10 Tips to Building a Powerful Online Audience

8/22/2019 10 Tips to Building a Powerful Online Audience

1/13

10 TIPS TO BUILDING A POWERFUL ONLINE AUDIENCE

WRITTEN BY

NED DWYER IVAN LIM


2/13

Online Businesses are hard work.

It's not that the work is necessarily difficult, it's just that there are a lot of different things you

need to do in order to be successful.

There is very rarely one silver bullet that solves all your marketing woes. In fact many times it

is the consistent effort of doing many best practices well that keeps you ahead of the gamewhen it comes to building a powerful online audiences.

Here are Tweakys top 10 tips for building a powerful online audience. Lets get started.

2


3/13

1. Make Great Content

Great content is anything that people want to read and most importantly share with their

friends.

Great content comes in many different forms. It could be a blog post, a video, a well-crafted

Tweet or even a Facebook content. The most important thing is to make it remarkable.

Now being remarkable doesnt mean huge or epic. It means bringing something inherently

valuable to your audience and that differs depending on who your customers are. Think

carefully about your target audience and ask yourself, What would remarkable content for

them look like?.

What looks remarkable for one person may not be the same for the other, but thats ok. As long

as youre remarkable to your customers thats all that matters.

You'll know when you're writing great content because you'll have a smile on your face, you'll

feel like you're adding something to the community around you and you seem to get nice

comments back.

Action :

Sit down and have a session with your team brainstorming questions about your

industry. What big questions do you want to answer? Even better take some customers

out for a coffee and ask them what content would they love to read about their industry.

3


4/13

2. Make lots of content

The first time you produce a blog post or a video it's going to be terrible. But that's ok,

everything is hard the first few times you do it.

The key is perseverance. The more you post the better you'll get at writing, for instance, and

the more feedback you'll get from your readers to make it better.

As an example I wrote the music blog at Electrorash.com twice a day for 2 years. I was a

terrible music writer to start with and not a whole heap better by the end of it but I was

averaging 50,000 unique visitors a month after 2 years.

9 times out of 10 great content beats bad content. But any content beats none.

Action :

Build a simple spreadsheet and make sure you have content ideas scheduled for at leastthe next 2 weeks with a deadline on when each piece will be submitted. Share this with

your team or at least one other person who will keep you accountable to deadlines.

4


5/13

3. Stay consistent in your communication

There is nothing worse than giving your brand a split personality. Are you serious or quirky? Are

you well spoken or do you say the occasional swear word? Do you talk about business stuff or

fun stuff?

Always be mindful of keeping the voice of your company consistent. This is your brand, andswitching between serious and funny messaging regularly is going to confuse your audience

and dilute your brand.

Action :

Create a spreadsheet with a list of your brands key messages. Each message should be

1 sentence at most but that will help you quickly establish the tone and style of all

communications.

5


6/13

4. Maintain a Pulse

A "pulse" is a sign of life out of your business. It tells the outside world that you still exist.

If you don't have a pulse, you die. Signs of a pulse include regular tweets or Facebook

messages, regular blog posts, and a regularly updated website.

Maintaining a pulse is also important for SEO in terms of maintaining freshness on your site. As

Google crawls websites they notice if new content has been produced. If they regularly see

content being produced they will visit your site more often and your pages get indexed sooner.

The faster your pulse is running the better, but don't get it too high - you don't want to have a

heart attack and burn out.

Action :

Use tools like Buffer App to queue up all your content sharing via social networks. Havea regular email newsletter that you use to keep in touch customers.

6


7/13

5. Solicit Feedback

No man is an island. Thats how the saying goes and its true.

It's hard to operate in a bubble, away from the opinions of the people around you because you

dont get any feedback.

Getting constructive feedback from the people around you is crucial to knowing whether you're

nailing it or just failing.

At Tweaky we asked conversion optimisation expert Peep Laja what he thought about ourlanding page and he ended up producing us a 3 page report on how to fix it. Thanks Peep!

Action :

Solicit feedback from customers with simple surveys (via your email newsletter). A great

tool for this is survey monkey.

Also reach out to people you admire who have experience in your industry and ask their

opinion on what youre doing.

7


8/13

6. Collect Email Addresses

Lets be clear on this... email marketing is one of the MOST effective marketing channels out

there.

Very rarely do we hear about companies that dont get a great return from email marketing.

Email addresses of customers and prospects are incredibly valuable. Everyone lives in their

inboxes so sending your customers an email means they're likely to read your messages.

Once you've got a good sized and well engaged email list you can send out specials you're

running or new product announcements. These will convert into sales which means your email

list is actually worth money.

Action :

There are a heap of different ways to capture email addresses but we generally

recommend having a fixed email capture form in the header of your website. Works like a

charm.

8


9/13

7. Network, Network, Network

The more people who know about you, the better. You need to get your brand out there as

much as possible and seize opportunities to enhance your audience.

Activities such as posting comments on blogs you like, emailing people who you admire and

offering help to someone in a time of need are great ways to build relationships.

The more connected you are, the faster you can make things happen - whether it's sharing

your content, getting feedback or connecting with people who can help build your business.

Got a problem that you're struggling with right now? Why not get talk to someone on our team

via our free marketing consultation reports.

Action :

Put together a list of people in your industry who are influential and you would like to

connect with. Start following them on Twitter and engage with their tweets, blog posts

etc. Let them know you genuinely love what theyre doing and reach out to them to

connect.

9
http://www.tweaky.com/blog/free-marketing-consultation-with-tweaky/http://www.tweaky.com/blog/free-marketing-consultation-with-tweaky/http://www.tweaky.com/blog/free-marketing-consultation-with-tweaky/


10/13

8. Leverage larger communities

One of the best ways to exponentially increase the size of your audience is to find bigger

communities in a related space and work with them.

Say youre a eCommerce store for dog products you should connect with a local dog

enthusiasts society, maybe a Facebook group for dog lovers or even a blog about loving dogs.

There are always people with bigger audiences who operate in your industry but arent

competing with you. Find angles to work with them and expose your brand to a wider

audience.

Examples of working together are guest blogging on their site or running special offers for their

community members.

Learn to leverage larger audiences in your niche and youll find yourself getting a headstart tobuilding an influential brand

Action :

Do a quick search on Google and Facebook for interest groups in your niche that arent

competitors. Put together a list of 20 of these groups and work a specific angle to

approach each of them. Go out there have a conversation and at the very least build up a

strong relationship so you can do something down the track.

10


11/13

9. Measure Everything

If you can't measure it, you can't improve it.

More than that - if you're not monitoring your marketing efforts you're not going to notice when

things start to go south.

When we first launched Tweaky we focused on a single metric to keep things simple. The

metric was the number of completed tweaks in a week. We watched the number slowly go up

over the course of 4 weeks and were excited every time.

Then the number started going down and we couldn't figure out why. The reason was that new

customers were not coming into the funnel - this eventually ended with no customers

completing projects in a week.

Measure everything and then as you go along learn to monitor the right things.Action :

Start getting a handle on your web analytics. At the very least understand how Google

Analytics works. If you need help with Google Analytics get in touch with us via the free

marketing consultation.

11
http://www.tweaky.com/blog/free-marketing-consultation-with-tweaky/http://www.tweaky.com/blog/free-marketing-consultation-with-tweaky/http://www.tweaky.com/blog/free-marketing-consultation-with-tweaky/http://www.tweaky.com/blog/free-marketing-consultation-with-tweaky/http://www.tweaky.com/blog/free-marketing-consultation-with-tweaky/http://www.tweaky.com/blog/free-marketing-consultation-with-tweaky/


12/13

10. Test in small batches

When you first start out with trying different marketing channels you will be basing all your

decisions on what you assume should work. The only way to know for sure if something works

is to test it.

Building your audience is exactly the same. You have no idea what will work so you should testassumptions on your content. The smaller your tests can be the quicker you can move on if

they fail, or the quicker you can increase your investment if they work.

As an example we wanted to find out if setting up email auto responders would increase sales.

Instead of spending a couple of weeks putting together email template designs, writing a

dozen emails etc we just sent a single email to customers 7 days after their projects finished.

We immediately saw how many extra sales this gave us and could justify the investment of

time and resources into making a more complex email auto responder system.

Likewise, instead of investing in a huge marketing project that takes 4 weeks to complete whynot scale it down into a 1 week project to quickly test its effectiveness. If it works then investmore. If it doesnt tweak the approach or dump it.

Action :

Look at your marketing plans right now and ask yourself whether youre over investing in

an unproven marketing channel. If you are, look at ways of scaling the campaign down

and running a small test to validate its effectiveness.

12


13/13

So what now?

Get started! If you follow our action points youll be well on your way . Remember to keep

persevering and that consistent work builds a powerful online audience.

If youd like to get advice from a marketing expert about your business sign up for one of our

free marketing consultations.

Who is Tweaky

Tweaky makes it easy and affordable for anyone to make small changes to their website.

Tell us what you would like to improve about your website and our project managers will create

simple tweaks for each task. Pre-approved developers can then start work on your project and

get the job done.

All of this backed by our 100% money back guarantee.

13
http://www.tweaky.com/http://www.tweaky.com/blog/free-marketing-consultation-with-tweaky/http://www.tweaky.com/http://www.tweaky.com/http://www.tweaky.com/blog/free-marketing-consultation-with-tweaky/http://www.tweaky.com/blog/free-marketing-consultation-with-tweaky/

Documents

10 Tips to Building a Powerful Online Audience