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A righteous Friday to you and yours. Since it’s the end of the week, I’m gonna take it easy on your brain today. We’ll look at the easier path to building an audience with the content you’re already producing or new content in a fresh format you’re planning.

After that, I’ve got This Week’s Marketing Wrap-Up that includes some cool tools I think you’ll benefit from. Let’s get into it after the quick poll below.

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The Alternative to Building an Audience for Your Content

This applies whether you’re starting to produce content or plan on adding new forms of content to what you’re already producing. 

Building an audience is extremely hard. Yeah, it looks easier than it is because we only see the success stories. Why?

• YouTube doesn’t recommend to us videos with 4 viewers

• Bloggers who became destitute after amassing a readership of 12 people in 7 years doesn’t make for a good NYT article

• The Hustle doesn’t link to TikTokers who uploaded 500 videos then quit because they made $65

That Results in Survivorship Bias

Survivorship bias (video w/ examples): a logical error in which attention is paid only to those entities that have passed through (or “survived”) a selective filter, which often leads to incorrect conclusions.

The content that makes it into the spotlight and has staying power is what we notice. It’s what we point to for proof that building an audience is possible. Just work hard and be consistent!

That is simply not true. It’s common sense that in a sea of internet content (examples below), very little of it is going to get read, watched, or listened to. 

2.6 million videos are uploaded to YouTube every day - that’s roughly 518,400 hours of video. Every day.

The podcast world is less competitive. 184,000 new podcasts were started in 2024. Still no easy road for making your claim to an audience with countless quality podcasts to listen to long before those 184k shows were added.

What about blogs? There are roughly 600 million blogs, and a rough estimate of 2 million new posts produced every single day.

I can’t make it any clearer than that, folks. And I hate to do it, but I gotta go Axios on ya…

Why it matters: All those odds mean there’s a microscopic chance of getting many eyeballs on your content if you’re just starting out or launching content in a new format (i.e., adding videos to your blog).

So why start at zero with nearly impossible odds staring you down?

Instead, why not get your content in front of any already established audiences you can find?

ANY audience is better than NO audience. More on this in a second.

What About Optimization?

99 out of 100 content marketers can’t grow an audience simply by following all the “best practices” for optimizing their content. 

Adding perfect meta data and YouTube tags and following article headline templates - all that’s fine. Just don’t think that’ll put your content above other content producers. Why? The majority of them are optimizing too!

Still, it’s worth the time it takes to optimize your blog, YouTube Channel, podcast feed, etc., just to stay on a level playing field.

However, if I were new to the content game, I’d worry less about optimization and focus first on…

Utilizing Other People’s Audiences

Everyone knows about doing guest blog posts and trying to get on podcasts as a guest. But there are plenty more ways to get in front of established audiences that no one talks about. 

And to drive the point home — if you have no audience at all, then you probably shouldn’t be picky about the audience sizes available to you. 

Dave Ramsey started selling his financial courses in homeowner’s living rooms and church basements. Starting small paid off BIG.

Start Somewhere

You’re gonna need to practice landing opportunities before you can properly pitch yourself to people with larger audiences anyway. So, practice on smaller opportunities.

And I’m sorry, but trying to use Instagram’s or TikTok’s built-in audience is not related to this strategy. Using social media is the baseline, no different than optimizing your content — everyone else is using social media too. 

Plus, you’re at the mercy of a heartless algorithm. You have zero control over that.

You do have control over pitching your content to other humans, though. You can improve your pitches over time, building your own audience by getting seen by an established audience.

Oh, in case it isn’t obvious, you will need a website or newsletter or some kind of home base to send people who find out about you after seeing your content on someone else’s platform.

So, where are all the places you can find an audience that belongs to someone else that offers a chance to put your content in front of the audience? 

3 quick ideas first, and then I’ll pile up a longer list after that.

1. Offer to shoot a collaborative video for a non-profit’s event that relates to your brand’s mission.

2. Ask your small libraries and bookstores if you can submit a copy of your book or how-to guide to put on their shelf.

3. Offer to improve a local business’ advertisement in exchange for them posting a bit of your content on all their social channels (if they have an active following - obviously).

Those are off the top of my head. Do some deep thinking about it and you’ll come up with more creative ideas since you know your content and the target audience — I don’t.

The obvious options to reach large audiences are obvious… all the huge platforms or being featured by a wildly popular show or blog.

To see how that typically works out, check with the non-obvious, aka unknown, content creators who’ve tried that and failed. 

Ok. Some more places to get your content seen by already-built audiences are below.

• Skillshare

• Udemy

• Letterboxd

• Discord

• SlideShare

• OnePress Social Locker (amplifies your reach organically by unlocking access after users share the link)

• Podcast directories

Last idea before we move on to This Week’s Marketing Wrap-Up. Aim to connect with and pitch your content to content curators in your niche. Easy win, since they’re 100% on the look-out for good stuff to share with their tribe.

Please share Inbox Hacking with a fellow marketing person or business owner. Many thanks…

Shane McLendon - Copy Kingpin

“Launching a brand-new strategic content initiative from zero is playing on hard mode.” ~Robert Rose

Bonus: Win more by doing this… (via Charles Miller)