How To Grow Your Online Audience

Without an audience, you simply can't grow your business, your brand, your e-mail list, your social media following, and it's unlikely you'll be in business for very long.

I came to that realization in my own business within weeks of stepping away from my corporate job to build my own business. Problem was, I was very new to audience building and I struggled.

Yes, I knew how to buy advertising. I knew how to write sales letters, rent mailing lists, and send thousands of letters out by mail, but my budget was pretty much at zero and I desperately needed to build an audience for myself or else I'd be looking for another job.

There's nothing like desperation to get you to find another way!

I began asking a lot of questions about how some of the most successful people I knew of got to where they were. I mean, nobody begins on top of their industry, there had to be a way to do this starting from zero and with no money and I was determined to find it!

The problem I ran into almost immediately was that nobody wanted to talk about it. It was like it was some deep secret that only a select few were privy to and they'd been sworn to secrecy!

I was undeterred. Success leaves clues, as my mentor, Tony Robbins often says, so I began looking for those clues.

It didn't take long to figure this out. You don't ever try to build an audience from scratch. It's too expensive to buy enough ads to attract people to your work. Instead, you have to "leverage" audiences that are already in existence.

Brilliant! Well, almost. How do you gain access to an audience somebody else built? That question took some work and a lot of trial and error to figure out.

One day, I saw that a friend of mine was putting on a seminar. And I saw that he and his team were working around the clock to sell tickets to their event.

I had an idea. What if I offered to help them sell tickets, but not in the usual way. What if I offered to interview every single one of the speakers they had booked for their event? And I'd do this for free, as long as I could host the registration pages and subscribe every participant to my own e-mail list.

So I approached them with my idea to do that and they loved it! It was not something they had the time or energy to do, yet they saw that it could be a great way to sell more tickets to their event.

Every one of the 19 speakers agreed to interviewed. Each one sent an invitation to their e-mail list, and I built all the registration pages for each of the interviews.

Every single day, I was adding hundreds of new people to my own e-mail list. After the interviews were done, I'd added more than 3,500 new people to my e-mail list.

Now I had a bigger list and could then sell to them as often as I wanted and never had to share a dime of my sales with anybody! And yes, I made hundreds of thousands of dollars from that list over the next year!

I did this with not one paid ad. I just created a value for value exchange and got access to 19 different audiences for free. And, I helped sell a lot of tickets to their seminar!

Since that time, I've been teaching my clients how to do this too. One of my clients was able to get more than half a million views to his video on YouTube and more than 3,400 new clients in just 24 hours, using a similar approach.

When I published my first book, I leveraged many audiences to promote my book and it became a best-seller on the day it was launched. Again, I didn't pay for a single ad.

If you have real value to offer, you can use leverage to gain access to many new audiences. And, there is no limit to the number of audiences that exist in the world today.

At a trade show, I met with 14 companies who were doing business with my ideal customers and offered to host a live training for their customers, at no charge. They all agreed to it because I set it up as a win for them, a win for their customers, and a win for me!

Here's the point. There is a LOT of talk about making paid ads work.

They can work, but it takes money and time, and it's likely you'll spend a lot of money before you get it figured out.

You can play that game if you'd like, but I have found that by using a little creativity, you can gain access to the exact audiences you want to reach and it won't cost you anything before, during, or after.

Here are 3 steps to growing your online audience:

1: Get crystal clear on who your best audience is for what you have to offer.

2: Find companies that are already doing business with your ideal audience.

3: Make them an offer that will benefit them, their customers, and you.

You can do this as often as you'd like with as many companies as you can find. If your offer is done right, most will give you access to their audience and you won't pay for that access.

When you do it right, everybody wins. And when everybody wins, it's hard to say no to your offer!

I have a free training on this topic you can access here.

Be Outstanding!

About Robert Imbriale

As one of the pioneers in the world of Internet marketing, Robert has remained a leader in the marketing world his entire career.  

In 1995, Robert got exposed to something different: Tony Robbins. After attending following his curiosity and participating in every training program offered by Tony Robbins at the time, he found himself as the Head Coach and Coaches Trainer for the Anthony Robbins and Associates franchise in Chicago.  

During the next 2 years, he would personally coach more than 2,000 people face-to-face which allowed him to refine his coaching skills.  

After making the move to San Diego, Robert focused on coaching business owners, entrepreneurs, and professionals, many of whom have reached multiple 7 figure incomes.  

He is the author of the best-selling book, “Motivational Marketing,” which he wrote as a manual for understanding marketing from the customer’s emotional perspective.  

Today, he is the host of the Coach’s Corner podcast, and works almost exclusively with coaches helping them get more clients and become more effective as coaches.