How did you build your audience? What worked?
What did it take for you to get that first subscriber to your newsletter or blog? Not even necessarily a paying subscriber, just someone you didn't know who ended up following you.
And, as a followup, what was the trajectory you ended up taking from that first subscriber to where you are now?
I ask as someone who is fumbling through trying to get that very first subscriber :)
Thanks all!
It's not just you.
I got the first subscribers by tweeting and blogging. Then things slowed to a crawl.
When starting out, everything happens at a snail's pace and nothing seems to make a difference or move the subscriber needle. Until you hit a critical mass, when a chain reaction kicks in and pretty much anything you throw at the wall sticks.
It takes an audience to build an audience.
Publish consistently. It can be as often as everyday or every week. I chose every day. Networking in a way that doesn't feel like you're networking at people - it's easy for other people to pick up on this. Writing is essentially an act of problem solving so if you're writing a newsletter or a blog you're sharing your ability to solve interesting problems for other people. Problems that they don't know they have. Problems that they can't articulate with words, but you can because you've been writing through those problems.
Tyler Cowen (https://marginalrevolution.com/) said that nobody read his blog for years. Consider all of your favorite authors and bloggers. Especially those who wrote pre-SEO era. Write because you enjoy it. Write because it challenges you. The audience comes after the work that you put in.
Curious to see more answers; I have an audience of 270 subscribers but it feels like i'm disconnected from them. There's little feedback and it just doesn't feel like the community I hoped it would be. I'm trying to change the tone of the writing to make it feel more personal, but i'm yet to tell if this will change anything.
What has worked for me:
"worked for me" = just under 100 good folks reading my emails, and 100 mostly different folks watching my screencasts, and 1111 people who occasionally see what I say on Twitter. Not huge, but tremendously humbling.
PS that 1111 Twitter follower number is real, please do not follow me and ruin it by changing any of the ones.
i haven't seriously been building an audience, though i was answering questions on Quora very regularly about two years ago partially to promote my first book, The Dropout Manifesto.
it worked. i gained a remarkable amount of followers on other platforms and even people reaching out to me via email to say thanks. (it helps to be a good writer on Quora.)
interested to hear what other methods work well.
Facebook Groups
For my Stock Market newsletter, https://bullish.email what got my headstart was a blog post I wrote and posted to HN about the process of building Bullish https://eduardosasso.co/blog/turning-my-obsession-in-the-stock-market-into-a-side-project/
Create content people value and remind them to subscribe.