Bill Flynn
Bill Flynn, author of Further, Faster: The Vital Few Steps That Take the Guesswork out of Growth, shared some fantastic tips and insights on scaling your blog or business. To do this, you must reach out and ask your audience questions about how your blog, product, or service makes their lives better.
Audiences are easy to overlook and take for granted. As novice bloggers, we write stories then assume many people will stumble upon our work, fall in love with our words, and commit to us for the rest of their lives.
If only it were that easy.
Instead, we get a few subscribers at a time and never talk to them. We know nothing about them except that they’ve subscribed. We don’t know why they read our work, what they get out of it, and how it contributes to their lives.
We continue writing, thinking they are thirsty for our words, and every one of our posts is a satisfying gulp.
But what if we knew for sure how we were improving their lives, solving their problems, and making their lives easier? Wouldn’t that data help us grow our audiences faster and serve them more efficiently?
This is Bill Flynn’s expertise: researching, asking the questions, gathering the data, and putting it to use.
Here are my seven most significant takeaways from our conversation.
- Marketing makes sales easier. Marketing builds awareness and educates your audience about how your blog will solve their problem. If you frontload them with the right information, they will be more apt to exchange their time for your content.
- Find the right audience. Once you find people who believe in what you stand for and value your content, they will share it with others and grow your readership.
- Once you have some consistent readers, ask them how your blog makes their lives better. Notice the pattern in their responses, and use that data to improve your content.
- We hire and fire products all the time. Ask your readers what other blogs, books, classes, or podcasts they’ve hired to solve their problem and why they fired them.
- Pay attention to your readers’ emotionally charged words when talking about their problems and how your product helps them. Those keywords reflect the real reasons why they’ve hired you.
- As a blogger or entrepreneur, don’t be scared to pivot if what you’re doing isn’t working. Very rarely are original ideas the final ideas.
- Enter the conversation and do something that adds value. What are people already saying about a problem? Listen carefully and become the game-changer they’ve searched for.
