A Five-Minute Exercise in Audience Building

A few minutes a day — every day — can make all the difference.

What good is having a forum, be it in a blog, a podcast, or a video channel, if you have no audience on the other end?

The number one cause of demise for any of these forums is the feeling you’re just shouting into the void, and there’s no one out there giving your words any attention. I’ve started a dozen such ventures only to end up quietly killing them because there was no audience.

How many budding affiliate marketers or businesses attempting to drive traffic to their site gave up because the experience was not yielding any eyes or ears?

Now, sometimes you don’t need an audience if your forum is meant more for yourself than for others, but I think most blogs and other forums exist because creators want to engage with others. It might be for business reasons. It might be more because it’s natural for many creative types to share something personal or useful with others.

But sharing implies there is someone out there. What do you do when that’s not the case?

Change all that in five minutes a day

There exists no shortage of articles offering strategies for building audiences. Some get quite involved or require you to put in a lot of time and effort.

What would you say if I told you that you could witness a noticeable increase in viewership by doing one thing for about five minutes?

“Professor Carstairs, you’ve gone mad!”

Okay, my name is not Carstairs, and this suggestion is perfectly reasonable.

Each day, take five minutes to engage in one social media platform of your choice.

“What, that’s it?”

Kind of.

For some of you, this is no big deal. For many, like myself, dragging oneself to social media can be a bit of a chore. I find a lot of it overwhelming. There are just so many people out there, and the mass of voices gets hard to follow.

First, remember that you don’t have to participate in every conversation you see online or even pay attention to most of them.

But do find a few. Take a minute to find a passing statement on, say, Twitter, and reply to a tweet. Do this a couple of times. Then use your last minute or so to write a post of your own such as:

• Share an observation.
• Make a witticism or tell a joke.
• Ask a question.
• Share a photo.

Finally, write a second tweet sharing a link to something you’ve created, be it a blog, video, podcast, or piece of artwork.

Then log out and get back to whatever you were doing before.

The next day, repeat this. Use the same platform, or a different one such as Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, or whatever seems to suit you the best.

Over time, you will gradually build an audience merely by being there and being someone who engages. Whenever I consider following someone on Twitter or Instagram, I check to see how often they post. If they post once a week, I tend not to follow. If they post every day or two, I’m more likely to follow that person as they seem to be a person who is more open to what I have to say.

They may not be, but they might be. The only guarantee is zero audience due to zero engagement.

The supercharging twist

Five minutes doesn’t seem like a lot of time.

To be honest, it’s more of a suggestion than a rule. Take six or seven minutes if that’s what you need.

But you’ll also find that, over time, you’ll become more used to leveraging social media as a tool for audience building, and you’re daily foray into the world of tweets and ‘grams may end up growing to ten minutes, twenty minutes, or half an hour.

All-time spent engaging with a potential audience. All-time spent showing the world what you have to offer. If you engage 20 people on social media and only one or two subscribe or visit your site, that’s still more than you started with.

Over time, your audience will grow. Keep it up.

Keep sharing those links. Try to keep your links to less than half of your posts, but don’t be afraid to promote yourself within your planned social media time.

Don’t go overboard. I’d discourage spending more than half an hour a day promoting and engaging on social media. I’m much more likely to unfollow someone who seems to be trying too hard than someone who is being cool about it all.

Leave the online marketing blitzes to those who know how to do it right.

No pressure

When you come right down to it, creating and sharing shouldn’t seem too much like work. We’re supposed to enjoy what we’re doing, right?

I think after you try five or ten minutes a day on social media to build your audience, you’ll start enjoying the process as you meet and interact with all the interesting folk out there.

But as soon as it stops being fun, pull back.

Regroup. Examine what you’ve accomplished and where you want to be. Take a break from social media if you need to. It’s not going anywhere anytime soon.

Then give it another go when you’re ready.

And have some fun with it.

Thank you for reading. I’d love to share more with you via my Bi-Weekly Word Roundup newsletter sent to subscribers every other Sunday. It will feature news, productivity tips, life hacks, and links to top stories making the rounds on the Internet. You can unsubscribe at any time.