S5E1 | warmed up and ready to buy

“We need to grow those audiences, nurture them, warm them up, and show them what we can do for them, show them what’s possible, and show them why they need us before we can sell.”

Can you believe we’re already on season five of the podcast? We’ve been going strong for nine months! With a new season comes a new topic, and this season will be all about monetizing! 

Today I’m diving into why it’s so important to have a ‘warm’ audience to sell to. 

I launched my first business in 2005, and at that point I didn’t even have a Facebook profile. Hard to imagine, right? But what I did have was one community forum that I generated business from, which used to grow my email list. At that point I knew I wanted to become an entrepreneur, to be my own boss, and to run things the way that I wanted to run them. So I was really excited to create an offer to generate income to make that dream a reality. 

At the time I was doing a lot of tech work, consulting, and internet marketing, so I put out these recurring packages that offered a bunch of different things. I was so excited by the offer that I was launching that I called in sick to work the next day so I could be home to tend to the rush of emails I was expecting. 

But there was no rush. 

Even though I sent out the offer to the forum and the email list, the audience was so small. There was also no preparation or runway before the launch to prepare people, there was no warm up. I didn’t explain why people needed these packages. The bottom line was, I didn’t have an audience that warmed up and ready to buy. 

If you don’t have a large enough audience, or your audience doesn’t know who you are, you can’t sell to them. You need to grow those audiences, nurture them, warm them up, and show them what you can do for them before you can sell.

You can’t just put out a product and hope people will sign up. Before you launch you need to listen to your audience’s wants and needs so you’ll know for sure that people will sign up. You need to build that ‘know, like, and trust’ factor because people won’t buy if they don’t know who you are or what you offer. 

And, as much as I hate to say it, you need an audience that’s warmed up for the algorithms. What you see on Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok is based on the algorithm. These platforms realize what content you like, and will show you more of that content to get you to stay on the sit longer.

Your audience can also help you to determine what to sell, because you can ask them what they want. Listening to my group has led me to create things like the monthly calendar of engaging posts in my membership, or strategies to increase engagement and monetization. And three years later, we’re still going strong doing that. 

And that’s a wrap for the first episode of Season 5! Talk to you soon!