The Smaller the Audience The Better

Don’t let the idea of needing a BIG audience keep you from getting started building one.

If you’re always working towards the next big number, you might be neglecting the process of building relationships with your current audience.

This is your reminder that every person in your audience is just that: a person. They’re not just a number, right? They have real hopes, real fears, real problems and real dreams.

You have the great opportunity of making a positive impact in their lives.

If you focus on service over accumulation, you can make a great impact AND a great income with just a few people on your list.

Learn how a smaller audience can actually be better than a big one in the latest podcast episode.

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Full Show Notes (Transcript)…

Hey, risers, welcome to Empathy Rising. 

There is a very strong argument for a small audience, a small, but mighty and effective and engaged audience I feel is always going to serve you better than a big audience and we're going to explore a little bit of that today because we tend to think that having a bigger online audience is important, but bigger is not always better when it comes to starting a side hustle.

And I really want to dive into that today with you guys. What I want you to imagine Is the largest group gathering that you've personally hosted with the state of the world right now? We might have to go back a few years because we really haven't had large gatherings for a while, but it might've been a wedding, yours or a family members that you planned, or you hosted. It might've been a family reunion, a Birthday, a bat mitzvah, like any of these kind of ritualistic or like celebrations that we tend to have, it might be something like that or maybe it was like a business or a corporate event that you've planned or that you've executed. What I want you to think back is how many people were there.

The average guest list for a wedding is between a hundred and 50 people. That's usually where they tend to fall. Now, sometimes there's those really big, fancy weddings that have 300 people in attendance. If both people maybe have a big family or whatever, 300 is usually where we see the gap, the max of events like this.

Now you might be saying, there's no way I had even a hundred people. Or you might say my fam, my wedding was. 500 or whatever. So fill in the blank here with your particular number. But what I really want to get to is the fact that like when you hosted that event, you probably hosted it at something like an event center or a reception hall or somewhere other than your home.

Yes, there are people who have backyard weddings, but those backyard weddings tend to be smaller, right? Because there's no way that you are going to have that many people in your living room, or that many people using your bath, or that many people trying to fit in your kitchen in your dining room. The thing about audience building is that we get very caught up in the number of people that we are accumulating.

It feels like this task of just going out and gather, get more and more because that's what's going to make me money. And that's what's going to make me a business. And that's what I really want to refute and argue against for you guys today. The other thing that tends to happen is that number is virtual, right?

When we can visually or imagine 300 people in our house. We wouldn't even be able to walk from like our bedroom to the kitchen. It would be so jam packed. And what happens when we're talking about an online audience, we see a number on a screen, 130 people following me on Instagram, 425 people on my email list or whatever.

So we see this just numerical number, you see this just number on our screen and it loses all value. It loses all context and it just becomes this arbitrary number. So we're just like, Oh, I want to get it to say 426. Oh, now I wanted to get it to say 619. Now I want to get to 1200. All we're looking at is this number on a screen and we don't have any tangibility to that number.

What we call this in the online space is a vanity metric that number being higher makes you feel better about yourself or your business or the state of things. Like things are going well because this number is going up. So it becomes a vanity. An audience that is big, let's say you have a 000 following you on Instagram, that's great, but an audience that's big does not equal an audience that buys from you.

And that's what we really need to get to the heart of today is those vanity metrics, something that goes up and it's. It makes you feel good about yourself or it makes you feel good about your business or it reflects you or reflects your business in a certain light does not actually mean that the profit is there to back it up, that the revenue is there to back it up.

So some of these gurus that you see, they have these giant followings like, wow, they must be so successful. The truth of the matter is most of the time, those giant followings are not equating into dollars in the bank. And I think that this is exactly what we tend to do is we focus too much on growing a big audience.

And we start to dehumanize those people in our audience. We see that numerical value and that's all we care about. And we forget that 426th person is a person with real hopes and real fears and real problems and real dreams. And that person has stumbled across Our thought leadership, our content, whatever we're putting out into the world, and they see hope there, or they see potential there, or they see a connection of maybe this will help me.

And if we, as the audience builder, are only focused on growing that vanity metric, accumulating people, we're going to forget about that person's hopes, dreams, fears, the faith, the trust, the hope that they're putting in us to potentially solve that problem for them. It's accumulate, it's focusing on accumulation instead of service.

The other thing that happens is that as you're just focusing on this number, as you're waiting for your audience to grow and you're putting your effort and your energy into accumulation, instead of service, you don't build relationships. People buy from people buy from people, even giant companies like Amazon.

We all know that Jeff Bezos went to space. We all know that we all know who that is. We all know what his company is. We all have an opinion about him, positive or negative. And therefore we have an opinion about his company, positive or negative. We know he's got a, he got a divorce. We know Bill and Melinda Gates are getting divorced, which.

Made me sad. I don't know why it made me sad. I don't know these people in real life, but it's still, we have a connection to the people who run these. companies. We don't just buy from brands, we buy from the people behind the brands. And so if you're only focusing on growing a number on a screen and you're not focusing on connecting with those people, you're never going to build the relationships that actually convert people from a number on a screen.

To a buyer to number, like it's number on a screen to money in your bank. And that's great. That's what a business is about making money. But all of us, I would say who are listening to this would argue that process of making the money comes through service, that process of making the money comes through impact.

Most, all of us still want to make an impact on the world to help the world become a better place. And that comes when we build relationships. The other thing that does happen is if you're not building the relationships, a lot of people are like, Oh, I can't have a launch until I have a thousand people on my list, or I can't build, have a launch until I have 5, 000 people following me on Instagram or whatever.

And so they wait to monetize. They wait to get the money in the bank, but what else are they waiting for? They're waiting to actually help people. They're waiting to help that person move from their bottom, their rock bottom to getting better or to being helped or to moving forward or overcoming that breakup or learning how to meditate and bring more peace into their day.

Whatever you're helping people with, it's supposed to have a positive impact. And if all you're focusing on is getting this number higher and higher, you're not going to have an impact. You're not going to build relationships and you're not going to make money. Because here's what happens when you embrace the idea of a smaller audience.

When you embrace the idea of keep, not necessarily keeping your audience small, but embrace where you are at in the process of audience building and say, I have 120 people here. If all 120 people were in my living room, holy crap, I'd be overwhelmed. There'd be no way that I could pay attention to that many people at one time, or that I could serve that many people at one time.

So try to humanize that number and imagine literally if you have to think about those people in your backyard or those people in your house, those people using your bathroom, right? It would be a totally different context. When you're able to do that, you are able to serve sooner. Whether this is for, through your free content that you're putting out on social media or your free emails that you're sending every week to nurture these people, you can serve them.

When you connect with them, you also, of course, can make sales from 120 people. We could put five people in a group program. No problem. Especially if there is a relationship with those 120 people, especially if you're not seeing them as a number, you're humanizing them and you're connecting with them.

This is why I think you should show up for your first follower, your first email subscriber, just like you would show up when there were a thousand or 10, 000. It's also easier to show up for one person than it is to show up for 10, 000 people, believe me. So put as much heart, soul, effort, energy into a small audience, and it will reap amazing rewards from, for you, not only from a money standpoint, but from an impact standpoint and from a connection standpoint.

It's also easier to make deeper and faster connections when you're talking to just a few people. You have the opportunity to really get to know your followers because you're not busy managing them. That's what I was saying. Like when you're talking to one person, it's a heck of a lot easier to maintain that conversation than when you've got a hundred or thousand or 10, 000, because all of a sudden at those large audience levels, your role shifts to a community manager.

Your role shifts to a bouncer, your role shifts to all kinds of different things. And if your role doesn't shift to that, if you want to be the person who maintains the connections, then you're hiring somebody to be your community manager, to be your bouncer. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but it's just another level of consideration as your audience grows, either you need to shift or you need to hire to fill that position with a small audience.

You can connect and you don't need outside resources. and or you don't need to change the way you interact with those people. You get to focus on the service. You get to focus on the connection because we don't want to think about hiring or anything like that until we've got significant and steady revenue coming in.

Then we can talk about hiring. All right. I'm going to give you four. Let me see. I think there's four probably count. Yes. I'm going to give you four reasons why I believe a smaller audience is better than a bigger audience. Okay. So the first thing is data. When you have a small audience, you can track their data so much better on office hours for side hustle.

Just this last week, we were going through one of my students funnels and we were seeing, okay, this person got on the wait list. For your program, which is amazing. And we said, where did they come from? And we could go into that single person and we could track all of the emails that person had opened. We could track all of the emails that person had clicked on.

Can you do this with a thousand people in your audience? Can you do this with 10, 000 people in your audience? Yes. The amount of data that you can gather doesn't change, but the process changes. When you've got 50 people on an email list, a hundred people on an email list, you can do this in an afternoon.

When you've got a thousand, 10, 000, whatever giant numbers of people on your list, that's going to take you weeks. Or again, you're going to be outsourcing and hiring it to somebody. Which costs you money, right? So a smaller audience allows you to gather data easier. You can see which emails they opened, which links they clicked, which posts they engaged with on Instagram or on social media.

And you can start to segment out who is a warmer lead and who is much more likely to purchase from you.

This is a lot harder to do. And I wouldn't say This is a lot more time consuming when your audience is bigger. When you can connect with people, when you can research your audience, when you can know what's working, you can do more of what's working and you learn that much more quickly and much more easily when your audience is small.

We've talked all episode about deeper connection, but this is the second thing that I think can happen. Much better and much easier with a smaller audiences, you can make those deeper connections. So as you are researching and gathering data, you might find your subscriber, Kathy. She opened five of the last emails, five of the last 10 emails, and she clicked on links in four of them.

And you can start to see patterns. Kathy is very interested in. Mindfulness. I'm just throwing a topic out there because the other five emails were about something different. So she's opened all of the mindfulness episodes or mindfulness emails, and she's clicked links in four out of five of them. We could make a little video or like a personal outreach.

You could do a video. You could do an email. You could do anything like that. It's for Kathy in particular. And you could say, Hey, Kathy, I just wanted to reach out today and check on you, see how you're doing. I know, I can tell by the way that, we're interacting together that you're really interested in mindfulness.

Do you have any particular questions? I'd love to support you as you're working towards this. That right there would make Kathy feel so seen, so understood, so heard, appreciated, all of those things. Kathy may come back and say, You know what? I don't have any questions right now. I just love following along with you and it's been so great and I'm just blown away that you've reached out to me. Thank you.

So it could just be a relationship builder. It could be a connection deepener. However, Kathy could also reply and say something like, Oh my gosh, yeah, I really need help with this. And then you could turn around and be like What if I, we could totally do a coaching call on that, or that's exactly what I teach in my program.

Do you want me to put you on the wait list? It could turn into a sale. It could turn into moving them closer to becoming a buyer from you. So it could just be a relationship builder, or it could be a sales mechanism. But both of those happen because you are able to connect with Kathy and you're able to connect with Kathy because you're able to easily, while your audience is small.

Go and see what she's interested in and form a deeper connection with her. You're able to serve her more intimately. You're able to know her story, to hear her story. You might even know their like families or their circumstances, and you can see how you can be genuinely helpful to them. Yes. Sales is a part of this.

Money is a part of this, right? You need to be compensated for your service. 100%. But it, sales doesn't have to be sleazy. It can come from this genuine place. Hey, I know that you mentioned you and your partner are struggling with this. I just wanted to let you know, I cover that specifically in module two of my program, and I think it'd be a good fit for you.

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. Uh, 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 um, honest, uh, insight into what it's like to be a Side Hustle student, what it's like to be a newbie, um, 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, um, and to get to see yourself, uh, mirrored back in these students who are, 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. Uh, 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 SiteHelper 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, uh, and help you decide if side hustle feels like your right next step for 2023. All right, back to the regular episode.

So yes, it's sales. But it's sales through relationship and sales through connection, and that can feel really good and it's easier to do when your audience. And the fourth piece I combined two, I combined deeper connection and sales. So that was supposed to be two and three, but it was two slash three. So let's move on to number four, which is revenue potential.

A lot of people make, might make it out to be that the bigger your audience, the more money you make. And yeah, that's true, but. Smaller audiences can absolutely have high revenue potential. I had an audience of 2, 000 people, maybe 2, 500 when I launched Side Hustle for the first time. And my first Side Hustle launch was, I'm doing the math.

My first Side Hustle launch was over 40, 000. It's significantly more than that now. But I would say that 40 K is nothing to sneeze at from a smaller audience. So small audiences can yield high revenue. What it boils down to is the offer higher touch, higher priced offer are obviously going to be able to, are going to bring you more revenue and it's easier to sell higher priced offers.

When your audience is small, when you can directly personally reach out to somebody, and when you can use, and I don't want to say, yeah, when you can use the connection, I guess that kind of sounds bad, but I hope you know what I'm saying. When you can use the connection that you've already established and make sure that they know that you're looking out for them and saying, I think you need this program.

I think it's the right fit for you. And this is why. So higher touch higher priced offers. Really makes sense with a small audience with a small audience. You can make significant money and you can make significant money. You also a by product of this is you have a potential for a street team or a team of OGs who recommend you over and over.

There are people who I worked with. Four years ago now, when I very first started this therapist business, like the serving therapists, and they still continue to recommend people to me, they saw me on holiday happy hour, which was a long time ago. It was my first event. They've followed me ever since some of them have bought from me and then continue to send referrals and people to me.

Some of them have never even They've never even paid me a dime, but they have sent me so many referrals that they might as well have because they're, they've become my street team. They've become my OGs, so to speak of, they've been with me for a long time. And because I treated them well, when my audience was.

They continue to refer to me, they trust me, they know the value that I bring, and I've been able to maintain that as my audience has grown, but if you put that in place with the small audience, a, you're putting it in practice for yourself, you, you set the standard of how you want to interact with your people and people that you connect with early on in the game can buy from you over and over again, as you grow they may evolve with you.

And they can send more people to you as time goes on. So really. The revenue potential with a small audience, I think is through the roof. It's just, if you know how to use it. So overall, I hope you can see why having a small audience can be more beneficial to you than having a big audience. I want us to work on humanizing this audience building process and seeing the fact that when we have 10, 20, 30 people in our audience, that's significant.

Are you going to have 10, 20, 30 people over for book club? Are you going to have 30 people over for a barbecue? Maybe that's the max, right? Anything over that it's wow. This is overwhelming. Small audiences can be super powerful. They can be super powerful for connection. They can be super powerful for referrals.

They can be super powerful for you making money. So don't get caught up in the bigger the audience, the better. In fact, let's flip that and let's look at a smaller audience can be better. Okay. So now that you know how beneficial a small, but mighty audience can be, it's time to start getting those first few audience members so we can serve them so we can connect with them.

And so we can absolutely sell to them. 

Until next episode guys, keep on rising!.

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