“The best content in the world won’t drive revenue if nobody sees it.”

~ Anonymous

Growing your audience is essential to the long-term sustainability of your business. Given that only a small percentage of your audience will ever buy from you, if you don’t continue to grow your audience over time, you will reach a point where you’re no longer able to generate revenue. If you are at a stage where you’re yet to even start selling your products or services, then growing your audience is an essential step to achieving that all important first sale.

Of course, with a simple Google search, you’ll find a gazillion different ways to grow your audience, many of which involve doing everything you can to stand out from the crowd and attract your ideal client. From having the perfect brand, to implementing fancy and complex sales funnels with expertly designed squeeze pages, along with irresistible freebies and opt-ins, plus suggestions that you spend the bulk of your business day posting endlessly on social media.

As you might have guessed it, I advocate a different approach.

In this post I share with you the exact framework I use to grow my audience from a place of genuine service.

Depending on how long you’ve been following my work, you may well have heard me talk about the importance of content creation for business growth. In this post I want to go deep into how exactly I do this and share with you the 3 key elements my framework includes that has, this year, been having a huge impact on my audience growth as well as the level of interaction on my content, at the same time as feeling fun, fulfilling and easy to implement.

These 3 elements are CREATE – REPURPOSE – PROMOTE. Allow me to talk you though each of these in more detail.

Create

It would be so easy to take up the mantle of content creation and end up overwhelming yourself or getting burned out. If we listen to conventional advice on the topic, the amount of content we should be creating on a daily basis feels not only punishing but frankly unsustainable for many busy business owners.

What I do, and what I recommend you do, is get into a rhythm of creating just 1 or 2 new pieces of content a week. My two new pieces of content are my weekly Soulful Strategies e-letter (usually created and sent on Mondays) and a weekly video (created and shared on my Facebook page on Thursdays). If you’re currently not creating content consistently then I highly recommend that you start with just one new piece of content and work to get consistent with that before attempting to bring in a second. I didn’t start creating my weekly videos until I was well into a consistent rhythm of sending out my weekly letters. If you’re serious about growing your business, then one piece of content a week should be pretty achievable.

Now with these two new pieces of content I have a content schedule that sees me sharing content on a daily basis. So how do I create all that content from just two original pieces? Read on to find out.

Repurpose

Repurposing content is one of those secrets that people either don’t know about or overlook the importance of. You may have heard me mention before how few people are seeing the content you create. If you send a newsletter, you’re lucky if even a quarter of your list are opening your emails. If you post on your Facebook business page you’re lucky if even 10% of your followers see the post. With stats like these, it’s absolutely essential that you get better at making your content visible (or you’re in danger of completely wasting your time). Repurposing is a key element to this.

In my business, I take the content I write for my weekly letters and 2 weeks after they go out as an email, I repurpose them into a blog post (just like this one!). All this usually takes is a few tweaks to the copy to make it read as a blog and the creation of a branded graphic to accompany the post. After publishing on my blog, I then share a link to it on my Facebook page and a few weeks after that I tweak the content again (usually to shorten it by a few hundred words) and re-publish it as a text post on my Facebook page.

So you see, from just one initial piece of content I now have 4 pieces (newsletter, blog post, linked post on FB and an FB text post) with nothing more than a few tweaks to the copy along the way. What this does essentially is increase the visibility of my content across my audience. This alone, however, is not enough to grow your audience. For that read on for the third element.

Promote

To make my content even more visible, I have implemented a FB advertising strategy to promote my content. Hat tip here to George Kao’s incredible FB Marketing Course. The strategy in a nutshell is to advertise my free content (mainly the repurposed text posts I mentioned earlier and my weekly FB Lives) to my warm audience. Warm meaning people who have visited my website, signed up for my updates or engaged with my FB page. I’m not selling anything with these “adverts” I’m simply making sure that more than the usual 10% of my audience see what I’ve created for them. As well as this, I advertise the exact same content to a cool audience. By cool, I mean an audience I have created based on the demographics and interests of my target audience.

With just €100 a month, I create 3 content promotions a week and reach hundreds more people than I would otherwise.

The results

Since embarking on this strategy the results have been amazing. More subscribers, more sales, more likes, more engagement, more personal messages from people thanking me for my content and telling me how useful they are finding it.

It’s been wonderful and as a result I’m excited to share this strategy with you. Content creation is definitely a core part of my day-to-day activities in my business, but with this strategy it doesn’t feel arduous or pointless, by streamlining what I create and making sure that I spend adequate time on the sharing/promotion of my content is allowing me to reach (and support) more people than ever and the positive feedback this brings works wonders for motivation.

When you hear from people that they appreciate what you are creating, it’s far easier to stick to your content creation schedule than when you publish to crickets and wonder if anyone is even reading it.