The Path Ahead: Building an Audience

Building an Audience

When you first start out it seems like it take forever to build an audience, but with passion, and mostly perserverence an audience began to develop. Trust me, I understand what it is like to get 1 to 2 views on YouTube of to be stuck in 200 view heaven with TikTok.

In time you too can monetize on YouTube, and reach a thousand followers on TikTok.

Don’t give up.

Some days it seemed that the needle would never move. I literally had to start watching more successful creators and glean from their videos what these people used to gain engagement. I even saw a video on TikTok that got 16,000,000 views just showing a man spinning an apple on the end of a pencil. You know I reasoned out finally that heĀ  had used something eyecatching to gain viewership. Another popular video had a man watering a pot of soil, and suddenly grew a pencil. Imagine that.

What I learned from videos is that someone needs to be creative, and mostly persistent.

Because most platforms are setup to earn revenue for their platforms, I began to learn to realize that I needed to magnify the reach of my content with paid ads.

Mind you, I did not quit organic posts and videos

The next step I took to build an audience became solo ads. I learned you could actually to have someone send a message to their list, and it would build an audience, and sometimes even produce some sales. Not enough to pay for the ad, but enough to reduce some of the cost for the solo ad. So certainly the solo ads brought an audience faster, it did not help me with my copywriting skills.

So faster traffic, but no development of skills on my part.

The next set of paid ads I took on were Microsoft and Google adsense. Let me tell you the riches promised from paid ads did not come overnight. I slowly learned the tricks of the trade. Most importantly, I learned a click does not equal a sale. RememberĀ  Google and Microsoft are paid on clicks and you get paid on sales. So there is a level of disconnect between your goals and those of mighty Google and Microsoft.

I learned alot about these ads from Jason McDonald who has put out a series of books on Social Media Marketing and SEO. You can easily find them on Amazon. They are both humorous, and to the point. He even offers a series of online classes thru Stanford’s Online University for about $600. You know I even called him a couple of times and he actually answers his own phone.

Next time we will talk about Facebook ads.

 

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