The Secret to Growing Your Audience Faster: Strategies That Actually Work

Your Dream Business

In this episode of 'Your Dream Business Podcast,' I discussed the importance of strategically growing your audience for business success. I emphasized that simply posting on social media or having an email opt-in on your website is not enough. I also provided actionable advice on utilizing lead magnets, social media, chatbots, ads, and collaborations to effectively expand your audience. I also highlighted the significance of leveraging other people's audiences through podcasts, stages, and email swaps. Ideal for online business owners, course creators, membership owners, and coaches, this episode offers valuable strategies and tools to boost your online presence.

KEY TAKEAWAYS COVERED IN THE PODCAST

• Posting Alone Won’t Cut It – Simply showing up on social media or having an email opt-in isn’t enough. You need a strategic approach to attract and retain the right audience.

• Leverage the Right Tools – Use lead magnets, chatbots, ads, and collaborations to actively grow your audience and engage with them in meaningful ways.

• Tap Into Other People’s Audiences – Get in front of new people through podcasts, speaking opportunities, and email swaps to expand your reach faster.

If you enjoyed this episode then please feel free to go and share it on your social media or head over to Apple podcasts or Spotify and give me a review, I would be so very grateful.

LINKS TO RESOURCES MENTIONED IN TODAY’S EPISODE

Connect with Teresa on Website, The Club, Sign up to Teresa's email list, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter

Transcript

If you've been in business for a little while, you'll know that growing your audience is one of the most important things that you can do. And in my experience, when business owners think they are trying to grow their audience, they're not really doing it as they need to be. Most business owners think. that growing their audience is just about showing up on social media and posting, when really it's so much more than that. There is a strategy that you need to employ in order to make sure that you're getting your name, your face, your business out in front of the right people. And not only that, getting them to convert onto your email list. In today's episode, I'm going to be taking you through what we really mean by growing your audience and some of the most effective strategies to get that done. Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Your Dream Business Podcast. I am your host, Theresa Heath Waring, and I am so very grateful that you have decided to hang out with me today. I never take that lightly. I know that your time is super, super precious and in. Thank you for spending time with me, for sharing this podcast, for writing reviews. For those of you who've written me a review, I will do my utmost to produce [00:02:00] and deliver a really good quality podcast. My aim is that, and if you're new to the podcast, is that every other week you get a solo episode and every other week you get an interview. And I've really honed in on who it is I'm helping, what it is I'm doing. So if you are an online business owner, a course creator, a membership owner, a coach, then you are absolutely in the right place. And I am going to be delivering you amazing value to grow your online business. And with the solo episodes, I aim for them to be really strategic, really practical, give you some really good step by step. Sometimes I give you some downloads to go with it. And with the interviews, again, I aim to bring you the best people in the industry with the best strategies and the best results. So today is a solo and we're going to be talking about audience growth. Now, this is something that has been coming up while constantly comes up. It's not even something that's coming up recently. It is something that is constantly coming up in my world. And the reason for that is [00:03:00] I help people launch pretty much all day every day. That's what I do. I help them grow their audience, launch their product and sell it. And that's what I do all the time. And one thing that is constantly on my radar and should constantly be on my radar and your radar is that very first step is that growing their audience. Because This comes down to a numbers game, and I hate saying that because it sounds like I don't care about the humans at the end of it, and I absolutely do, and if you're in my world, you know I care deeply about the people in my world. However, when it comes to selling and having a successful online business, it really does come down to the audience, and it comes down to numbers, and therefore it makes perfect sense that the more people you have in your world, the more people you have to sell to. So I want to talk about audience growth today. And before I get into what I mean by audience growth and, and give you some ideas as to [00:04:00] how you can grow your audience, because I'm, you might be thinking, well, I am growing my audience. I'm trying to grow my audience, but we need to talk about what that really honestly looks like. I just want to remind you of some of the. Numbers that we talked about back in episode three, six, eight. So if you want to go back and listen to that episode, then please do so. Where basically I break down what is realistic, but some of the numbers that we talked about are your list, your email list size. And actually, I've broken this a bit further down for you on this episode. So we have your email list size, then we have what we call a launch list. So if you were doing something like a bootcamp or a webinar or whatever, that would be your launch list. The people who opt into that is your launch list. So you have your list size and then you have your launch list. Now, roughly between 15 and 30 percent of your list size will opt into your launch list. Okay. And I'm going to go through some numbers in a minute with this to help you understand this. And then we'll have like an engagement and a show up percentage, which I'm [00:05:00] not going to talk about in this episode, but I did in episode three, six, eight, then roughly between one and 8 percent of your launch list will buy. So let me explain how that looks from a numbers point of view. Let's say that you have on your email list, a thousand people, and let's go with the lower number, the 15%. And only 15 percent of them Join your launch list. So that means from a thousand people, 150 people are on your launch list. Then let's say, and I've rounded it up slightly from the 1%, let's say 2 percent of those people buy, which means from 150 people, two people buy. Okay. Which means if you were selling a product of 997 or pounds, you've roughly made 1, 994 or pounds. That's from an email list size of a thousand people. Okay, so then let's say our email list size was 2, 500. So you've increased your email list to 2, [00:06:00] 500 and we're going to go with the same percentages. That would mean that your 15 percent of that list would go up to 375 people who signed up for your launch list. And then let's times that by the 2%. Well, that means that roughly 7. 5 people are going to buy. We'll round that up to eight, which means based on our figure of nine, nine, seven, that you're making around 7, 976 or pounds. So you can see that with that increased audience, you're going to make considerably more money. Now I've done it on the lower percentage. And yes, there are lots of things that we can do within a launch that can help increase percentages, but. Ultimately having a bigger list at the beginning is always, always, always, always going to help. Also remember that if you are doing the same launch and you don't grow your list, but you keep advertising that same launch to your list, that that percentage of people who go from your list to your launch list is going to decrease and that's going to get [00:07:00] worse over time. So we always want new people coming into our audience, and the faster and quicker we can build our audience, the better. Now we've understood that, let's start by saying what audience building isn't. Now this is slightly controversial, but audience building isn't just going on social media. I'm not saying it's not that at all. I'm not saying that, forget social media and it's rubbish and it's not working. However. It is more than just posting on social media. It is more than just showing up and doing stories or posts or whatever it is. Audience building has to be way more strategic than that. Now, I have been in marketing a really long time and it used to be different. Maybe easier, but different and social media used to be different and yes, you probably could post on social media and build a good audience, but that is not the case anymore. The algorithms getting harder. The everything is tricky. It's not as easy as it was. It's [00:08:00] still a great resource and it's still something brilliant to use. However, audience building is so much more than that. Also, audience building, the one thing it's not, is you just having a join my email list on your website. That is not audience building. So, if you at the beginning of this episode thought, yeah, I do audience building, and your audience building consisted of social media posting and having something on your website for people to go, yeah, I'll opt in, I am very sorry to break the news to you. That is not audience building. Audience building is way, way more strategic than that. And what I want to cover in this episode is some of the strategic things that looks like proper audience building and working really hard to grow that list. One thing I have to start by saying though is lead magnets are still one of the most effective ways to build your list and to get people onto your email list. People need a reason to get on your email list. And lead [00:09:00] magnets are still a brilliant way of doing that. They're not dead. They people, some people are really anti lead magnets. Honestly, if it's a good lead magnet, they still work really, really well. And they are always worth having in your business. and multiple lead magnets, if possible. And we can talk all about that in another episode about what works for lead magnets and all that sort of stuff. And I have done in previous episodes, but the lead magnets are really, really important. However, the other key bit is, and I think this is again, a mistake that people make is they think I'm posting on social I'm. I've got an opt in on my website, and I've got a lead magnet. Why is my audience not growing? Because again, it's back to that thing of, if you make it, they will come, where unfortunately they won't. I'd love it if they did, and it would make our lives so much easier. And holding out to go viral would be ace, but I don't think any of us can rely on that. We really need to have a strategy that says, now I have this lead magnet [00:10:00] or now I have these different lead magnets. How am I going to get that in front of more people? And that's the key bit that people are missing out. That's the audience building bit that people aren't quite getting their head around and being strategic about. Or Where they are being strategic, they're not doing it enough. Again, having that list building thing isn't just about a created lead magnet. I posted it a couple of times. Now I'm good to go. It is an ongoing thing. In fact, so much so that within my world. And when I say my world, we actually have a community that is for anybody who works with me. So whether they are on the grow, launch, sell course, whether they are in my membership, whether they work one to one with me or on one of the accelerator programs. They all have a community, which my team have very sweetly and funnily named it Tease World, because I talk about people being in my world. And we did a challenge at the beginning of 2025, where I encouraged them to [00:11:00] apply and to reach out to 14 places a week to a day, to try and get in front of other people's audiences. And that's the kind of strategy that I'm talking about. Now, Can they maintain 14 a week? Probably not. Could I maintain 14 a week? No. However, as a challenge, it was great, but there should be a level of something that you are doing every single week, the same way as you wouldn't not post on social media or you wouldn't not put your content out there. I want you to view the audience building activity, the audience building strategy, the same way. So I've got some ideas for you as to how you get people in your world and how you get that lead magnet in front of those people. That's the key bit. Again, it's all well and good and nice having people in our world, but we want them to see that lead magnet. And I've got some different ideas. Now, the first one is obviously organic social media. If you are posting regularly on social media, I want you to regularly post your [00:12:00] lead magnet. People get really het up and worried over this about what if people are getting annoyed? What if they're getting frustrated? What if they think I'm selling to them? Well, first off, you're not selling to them. Secondly, hopefully you have created a lead magnet that is a value and that is really important in my world. We've all downloaded stuff. That's absolute dog poop and we don't want our lead magnets to be that case. We want it to be really good. So hopefully you're doing something of value and it's for free. So why wouldn't you want to share it? Why wouldn't you want to get it out there? And why wouldn't your perfect customer want to download it? Also, as we've already talked about, the algorithm can work against us sometimes and very few people can see our posts. So even if you feel like you were posting it every single week, actually in reality, not many people are seeing it. So that's the first thing. I want you to be posting it on social media and I want you to be posting it. or your lead magnets really, really regularly. Also, with that, you can have different images, different captions. [00:13:00] You don't have to post the same thing every time. You can have different ways that you talk about it. Secondly, chatbots. Now, I did an episode back on, back in 2024, episode 365. We'll link to it in the show notes. If you ever want to see the show notes, you go to thereseaheathwaring. com forward slash, and you just put in the number of the episode. And this episode is number 388. So all the links will be in there. So we did an episode with the lovely Mel Ellers, all about chatbots and how effective they are. getting engagement, but also using them for things like getting opt ins into your email list. And we would have all seen them. It's fairly simple, but there are some kind of important rules and things. So do make sure that you follow Mel and have a look at her stuff. I'll make sure we link up to her as well. But basically what you're doing is you're getting people to comment a word and you're sending them a link to then. opt in either a link to opt into your lead magnet or you're getting them to opt [00:14:00] in through the bot itself. But it can be a really effective and simple way for your audience to get their hands on your lead magnet. And if it's a good post, it's like a self fulfilling prophecy. Hopefully, you'll know that what happens with social media is that when someone likes or comments or interacts with your post, the platform goes, Oh, okay, people are finding this useful and they show it to more people. Well, when you've got a chat bot on there, and I'm talking specifically about Instagram here, this is where I've used them, and someone comments, then that helps with the engagement, which helps more people see it. It can be, from a list building point of view, using chatbots can be so, so super effective. The next point I've got down here is ads. So you don't have to put any money behind chatbots. If you pay for many chat, I think there's an element that you can still do it for free, but chat, many chats not. expensive. But if you did have some budget, you could run ads to your lead magnet. So again, you could set that up in Meta, you could do LinkedIn [00:15:00] ads, you can do Pinterest ads, wherever it might be, but you can put some money behind it to get it served to a new audience, people who don't know you, and then give them the option to opt in and get this thing for free. The next strategy is something I talk a lot about. And in fact, if you go and listen to episode three, four, six, it goes more in depth, but basically other people's audiences. And there's a few different strategies I want to talk about specifically under that umbrella. The first one is podcast stages interviews. Where can you go and speak? or be a guest on a podcast or be interviewed for something where it's being put out in front of their audience. That's such a great strategy and it's one that I use. I speak a lot. I like to go on other people's podcasts. FYI, if you have a podcast and you want me on, I would love to come and have a chat with you about that. But yeah, that's a strategy that in terms of getting in front of other people's audiences and serving up lead magnets, other people's podcasts, stages, i. e. you're speaking at places that can be virtual or in [00:16:00] person and interviews. The next point is training in other people's groups. This can be really, really useful. Now, there's probably a million questions about this I get asked in terms of, should you get paid? What should you do? When shouldn't you do it? How much content should you give them? There's a lot around this. However, in short, often, no, I wouldn't get paid for them. I have been paid for some groups to speak in. And as long as it's the right group or it's the right audience, it's not even about the numbers. I mean, I've done some sessions to really small audiences of like five, six people knowing that it will be in the vault and there's more in their membership, but maybe five, six people turn up live. I have no problem with that. It's not about the numbers. It's not about like, yes, would I turn down a group of 5, 000 people? Not in a million years. Like I would be there like a shot. However, It doesn't mean I won't do it if it's not a ginormous group. And I think that's something that when...