Making the Most of a Small Audience
“But I don’t have an audience” — can you relate? 🤔
If you’ve been letting a smaller audience hold you back from building a side hustle, it’s time to shift your perspective.
The truth is you don’t need a large audience to have a fulfilling and lucrative online business.
To avoid falling into the follower count trap, listen to the latest podcast episode and I’ll explain everything, including how you can tap into your small audience effectively.
CLICK BELOW TO LISTEN!
Transcript:
Hey risers, welcome to Empathy Rising.
I do want to let you guys know that I am a little under the weather and so my voice might sound scritchy or scratchy on this episode, so bear with me.
I am excited about today's episode because I am coming hard for one of the biggest myths of online income, and that's the idea that you have to have a huge audience before you can be successful.
We definitely talk about audience building on this show. I do believe in audience building, but I don't believe that there is a certain number that your audience needs to be or a certain size before you can start making money. In fact, one of my Side Hustle students, I had to reframe this for her. She made some money from her side hustle from a side gig while she has been in this turmoil with her practice, like all of us have, right. And she was able to bring in a couple of dollars.
And I'm like hell yeah, that's what it's about. And she would probably say she doesn't even “have an audience” yet because she doesn't have anyone on her email list or anyone in a Facebook group, but she still was able to make money.
While most therapists have been scrambling to bring their practices online, or if they already had some clients online, they've been trying to get all their clients online, right? I've been sitting back and watching everything take place. Now you guys know it is never my intention to take therapists out of mental health.
By teaching you guys how to repurpose and repackage your clinical skills, it is not my intention to say “let's make all the therapist coaches now”, right? I don't want that. I will flat out say, I don't want that. I want you guys to be able to have caseloads that are manageable and feasible. And if that means only eight clients for you, I want you to be able to have a supplemental income stream that you don't have to go back to square one or feel like you need a new degree or anything like that.
I know that your clinical skills can be translated into a course, or maybe it is coaching, or a membership site, or whatever that is. But I've seen some really cool things, maybe hidden benefits happening because of this whole pandemic.
And I think our field is going to start to make some changes, right? They're going to recognize how hard they have been making it on us previously to provide consistent care, cohesive care, continuous care, if our clients move out of state and all of this stuff. So I think maybe national licensure might be fast tracked for this.
I would cross my fingers for that for all the other military spouses out there. Maybe insurance reform will happen. We're already seeing Medicaid and Medicare relax their telehealth restrictions and things like that. Maybe these things will stay around and I really hope so. But I've also been privy to a lot of conversations, a lot of people reaching out to me about the idea that online income has a real appeal right now because it is unregulated.
So some of you might've barely skipped a beat, right? You might've already been prepared for telehealth and boom, cool. All your clients were like, sure, I'll see you on the computer. No problem. But a lot of people, now they're scrambling to get certifications in some sort of teleplatform, or they're scrambling to find platforms.
And some people have had to let go of a week's worth of clients, right? Normally the lack of regulation of coaching or courses gets our backs up a little bit. We've all gone to grad school, whether that's master's level, whether that's doctorate level, whatever.
We've all done so many hours of face to face work to get our licenses, and we've all done so many hours of continuing ed that when we see somebody without those credentials able to be a coach or be a whatever, that we can get a little offended by that. But in times like right now, to be able to just be like, sure, I can go sit out and not have to worry about somebody overhearing our conversation.
I don't have to be set up for confidentiality. I don't have to be set up for HIPAA. We can just exchange cash for a service. That's nice, right? What's interesting about this is the thing that keeps most people from starting is the fact that they don't “have an audience”.
“I don't have an audience” —I think that is something that I hear all of the time. And there is a purpose for cultivating an audience for continuing to grow leads, right? There's a reason for that. The bigger the audience that we have, the easier it is to then have sales and promotions and to sell that course or to book coaching clients or to enroll membership site members.
There is a reason to continually build an audience, but you don't have to have an audience to make money. So that's what we're going to dive into today. Because the idea of even having 10,000, or 5,000, or even 1,000 people on a list or in a group or in some cumulative place before you can make money isn't true.
Now here are some things that are true. What is true is that an industry standard conversion rate for online income—now this is industry standard I am generalizing here because there are so many factors that go into this—but what is true is that the industry standard conversion rate is between one and three percent So that means for every hundred people in your audience, in that Facebook group on that email list wherever you have them, you can assume that one to three of them will buy.
And it's hearing these stats that's disheartening to people, and this is where people think they need those thousands of people if they're gonna make a side hustle worthwhile. But there's a lot of things that we have to take into account, and if you've been listening to me for a while, you probably can guess already what these things are. But we have to take your income goal into consideration.
Did only a few of your clients agree to come online? And so now you're like half your caseload, and you've got to make up half your caseload. That's a whole lot different than those like hundred thousand dollar launches that people like Amy Porterfield and all those other people are talking about. Or maybe you just want to put an extra 500 toward your mortgage every month cause you want to pay your house off faster. Or you're attacking those student loans like crazy and you just want to pay those down as fast as you can.
So those income goals look different. And based on what you tell me you want and need from your online income stream, we can devise a plan. And you might not need as big of an audience as you think you do. You also want to talk about the type of program. You've heard me talk about this a million times too, but are we talking about a low price, high volume type of program, like a membership site? Or are we talking about a group program that's premium priced?
Those are going to look very different. And, also, the rate of growth. If this is something that, if you had a 15,000 launch once a year, that would be amazing. Okay, then we can go slower and the size of your audience doesn't matter as much. But if you're trying to have a 15,000 launch every quarter, then we need to do some different strategies.
Okay, so your income goal, the type of program you're drawn to and how fast you want to go all play into this because with a premium group program, say your premium group program is priced at 3,000, you might only need three or four people. To make it worthwhile you can definitely close three or four people off of an audience of 250 or 300 people.
Okay, so 250 to 300 people sounds a heck of a lot different than 10,000. So even with a membership site you might think oh, I want hundreds of members right off the bat. And if you tell me that I need this to be making me 5,000 or 10,000 a month immediately, then we're going to need a big audience and we're going to need a big audience fast, which means we're probably going to be paying for that audience, meaning running ads or whatever that is.
But what if you were to enroll your first 10 members in your membership site, and then you enrolled 10 more a few weeks later, and then you're enrolled 10 more a few weeks later. So it's like a low steady hum of audience building versus a big, huge, like exponential curve—probably not appropriate right now—exponential curve of audience growth, right?
So every time you give me more input into what you want and need from this, it informs the strategy that I reflect back at you, okay? This is why I say to all of my Side Hustle students on the first day of class, or the first day of the program, I say there are many roads to the end result.
Even if all of my Side Hustle students started at the exact same time, and they all wanted to develop the exact same program, by the end of that six months, those programs would not be recognizable. They would each be so distinct because the path that each person needs to take and wants to take makes everything look different.
Because I think what happens when we start getting into online income—and I'm not trying to throw Amy Porterfield under the bus—I listen to her every week. I think she's great. But when we get into online income, we often find these big gurus, Amy included, and we all know some of the other ones, right? And they're guru status, right? They're trying to get their businesses up to 10 million dollars.
If they don't hit six figures with their launch, then it's a flop, right? God forbid they hit 999,000. Then they're like, oh, I failed. So when we start hearing those kinds of numbers and we start hearing that's the goal, that is what we think we need to do. That's when we think it's worthwhile, right? If we're not hitting those massive numbers, then what are we doing?
And the truth is when people are sharing those numbers, like we had a 250,000 launch, we had a 500,000 launch, right? That is their gross revenue. Now this is like accounting 101, not always a therapist skillset, but gross revenue, meaning before their expenses. We have no idea what they paid on ads. We have no idea what they paid assistants.
We now have no idea what they paid copywriters, graphic designers. We have no idea what they paid in taxes on that, right? So they are not sharing their profit. They are only sharing this gross number. And we also don't know how much of that was payment plans and how much of that was like paid in full and all kinds of stuff.
So that might be 500,000 coming in over the next 24 months, depending on what kind of payment plans they have. So there's this picture that's painted. It makes it look like this is what we have to do. And it's just setting us up to believe that, oh, I have…
And you know what? I'm just thinking about this. This is totally off script, but it's cause they all have fricking courses about how to build your audience. So they're like putting it out there that this is the only way to do it. And look at these huge numbers. And by the way, if you want to do it to go by my email list course, that's why. Sorry, if I'm bursting any bubbles, I'm a little ranty today, right?
I actually recorded an episode about a year ago now, where I had Allison Puryear of Abundance Practice Builders on, and she talked about her 200,000 launch. So you can scroll back a ways and listen to that one. It was like 200K in seven days.
But what I loved about this episode was Allison actually broke these numbers down for us. She shared her expenses, how much she paid other coaches, how much she paid other assistants and other helpers in her launch, and her expenses actually weren't that high. But she also shared her stress level to make the 200,000 in seven days, right? So it was really great to get an honest breakdown of something like this.
So if you're wanting to do numbers like that it's totally possible, but I want you to hear all the things that go into a huge launch like that. So you can scroll back and listen to that episode. But most of us. If we made a 200,000 in a launch, we'd be like, holy crap, I hit the mother load.
But most of us are like, wow, if I made an extra 20K this year I would be, like, living large. I would be able to put a 20K dent in whatever that is. I could take a really awesome vacation. I could shrink my caseload by three clients and be able to be there at school pickup or whatever.
So most of us are not… We might be dreaming about these huge numbers, but that's not what we're doing this for necessarily. We're drawn sometimes to the glamor, but we're not privy to the ugly stuff that goes on behind the scenes of these launches. So we just start to chase that without actually checking in to see if their approaches and their methods and their one-size-fits-all approach is right for us.
This is how we come to believe that we need that huge audience. If we're ever going to have the kind of time and financial freedom that these gurus make it seem so possible, we're going to have to wait until we're big enough, right? We have to wait until we have earned that kind of an audience.
And that's just crap. It's just crap. This is where I get fired up. I've been fired up this whole episode, but I'm so passionate about you guys doing this on your own terms. My belief about online income is that it should fit in with your lifestyle and it should make sense for you. When you've done the work to align your side hustle, when it is not a one-size-fits-all, rubber-stamp kind of approach, but when it is an approach that aligns with you, your strengths, your needs, your goals.
Hey Risers, I am so honored and excited to be interrupting you for just a moment here with an invitation to our third annual Side Hustle Open House. For three years in a row, I have been peeling back the curtain, so to speak, and giving you not only a sneak peek, but really a deep dive into what is included inside of Side Hustle before you ever enroll.
That way you get to see everything that's included in the curriculum. All of the ways that I facilitate you going from idea to income and building out your online income stream and all of the extras that are included. So the way this is going to work is on October 19th at 7pm Eastern, 4pm Pacific. You guys are going to meet me on Zoom and I'm going to walk you step by step through what is included inside Hustle.
So I go phase by phase, I show you lesson by lesson, and I show you all of the templates. It's trackers, tutorials, the workbook pages, everything that's included to keep you accountable, to keep you moving forward, to support you on your journey. And I explain how I facilitate you in all of that. So that's the first aspect of the open house.
We have our support staff, our copywriter and our graphic designer. They're going to come and show you more about their role in the program. So how they help you produce quality, professional looking assets. So you look like you have not just cobbled this together on your own. You've really put together a polished product.
And then the third aspect of this open house that I'm always so proud of is our current students and our alumni who not only get to come and show off a little bit for you and show you what they've made over our nine months together, but also to give you a really honest insight into what it's like to be a Side Hustle student, what it's like to be a newbie, and what it's like to balance taking on something new with an existing practice and family and life and all of that stuff.
So when you go through Side Hustle Open House, you're able to see everything that I offer for you, everything that the support staff offers for you, and get real life accounts from real life students. I really love this open house because not only do you get to kind of try it before you buy it, but it gives you the opportunity to envision working with me, envision what you're taking on when you go through Side Hustle, and to get to see yourself mirrored back in these students who are a year out from where you are right now.
So, again, I would love to invite you to attend our third annual open house. Really get to see and experience this proven program and to decide if it feels right for you. The Open House is taking place on October 19th at 7pm Eastern, 4pm Pacific. And even if you can't attend but you want to still see how Side Hustle works and if it feels like a fit for you, please go ahead and register because that's the way that you'll get the replay.
So, I hope to see you there. I can't wait to meet you and help you decide if Side Hustle feels like your right next step for 2023. All right, back to the regular episode.
Then you can start to see results that are tailored to you. When you figure out how much you actually make, want to make, even if it is a hundred thousand dollars, like that's awesome. Let's build a plan for it. So when you figure out what type of income you need from this income stream, when you have figured out the right type of offer, I want to do a group program. I want to do a membership site, whatever that is.
And when you've figured out how fast it is, you want to go: How often do you want to be launching? How often do you want to be selling? Is this side hustle going to eventually become your full time thing and your therapy practice is your side hustle? Maybe.
And some of you are like, whoa, I never even thought of that. Those are the things that we need to consider, and when you do, you're going to start to feel much more intentional about the size of your audience, not like you're chasing some arbitrary number, okay? When we are informed by facts instead of the glamor or the glitz or these possibilities.
Then we're going to be doing this from a much more grounded place and a much more intentional place. And I don't want to say this, like I'm not trying to burst bubbles and I'm not trying to say that don't dream big. I don't really want a million dollar business. I really don't, but. I want my business to grow.
I want to make more money, right? I want to help more therapists. I want to serve more people. So I'm not trying to say play small, but I'm trying to say get honest with what you need right now. And if you really are chasing those big numbers, that's awesome. But there's a plan and a step—an approach that's going to be tailor made to you versus just this like I said, one-size-fits-all stamp.
And the other thing to think about is when you get clear on this, when you get clear on your goal, you're going to realize—I would bet money on this—you're going to realize that the audience size that you need is a lot lower and the audience size to get started is a lot lower than you originally thought.
So I've spent a lot of time talking about why the idea that needing a big audience is a myth, right? If you can gather a hundred people to your email list, which can be done in a month. If you can gather that many people, you can start making money. And I know I said, I didn't want to put any kind of, like, magic numbers on this. And I'm just throwing it out there, but an audience as small as 100 can close for you.
It might only be two people and we need to think about what type of program makes sense for you to run with two people, but two out of a hundred could actually be really lucrative if you're selling a 5, 000 program. So there's lots of different approaches to make this make sense.
So we've talked about why a big audience is a myth, but now what I want to share real quick is my top tip, my most important tip for making an impact with a small audience, okay? Because if your marketing isn't working, if you're not inviting the right people to join you, if you're not attracting the right people, then none of this matters, right? An audience of a hundred is going to convert if it's a hundred of the right people.
But if you have an audience of a thousand of the wrong people, you'll probably get a worse conversion rate than you would with a hundred right people. This is why I want to talk about what we do with a small audience, okay? The thing to think about with any audience, but especially with a small audience, is focusing on the benefits of your program and not the features.
Okay, the biggest mistake, and I see this time and time again when I'm searching for sales pages to share with Side Hustle students for them to just get a feel for different programs that are out there. I see this I would say five times out of 10 where people who are promoting an offer or promoting an online program, they talk about what is included.
Oh, it's a six module course with five lessons each. So you're going to learn 30 new things. It's a membership site with a weekly structure that includes training, Q and A's, and coaching. Okay, it's a group program that includes new lessons and office hours and small group calls.
Okay, all of those are features, they don't tell me why I need to be in that course or why I need to be in that membership site or why I need to be in that group program. They just tell me what's included in the group program.
Now there is a time and place for these things and people do need to know these things, but they need to be emotionally invested in the program before they even care, right? If before they even care what's this, what time, how much time is this going to take me?
Or what does the weekly schedule look like? Or what am I going to get from this thing? Before you're even willing to ask those questions, they have to be interested and emotionally invested in the thing first. And those are not the things selling the features is not what's going to get you a good conversion rate on a big audience or on a small audience.
What makes “selling easy” and what maximizes a small audience is being deeply aligned with sharing the benefits of it. So not only do we need to be deeply aligned with why we want the online income stream, which will help us see that we actually don't need a big audience, we need to be deeply aligned with what we're offering that audience.
Because if we're aligned with that, we will know the emotional benefits and we'll not only know them, we'll believe in them. That's the difference between a convincing salesperson and an authentic salesperson. A convincing salesperson knows the benefits. They know why somebody could benefit from the program, but an authentic salesperson, when sales feels easy and not slimy and just like a natural invitation, that's because that person believes in the benefits.
So, it's funny, I talked about a sleazy salesperson, but I'm going to use a car example here and car salesman get a really bad rap, but I'm going to use a car example because it's the easiest way to depict the difference between features and benefits. And my Side Hustle students, they always chuckle when I do this example.
So if any of them are listening, they know exactly what's coming. But I want you guys to picture a vehicle in your mind, and we're going to call it… It's a Hyundai Tucson, so it's one of those small crossover SUV type things. So that's what it is. It's a small crossover SUV. It is brand new. It has zero miles on it. It is red. And I don't know this stat for sure, but let's just say that it gets 35 miles to the gallon. Okay?
These are all the features of the car. It's a Hyundai Tucson, it's brand new, it's red, and it gets 35 miles to the gallon. Okay? Those are the features. So if somebody walks up and they'll be like, hey, yeah, it's red, and it gets this kind of gas mileage, and, oh yeah, by the way, it's brand new.
People are like, okay, cool. But let's take this further and let's talk about what the benefits of this car are. So you guys know I use generic examples, so don't think I'm trying to be biased or anything against any type of people. But we're gonna say we've got a Hyundai dealership in California, In SoCal, right?
And there's this 22 year old surfer dude, and he just graduated college, and he got money from his family, and he's decided that he wants to buy a new car, right? He is walking into the Hyundai dealership. And now let's just really juxtapose this. There is a new family: A mom, a dad, and a six month old baby, and they walk into a Hyundai dealership.
So the Hyundai salesman comes up to the surfer dude and he's bro, it's got all the latest tech. It's got Apple car play. I don't know why I'm doing this surfer voice. It's got Apple car play. It's got this kind of camera and this kind of sunroof, and it's got all the latest gadgets, Bluetooth, that whatever, when you buy this brand new car, you are going to be the hippest dude.
You're going to be the coolest guy. Okay, it's red too. So when you pull up at the beach and you're unloading your surfboard, all those surfer chicks, they're gonna see you, right? You're gonna be noticeable. So not only are you gonna be cool with this brand new car with all the tech, you are going to be hot and sexy and attractive in this red car.
And you can take off from here in San Diego and drive all the way up to Carmel and… I’m making stuff up… all the way up the coast without having to fill up your tank because this thing gets 35 miles to the gallon. So you have the freedom and you can just take off, right?
So this is how we relate those features. It's brand new, it's red, and it gets 35 miles to the gallon. This is how we relate those features to the emotional benefits of being cool, of being hot, sexy, and attractive, and of freedom. Okay, so now let's sell that exact same car.
Red, brand new, 35 miles to the gallon. Let's sell that to a family. Okay, so this family walks, in Maine, to this Hyundai dealership and the salesperson says, wow, I see you guys have a brand new baby. Let's check out this Hyundai Tucson over here. This thing is brand new, no one else has ever driven this car.
You know that it is clean and it doesn't have any smoke or anything from any previous users in it also, the brakes are brand new, the fuel injection is brand new, all of this stuff. That this is a reliable brand new car. It's also got the latest safety features on it. This brand new car is safe and reliable, right? And it's also red. So when you're out there on the road with your new baby in the back, everyone is going to see you. You will not be missed in this red car.
So again, you are safe in this red car and it gets 35 miles to the gallon. I know you're probably buying diapers and wipes, maybe even some formula or whatever. You've got some new expenses because of this baby, this thing gets 35 miles to the gallon. And so you will only have to fill up maybe once a month, and you're spending money wisely.
So the same exact car that made the dude in California cool, hot, and hit the open road makes this family safe and financially responsible. Okay? So it is not the features of anything that sells anything, right?
We're talking cars here, but it's not the features of your course. It's not how many modules it has. It's not how many lessons it teaches your group program. The fact that you have two weekly calls, that doesn't matter. What sells your program or your offer is talking about the benefits. And so it doesn't matter how many people are in your audience.
You can have amazing conversion rates with a small audience if you are connecting authentically to the benefits of your offer, and you are finding people who need those benefits, okay, so you can see that features don't really matter and it's how the product relates to the customer and how it addresses their concerns and how it gives them the desired outcome.
And so if you guys remember back a couple of episodes, towards the end of last year, I had Eileen on. Eileen created a membership site for parents of neurotypical kiddos who have some behavioral challenges because their brains work differently. And she created a membership site, and Eileen is in this population. She's in this community. She lives it every day.
And so she knows the benefits of learning what she teaches in her membership site, and she knows the benefits of having community with other moms who get it because she lives it. So Eileen had an audience of around a thousand people, which if we go back to the conversion rates of one to three percent, we could assume that about 10 to 30 people were going to join her membership site.
And, in fact, Eileen enrolled 71 people in her membership site, which is a seven percent conversion rate. So she more than doubled the industry standard conversion rate. And she also told me the other day that she has 55 people on her waitlist for the next time she opens the doors. So she could easily have another 30. Knowing the benefits of your offer, not knowing them, but believing the benefits of your offer and being deeply aligned with them… this is why you guys have heard me say, I think that therapists make better marketers than people with Harvard MBAs: Because empathy is a skill that you guys have, that all therapists have.
This is something that you have honed for a long time. It's not something you're faking or making up, and it's not even something that you're a novice at. In fact, you're probably so good at it that you don't even count it as a skill anymore.
So don't worry about having a small audience. It's really just a matter of tapping directly into why you want to make this program, your desires, your values, right? The pieces make sense for you. And then empathizing deeply with the people that you're called to help. So again, your clinical skills, repackaged and repurposed.
And so when you just happen to your empathy, when you've done some of the work that makes sure that this is the right fit for you, that you're going at the right speed, that you're aiming at the right income goal. You can get started with a small audience and you can serve the hell out of that small audience.
And you're ready to start your online income stream way sooner than you think. And so I know that expanding your business right now is… it's a weird subject. It's something that all of us are like living in this weird limbo where we don't know what the next two weeks are going to look like, right?
Are their kids going back to school or the kids not going back to school? Is the grocery store going to have toilet paper or the grocery store is not going to have toilet paper, right? So some of you might be shying away from the idea of a Side Hustle and diving deeper into your practice. And I feel you, but some of you might see what's going on right now and recognize that you want diverse income.
You want a diversified livelihood and you want to hedge your bets against this uncertainty. And I feel that too. So what we've talked about today is business and marketing at its core, right? So apply it where you need it right now. If you need to be thinking about marketing your practice a little bit more, everything we've talked about applies to your practice too.
Dive into the benefits of working with you, not the features. Don't talk about 50-minute sessions. Don't talk about the fact that you're online because everybody's online now. Right? Start talking about the benefits of working with you. And if you want to apply this to your side hustle or another program that's a little bit less regulated and is maybe easier to get off the ground right now, then apply it there as well.
So I hope this episode has done a few things for you. I hope it's shown you that everything you need is inside of you to market or sell any product therapy or otherwise. And I also hope that it's shown you that you don't have to wait to hit some obscure number of email subscribers or social media followers to get started promoting you and your programs and your products. Authentic, aligned marketing always wins. Okay, it always wins. Alright until then guys, keep on rising.
