As a freelance writer, you’re building a business. And one of the most useful things to any business is an audience or a list.
The type of audience you want to build will vary depending on your goals. If you’re looking to land more clients, you’ll want to build an audience primarily of marketers and other people who may hire you. If you’re looking to scale your business — by offering a short training program, for example — then you might want to broaden your audience to include more businessowners.
There are two places that are a natural fit for a writer looking to build an audience — LinkedIn and email.
Building an audience on LinkedIn can…
- Increase your connections and name recognition with marketers in your industry.
- Establish you as an authority in your niche.
- Bring more clients and projects your way.
Building an email list can…
- Give you a direct line to the marketers who may want to hire you.
- Allow you to set up a waiting list for project openings — a system that lets you pick and choose what you want to work on and increase your fees.
- Position you to sell scalable products like e-books.
In short, when you build an audience, it can make landing clients easier… it can put you in the path of unexpected opportunities… it sets you up to scale your business and your income later… and it grows your overall credibility and authority in your industry.
Now, if you want to build an audience fast, you can pour a ton of resources into your efforts. You can spend the next month focused on nothing but increasing your followers or growing your list. Or you can spend money on paid advertising to attract more people to you.
But you might not have that kind of time or money to invest. And, with a rapid-growth plan, you might also end up with a lot of lower-quality connections and leads.
It can be far less stressful, more attainable, and more productive to take a slow-burn approach to building your audience.
3 Slow-Burn Techniques to Grow Your LinkedIn Audience
Before you choose a method for growing your audience, spend a little time thinking about your goals.
If you want to land more clients, then it makes sense to focus on attracting marketing managers, VPs, and directors, along with content managers. Those are the people who do the hiring in most cases.
On the other hand, if you want to grow your network, so you can offer your clients referrals when they need them, then you might want to focus more on making a variety of connections, including graphic designers, web developers, and media buyers.
Your goals will determine what kind of content you create and who you focus on for your audience-building efforts.
1. Follow and Comment
One way to build a high-quality, targeted LinkedIn audience is to follow people who attract the same audience you want to attract.
When you follow a person on LinkedIn, their posts will start showing up in your feed. When that happens, read their post carefully, and then comment on it in a thoughtful, useful way.
This takes time, but it delivers good results.
First, you’ll start to gain the attention of the original poster. When that happens — say they respond directly to one of your comments — reach out to them with a connection request.
Second, and more commonly, you’ll have the opportunity to interact with other people who are part of your desired audience. You may find yourself in a comment conversation with someone who is completely new to you, but who is part of the audience you want to draw in. When that happens, reach out to that person with a connection request.
A few tips to add power to this strategy:
- Use LinkedIn’s search feature to find people who are part of your target audience — for example with LinkedIn’s advanced search feature, you can look for people with Marketing Manager in their title.
- When searching for people to follow, look at their profile and check their recent activity — ideally you want to follow people who have posted in the last month or so, and who regularly post their own content.
- Prioritize commenting on posts that have a lot of responses.
2. Get on a Regular Posting Schedule
One of the most surefire ways to build an audience on LinkedIn is to start posting your own content regularly.
You can post daily, but even posting two or three times a week on a consistent basis will start to get you in front of more people, which will bring more people into your audience.
When it comes to what to post, study the people you’re following — the people who have the attention of your audience. See what they’re posting that’s getting a good response and then start thinking and writing about similar topics.
A few tips to add power to this strategy:
- Include video, carousels, and graphics in your posts. Text posts are fine, but you’ll get more traction if you mix it up a bit.
- Don’t put links in your posts. If you have a link to share, add it to the comments after you post. LinkedIn wants to keep people on LinkedIn, so it won’t give your post as much algorithmic love if you include a link off to another site.
- Interact with people. When people comment on your post, reply to them.
3. Publish Articles on LinkedIn
When you write a post that gets a lot of traction with your audience, expand on it and turn it into an article. Then post that article through LinkedIn’s publishing platform and share it with your audience.
In this case, go ahead and share the link directly, since you’re keeping it within the LinkedIn ecosystem.
A few tips to add power to this strategy:
- Pull interesting quotes or excerpts from your article and use those to create posts for sharing your article.
- Add a call to action at the end of your article to encourage people to connect with you.
- Repurpose your article when it makes sense — turn it into an infographic, a video, or a carousel.
You can use all three of these strategies or just one or two. Do it consistently over a long timeframe (at least six months or a year) and see how much your audience grows.
And don’t forget your original purpose! If you’re building your LinkedIn audience to land more gigs, be proactive about reaching out directly to people within your network to share ideas and pitch projects.
3 Slow-Burn Strategies for Your Email List
I’ve interviewed a lot of successful people over the years. Often, I ask them, “If you could go back and do one thing differently, what would it be?”
Far and away, the most common answer is, “I would have started building my list sooner.”
Building an email audience is an excellent way to strengthen your business and to create new opportunities for growing your income.
1. The Proven List-Building Method
The most time-tested method for building a list is a slow-burn strategy if there ever was one. It goes like this:
- Publish high-quality content on your website that addresses problems, questions, and pain points your audience has. Make sure that content is optimized for search engines and that you share it on social media.
- Create a useful lead-magnet that will appeal to your target audience.
- Whenever someone visits your site to read your content, invite them to join your list in exchange for your lead-magnet.
It’s a simple strategy, but one that takes time and commitment to execute well. That’s actually good news, though. It means few people follow through on this one. If you stick with it over time, you’re all but guaranteed to see results.
2. Change Your Email Signature
This is one of the simplest, easiest ways to attract people to your list.
In your professional email, change your signature to include an invitation to join your email list. Don’t forget to include a benefit or a reason why they should join.
Will everyone who gets an email from you sign up? No. But some people will, and over time, that will add to your audience.
3. Cross Pollinate
Attracting other people’s audiences to your email list is another proven strategy. In this case, you find people who have blogs, newsletters, podcasts, publications, or social media feeds that are serving the audience you also wish to reach.
And then you reach out to those content creators to see if you can collaborate with them. You might write a guest post on their blog, do a guest spot on their podcast, or maybe even host a webinar together.
When you do so, you help them bring useful, interesting content to their audience, and you get the chance to invite their audience to follow you, as well.
Growing an audience in an intentional way and taking the time to do it organically can pay big dividends down the road. It can make everything about your business easier — attracting high-quality clients and interesting projects to you and opening the doors to unexpected opportunities, like speaking engagements and book deals.
And with these slow-burn strategies, you can build your audience one small step at a time in a completely manageable way.
