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Growing an audience begins with this question –
What matters most?
Say it with me.
This is something I had to define for myself three years ago when I rebranded my online presence. I answered this question with “caring about people” and built my entire brand on that. This is why I begin each week’s blog topics with relationships, and then fill the rest of the week with other topics to equip people with the tools they need to lead in life. Relationship with people is the foundation for what each and every one of us contribute to this world. I don’t care what job you have, the Why? behind what you do should always be that it will impact people. It is when we lose sight of the Why? that we begin losing focus of our own importance in carrying out the mission.
Right before I did this online rebranding, I read Patrick Lencioni’s The Three Signs of A Miserable Job and remembered that one of the three points he made was that jobs are miserable if you don’t know why they matter. We can apply this concept not only to our jobs, but anything we do. When you put people on the receiving end of what you do, you then know why you and your company exists. Introverted or extroverted, at the very core of us all is the desire to impact people, whether we realize it or not.
If you have lost sight of the Why? for your role in your business, here are 3 ways to get back to doing what matters most and get back to growing your audience:
1. Listen to your audience.
It doesn’t matter what business you own, listening to what your customers, clients, and audience wants and needs is huge when it comes to growing your business. I can’t tell you how many entrepreneurs I have met who stick their head in the sand and either just don’t care and want to do their own thing or they are too afraid to listen to constructive feedback from customers. Whether it’s forming a survey or creating some sort of public forum, having a way to hear from the public is essential to see where you may be lacking, or so you can see what you are excelling in, so you can focus more of your attention there.
2. Pinpoint your differences.
To stand out in a world where there are enough products and services to confuse consumers, you need to pinpoint your differences. Why do these things set you apart? What products and services do you offer that your competitors don’t? Why should people care about your offerings? No matter how small it is, you need to make sure that people clearly know what it is that makes you different. Even if you think you have already done this, maybe you haven’t clearly communicated this to your audience and displayed it prominently for people to see.
3. Bring your business back to what it is about – people.
As a business, you are there to offer products and services to an audience, so that they can profit from it. That’s why people will come back time and time again. Maybe you have lost sight of that and have been focused so much on what you are profiting from it that you forgot the reason you began doing what you do. Issues in our own lives are amplified when we are focused on ourselves. When we focus on the lives of others, our own issues become minuscule and we are reminded of the reason we are here on this earth – to touch the lives of others.
Use these three points and return to why you do what you do to grow your audience, today.
I play the piano.
There are times I have played under great stress and not enjoying it at all (e.g., having been forced to enter a contest or competition in high school).
There are other times I have played for an audience of one or two and cried from joy and connection.
If you were to listen to me play at the competition or in my grandmother’s living room, what you heard might sound very much the same on the surface. It might even have been the same song. But what was happening inside of me was a whole different story. And even if people wouldn’t be able to pick it out in the purely audible sense, they could feel the difference.
One feels perhaps impressive yet sterile.
One feels — like the music isn’t there at all, or like if it were, you could touch it, breathe it in.
What’s that got to do with anything?
Well, I think many people — focused on their own success or ego or prestige or competition — read books or tweets or blog posts about being others-centered, and they “implement.” They add a forum. They make the suggested questionnaires or polls. They do A / B testing. They might even talk with the hoi polloi and smile and nod a lot. But inside, the motive is still the same — to get something for the self.
I never much cared for the TITLE of the book How to Win Friends and Influence People. And I have a similar reaction to the new jargon like “leveraging the power of your network connections” (which, when I break it down, just comes out to “using people to get what I want”).
Yet all of the above things — if done with the right attitude and motive and a true focus on others — look very much the same as when they are done with self-serving purposes in mind. And for this reason, we might think no one notices. But they do notice. They might not be able to put their finger on it; but just like listening to music played from the heart, they know. Deep down, they know when it’s real.
I say all this to suggest that we first need to do the reflective work of being sure our motive really is to help others and make the world a better place, not simply to pursue a means of benefiting our own bottom line or ego.
Businesses exist to make money. But I believe that if we truly face who we are inside and get the core stuff right — truly caring about people first and foremost — the rest takes care of itself.
Couldn’t agree more.
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