FILL YOUR AUDITORIUM

If you are reading this book and want to grow your audience moving forward, it is time to take center stage.

As you get started growing your platform, imagine yourself taking the stage in a huge auditorium. Unless you are already famous or in some way well-known, you are going to be looking out from the stage at a very sparse crowd. Your initial audience will be gathered in the front couple of rows and will likely consist of friends and family there to support you as you launch your blog, podcast, or other content channel.

Before you say anything from the stage, it is important to remember that everything you do in this public arena will either help or hurt you in terms of growing the audience in your auditorium. In the digital environment, which is largely anonymous, people can get up and walk out as quickly as they came in, and they have zero qualms about doing so. If your blog doesn’t cut it or you spend too much time “selling” from the stage, the only people left will be those who can’t leave—good friends and family (and they’re dozing off, rolling their eyes, or muting you).

On the other hand, if you are dynamic with your content and provide entertaining and informative information, you give your initial audience content they can share with their audiences (as micromedia outlets themselves, each of them have their own stage—even if they’re just speaking to Facebook friends). When they share your blog post, they stand out in the hall with a big sign and point their audience into your auditorium.

Once their friends arrive, they will make a very quick decision on whether they want to sit down (by subscribing), stand in the back (just reading the post), or head on back out the door. Much of what they do will depend on a combination of the look and feel of the stage, which is the content on your website. Is it professional? Does it provide a clear overview of the value you will provide? Are you giving people a reason to sit down and subscribe via a quiz, free download, or other value proposition? Are you popular right now with the people sitting in the audience? Do they see a lot of commenting and sharing? The quality of the content you are providing from the stage of your website needs to engage, as most will want you to hook them quickly or they will be gone.

Although the audience is judging you on a number of things, they are also doing so very quickly. According to a study done by the Nielsen Norman Group, the longer you can keep someone in your auditorium (your website), the better chance you have that they will sit down:

It’s clear from the figure below that the first 10 seconds of the page visit are critical for users’ decision to stay or leave. The probability of leaving is very high during these first few seconds because users are extremely skeptical, having suffered countless poorly designed Web pages in the past. People know that most Web pages are useless, and they behave accordingly to avoid wasting more time than absolutely necessary on bad pages.

If the web page survives this first—extremely harsh—ten-second judgment, users will look around a bit. However, they’re still highly likely to leave during the subsequent twenty seconds of their visit. Only after people have stayed on a page for about thirty seconds does the curve become relatively flat. People continue to leave every second, but at a much slower rate than during the first thirty seconds. So, if you can convince users to stay on your page for half a minute, there’s a fair chance that they’ll stay much longer—often two minutes or more, which is an eternity on the Web.

The question you need to ask yourself is this: “Am I giving someone a good, clear reason to stay on my website/blog?” If not, the doors to your auditorium are revolving—you may get a number of people in, but they aren’t sticking around.

We’ll be discussing ways to fix that problem so you can own the connection to your audience. We will also explore at length how to get people through the doors of your auditorium by building relationships with individual influencers and groups, and effectively using rented and earned media.

Although traditional or earned media, as we will be calling it, is changing, based on syndication, influence, and scarcity, we believe it is more powerful than ever in terms of getting a message out. So while we want you spending plenty of time in your auditorium creating content, interacting with others, and building an audience, we’re also going to challenge you to devote more effort to acquire earned media coverage as well by getting on larger stages that you don’t own.

The key change we want to encourage you to make is to think of reaching an audience via earned or rented media, not just as the end goal but rather as crucial components of driving people to your owned media space, be it your website or email list, where you can extend that interaction for a much longer period of time. In the age of micromedia, every interview, speech, guest post, and other public event is not only an opportunity to reach those people during that short interaction, but also an opportunity to then give them a reason to head to your website and convert to your platform.

In the coming pages, we will explore numerous case studies of how to do this, ranging from the authors of the runaway bestseller The Confidence Code, Katty Kay and Claire Shipman, who grew a huge email list by pairing a clear call to action with a national media campaign to drive more than 150,000 people to their website to take their free confidence quiz; to bestselling author and speaker Jon Acuff, who leveraged in-person meet-ups in cities where he was already traveling to build relationships that gave him the ability to make the most important career transition of his life. You will also hear from experts such as Fred Allen of Forbes and Patricia O’Connell, a former editor at BusinessWeek, on how to craft great content and what it takes to be a contributor.

Even though we will discuss it at length, this is not a book about social media.

Despite the amount of time we’ll spend looking at how to get great media attention, this is not a book about PR.

Although we’ll walk through case studies of speakers who have built massive audiences through in-person events, this is not a book about driving attention via events.

Rather, this is a book about a new kind of mindset that all who have a story to tell in today’s modern media environment need to embrace—before the window of opportunity disappears.

Not only does growing a large, owned media audience give you leverage to share your own ideas, but it also allows you to grow meaningful relationships that can change lives. The key is to think more like a media executive than a marketer. The most important opportunity is not the short-term sale; it’s getting someone to take a seat in your auditorium.

Let’s get started.