with ads. Once you know what your best lead magnet is and which of your offers sell the best, it may be worth investing in some education to learn how to use paid ads to scale your business.
How to Grow an Online Audience WITHOUT Using Social Media
Many successful digital entrepreneurs have chosen to avoid social media altogether. In the rest of this article, I’ll share some other ways of consistently gaining new leads for your online business.
How to Use Content Marketing to Grow Your Online Audience
I like writing better than I like recording video, so I enjoy writing helpful articles like this one. Blogging can be a good way to nurture your existing audience as well as a way to grow your online audience.
Google (SEO)
One way to grow an online audience through blogging is to write articles on topics people are actively Googling. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the “science” of how to make sure your content will come up in a relevant Google search. If your topics are already well-covered by other established online businesses, it may be difficult for your articles to rank in Google, but it’s not impossible; you just have to be more strategic with your SEO and keyword research.
Depending on your niche, Pinterest can be a really good source of organic website traffic. To get people to visit your website from Pinterest requires regularly designing and posting scroll-stopping, click-worthy images promoting your content. If any of your pins “go viral,” it’s possible for them to keep sending you traffic for years to come.
The cool thing about Pinterest is you can use it to promote any type of content. If you prefer writing, you can promote blog posts. If you prefer to make videos, you can promote videos (and these often do really well). You can even promote particularly useful social media posts.
To determine whether Pinterest might be a good channel for you to pursue, do a keyword search on Pinterest for topics you typically teach about or help clients with. The majority of Pinterest users are women, so if your target audience consists primarily of women, your content is more likely to do well on Pinterest.
If there seems to be a lot of content on Pinterest related to your niche and you enjoy creating content, consider investing in some Pinterest education. I recommend these sources for learning about how to effectively use Pinterest to grow an online audience:
Using Referral Partnerships to Grow Your Audience
A referral partner is somoene who regularly tells their own clients, customers, or followers about your business, usually because of some type of monetary incentive such as a flat referral fee or a commission on the sale. Referral partners who earn commissions are called affiliates.
Affiliate Partners
The idea of growing an online business through affiliate sales can seem ideal at first: you don’t have to do any work; you let your affiliates do the work and the sales start coming in!
I have a lot of experience selling affiliate products both successfully and uncessfully, and from this I’ve learned that you can’t rely on affiliate sales as a business growth strategy unless you’re actively seeking out new affiliates and nurturing your affiliate relationships. It’s usually harder for people to sell affiliate products than their own products because their audience doesn’t have the same trust built for the affiliate product creator. You can help your affiliates be more successful by providing them with resources to share (lead magnets, blog posts, etc.) that will help them “warm up” their audience before pitching your product.
Referral Partners
Referral partnerships can be a great source of leads for some types of online businesses. The key is finding referral partners who already have a consistent influx of leads or clients in need of your services who don’t already offer those services themselves. For example, a web designer who doesn’t do graphic design would make a great referral partner for a logo designer, since they may have lots of clients needing a new logo for their business.
To determine whether referral partnerships might be a good audience growth strategy for you, think about what service providers (who are not your direct competitors) are already serving your audience. Consider reaching out to them to discuss working together. Then, make it easy for them to refer you by:
- Providing articles and lead magnets for them to share directly targeted to their audience (with a way to track leads and sales that come in through those links)
- Offering to give an educational presentation to their audience, either in person or online
How In-Person Events Can Help You Grow an Online Audience
Just because you eventually want your audience to connect with you online doesn’t mean the relationship has to start out that way. Building relationships with organizations in your community that already serve your target audience, attending local networking events, and speaking at industry conferences can all be good ways to get new clients and customers.
The key is to make it easy for people who meet you or hear you speak in person to find and connect with you later. Do this by sharing business cards, hanging flyers, and sharing a targeted lead magnet.
For example, if you’re a wellness or nutrition coach, local hospitals, women’s networking groups, religious groups, and universities could all be good places to speak to a small group and encourage attendees to download a lead magnet related to your presentation.
How to Use Collaborations to Grow an Online audience
One of the best ways for new online entrepreneurs to expand their reach and grow their email list is by collaborating with other online businesses, especially those who are also trying to grow their list. Here are a few common ways of doing that:
Virtual Summits
A virtual summit is a conference where all the presentations are given online, either pre-recorded or live. Most virtual summits offer a free or cheap ticket option as well as a paid ticket upgrade. They are a good source of revenue for the summit host and affililates, and provide exposure to a new audience for the speakers. Most virtual summits allow or encourage their speakers to share a lead magnet as part of their presentation or part of a “bundle of goodies” that are included with each ticket.
A good place to find virtual summit speaking opportunities is in Facebook groups for virtual summit hosts like Summit Host Hangout, groups for general online business networking, or in groups specific to business owners in your niche. You can also join the Virtual Summit Search Speaker Directory (though I’ve yet to receive any invitations through that website).
Some bigger virtual summits charge speakers a fee to present or only accept speakers who will commit to promoting the event with a certain number of emails and social media shares, so before you agree to speak at a virtual summit, be sure you can fulfill the requirements, including submitting your presentation, lead magnet, and promotional graphics on time (if these are submitted in advance).
Digital Product Bundles
Another way to grow your online audience is to submit an online course, lead magnet, or other digital product to a “bundle.” The “Bundle Host” gets to make money by selling the bundle, and contributors get new email subscribers and possibly affiliate sales. Here are some links to some bundle opportunities where you can get an idea of how it works:
- https://www.thebundlecommunity.com/upcoming-events
- https://suzannebrick.com/sb-success-factor/bundle-hub/
It’s not uncommon to get several hundred new email subscribers from a bundle, but these leads require special care since they joined your list on the same day as they joined dozens of others and will be overwhelmed with emails and likely to unsubscribe if you hit them too hard with a series of welcome emails. If possible, tag bundle subscribers in your email software or put them on a separate list so you can control the amount of email you send them.
Link Swaps
A link swap is where and another online business owner agree to each promote the other person’s freebie so can both grow your email lists. This can be done with a single email, but it might be more effective if accompanied by a joint video presentation or Facebook live, as this will give you both multiple opportunities to promote the lead magnet.
Niche-specific business networking groups on Facebook are probably the best place to find people who would be open to collaborating, but this website is another place you could look: CollaborationStation.directory
Podcast Guesting
The last online audience growth strategy I’ll share here is being a guest on someone else’s podcast. This could take the form of an interview, or it could be more of a formal presentation. Often the podcast host will prepare questions in advance to ask you, but they may appreciate (and be more likely to book you) if you share with them some key talking points likely to be of value to their audience.
If you feel nervous about the idea of speaking on a podcast, it may be helpful to you to know that it’s not like being live on the radio. Recording a podcast is usually just a recorded Zoom call that feels like having a normal conversation. Later, the host may edit the recording to shorten it or take out anything embarrassing (which will probably be unnecessary). The podcast may be posted as both a YouTube video and an audio podcast, or it may be audio only. You can know this in advance by seeing how previous episodes have been shared.
An advantage to podcasts is that people may listen to them months or even years after the date they originally aired, so they can continue sending you new leads as an “evergreen” lead source. Another benefit to podcasts is that the host may link to your website in the show notes for your episode, which is beneficial for SEO.
The key to turning podcast listeners into leads is to share a highly targeted lead magnet, mentioning it multiple times if possible, with a link that is easy to remember and easy to type.
7FigureLeap.com is a great resource for learning how to find and effectively pitch podcasts. You can also often find podcast guesting opportunities in networking groups for online business owners. Though podcasts seeking guests are more likely to have a smaller audience, they can be a good way to gain confidence and experience, and they may grow later.
Did I Miss Anything?
Have you tried any of the strategies mentioned here? If so, what were your results? Are there any other effective strategies for growing an online audience I forgot to mention here? Please let me know in the comments!
The distinction between building an audience without relying on social media and using social platforms strategically is especially useful. Many entrepreneurs do burn out by posting constantly without seeing sales, so focusing on sustainable audience-building methods is a practical approach.