Thoughts

This subject has become a mantra of mine here lately. This is from my business site InternetMediaNow.com, enjoy.

Traditional advertising is renting an audience.

By this I mean that you would not have access to say the ABC TV or radio audience unless you pay for that access in the form of advertising. Today we have an opportunity to build and develop our own “Proprietary” audience. If you have a message, service or a product to sell then you should start now to build yourself a proprietary  audience so over time you can reduce your advertising expense. As your audience grows you will be able to reduce your dependence on traditional advertising and still be able to get your message out and create sales.

What is a “Proprietary” audience?

I use the word proprietary rather than own due to the fact that you can’t really own an audience. The audience always has the option of turning the channel or unsubscribing. It is important to always remember this. What I mean when I say “Proprietary” audience is list of email subscriber you have permission from them to send content to and/or followers on the various social media channels. The power of this type of audience is incredible, even more powerful than TV and Radio. If you build this audience correctly you will have an audience of people who are not only receptive to hearing your message but are looking forward to receiving your content. There is also the smaller group inside of this audience that are what I call Super Fans. These are the folks in your audience that LOVE you and will tell others about you whenever they can. There is another opportunity here in finding your super fans in your audience and/or developing folks into super fans.

Think of it as owning your own newspaper or radio station.

There is a right and wrong way to build this audience.

Wrong Way:

Buying a list that is not qualified or building a list of random emails that you don’t know if they have any interest in you, your product of service. This list wil not be worth your trouble anyway the folk on that kind of list will see your email as spam which is what it is since you didn’t ask for permission to send them your content.

Right Way:

Ask for permission to send your content to the recipient. Be compelling enough and have something worth sending to your followers. You may want to give something of real value away in exchange for the opportunity to send your content to that person’s email. Have real answers to real problems. Be the solution. You need to earn the right to make your offer by proving that you have the skill or product that can solve the problem of your customers.

Once you have an audience you will want to keep in touch with them and continue to give them good content and be careful not to wear them out with non-relevant or worse, salesy, (if that’s a word) content. So you want to be intentional with what kind and how often you send your content.

If it seems like I am leaving you with more questions than answers I am sorry but the type of business and message will change the answers so I will leave it to another post on another day.