A customer of mine, with over 200 well produced and quality videos, didn’t want to start promoting or posting those videos on YouTube because they only had 4 subscribers.
“We want to have more subscribers before we start to put more videos on YouTube”
How do you expect to grow your subscriber and follower base if you don’t post content?
Read this post and you’ll see EXACTLY why you need to start promoting your content, via newsletters and social. Even if you’ve only got a small audience to start with.
Grow your audience with content
The fastest way to grow an audience is to start creating more content. Talking more, having conversations, expressing your thoughts. 1000 people aren’t going to magically start following you because you think you might have something interesting to say one day.
If you dig a little deeper, you probably have more contacts that you realise. People that you should be talking to. If you’re not sharing anything at all, why do you deserve more people following you?
In order to start having more people follow you and listen to you, you need to share more stuff. Simple as that.
6 Ways to Grow YouTube Subscribers and Your Exposure
Start practising now
You’re going to get stuff wrong and that’s fine. We all do it. Send newsletter emails with broken links. Drive traffic to broken pages. Write or create dull content.
The point is that you need to start making these mistakes sooner rather than later. Sending broken links to a few dozen people is bad – but not the end of the world. Producing dull content and sending it to 1000 people is waaaaaaaaay worse.
Start getting in the habit of creating content, editing it and promoting it out. What’s your process and repeatable steps for getting attention to your content? Start doing that now and get better as you grow.
Your audience doesn’t know they’re only 5 people
I’ve noticed that a lot of my customers and colleagues say they feel silly or weird sending a newsletter to just 5 people. I’m curious as to how your audience even know they’re only on a list of 5 people. Are you telling them?
I understand how you feel, it’s tough starting out and you feel like you’re not making an impact. But you need to learn how to nurture a handful of people before you can move onto larger numbers. In fact it’s probably easier to talk to and nurture such a small number. You could really make an impact on those 5 people and seriously tailor your content.
Get used to working with smaller numbers and it’ll serve you well when your list grows.
You’ll suffer from list decay
Recently, one of my larger customers decided to clean their list and start removing as many leads as they could. It wound up being close to 4000 leads that were either dead, inactive or spam. Even if they were regular people, they just weren’t getting anything from being on that list.
We were relieved that we had such a high number of people removed. Bearing in mind, they didn’t unsub, we deleted them. We felt they weren’t adding anything to the list. Now, my customer’s open rates are higher because people left on that list ARE engaged.
Your list will decay. Like a flower in the summer, as time goes on it fades if it’s not nurtured. Here’s the biggest paradox small lists face. They tell themselves that they’ll start to email a newsletter out more regularly when their list is 1000 people.
But by the time you hit that number, your list will have decayed. How long do you think people remember subscribing to your list? A day? A week? It’s more like a few hours.
You need to regularly email and update people in order to stay fresh in their mind. If you wait too long, they’ll forget you.
Besides, if you can’t keep a few people engaged, why would a larger number be any better?
There are other ways to promote that aren’t manual
Just a short one here. If you’re serious about sending content regularly to new subscribers, leads and email lists, then think about automation. If you’ve got content to share, put that on automation so when anyone signs up, they get a stream of content.
You DO still need to send and write newsletter emails, but automation is a great way to keep people engaged with relatively little effort on your behalf.
You’re using your small audience as an excuse
Frankly, the final reason people don’t start promoting and reaching out is because they’re scared. Saying “I’ll wait until I get a bigger list” is just an excuse to start the hard bit and get started.
Putting on your trainers is the hardest part of going for a run. Learning a new skill like content creating and promotion is hard work. But you NEED to get started now, no matter how small your list is. No matter how small your audience is, you’ll grow a skill that serves you for the rest of your business.
The act of attracting an audience and talking to them is one of the most important skills a human can learn. You’ve got the brains, you just need to start.
If the idea of creating an entire promotion and content plan from scratch seems overwhelming, then check out our $100K marketing funnel plan below. It shows you exactly what we send to new leads and customers via email.
