How do you build an audience from scratch? By using OTHER peoples' knowledge. 💡

Hey Reader,

I recently came across a really interesting video with a guy named Justin Welsh (know the name?), who created a multi-million dollar business totally on his own as a solopreneur.

At first I was like: 🤯

And then I was like: 🤔

I mean like, naturally I'm intrigued, right? I thought success was being able to say you had a team behind you or you recently hired someone. So this really scratched my borderline-hyper-independent brain.

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The 23-minute mark was my favorite part because the conversation looked like this:

"Organic social to me is all about getting discovered." (Yes)

"Getting discovered in and of itself is not enough." (YES)

"To me, it's less about interest and it's more about trust. 'I trust this person is really good at what they do. I trust this person is not just lip service, that they're actually an expert at the things they say they're an expert in.'" (YEEESSSSS)

So how do you accomplish something like this? Three of my favorite words, my friend: Long. Form. Content.

You either cringed or smiled at that.

Either way, in my opinion, long-form content is a really great way to build trust through either educating, motivating, or inspiring.

But how do you do that if you're not a household name? How do you make people listen and create demand and all that stuff if no one knows who you are?

Easy.

Leverage other peoples' knowledge or information.

This doesn't mean you need to know those people personally, you just have to know them and their philosophies/methodologies well enough to be able to speak on them well and often.

This led me to create this spur-of-the-moment video with my two cents. (It also gives you an opportunity to see what I look like on a day without meetings.)

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Once you build up your initial traction through what other people have built, you can leverage that new-found trust and attention into something more aligned with your bigger vision. Thought leadership? Authorship? Entrepreneurship? Bigger clients? Retreats? In-person events?

The great thing about long-form marketing (and also the horrible thing, but I'm assuming we're all optimists here) is that, yes, it takes a while to build traction and you feel like you're constantly throwing spaghetti at the wall, but when you find something that clicks, you know that it works. How? Because you've gotten people to do two things: trust and listen to you.

What do you think? Do you share a different perspective? Yes, this totally resonated! Parts of it did - I'm curious to learn more! Not really, but it gave me something to think about!

If you enjoy this content, I think you'll really appreciate the stuff I've been posting to my YouTube channel lately, so be sure to check that out!

Until next time.

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Onward,

Lauren Erickson

Founder, CEO, & Chief Strategist