I wish I’d known this earlier…so I’m telling you now.

Let me backup for a second and explain something:

If you have a product or service to sell, having an audience of devoted fans is the most important thing to focus on so that your revenue isn’t dependent on the whims of Meta, Google, the news cycle, your affiliates, or anything else outside your control.

I understood how critical building and nurturing an audience/community was early on, which is why for the first several years of my business I was slowly but surely growing my email list through organic traffic.

I consistently created content that was useful to folks each week in the form of a blog (which I started writing in 2010) and then through SEO and a tiny bit of social media traffic (at the time social media marketing was barely a thing) folks found me and joined this community. (If you’ve been around since then, hi! And thank you!)

But it was slow.

It wasn’t until my first book, Money: A Love Story, came out that our audience’s growth curve shot up.

That year, our email list went from 3,000 to 45,000.

You might assume it was having a book come out that magnetized all those folks.

And that was part of it…but what I didn’t realize until years later was that I could have been growing my audience through the very same channels that grew it when the book came out without having had to wait to write and publish a book.

And you don’t have to wait until you’re a published author (or until your next book comes out) to fertilize your audience growth in a big way either.

Stay with me and I’ll explain.

It wasn’t having a book come out that sky-rocketed the size of my audience…it was media and PR!

What I misunderstood for way longer than I wish was that we don’t have to wait around for a big book launch or for someone to contact us to be featured by large media outlets so that you can use their existing audience and credibility to grow yours!

It’s the ultimate visibility leap-frog strategy:

1. Be great at what you do.
2. Learn to pitch top-tier media outlets so your brilliance gets featured.
3. Increase the speed and magnitude of your audience growth by directing the traffic that these media outlets already have to your brilliant ideas and work!

Once I stopped waiting around to write another book and have media outlets invite me on, I learned how to pitch them myself.

I cannot tell you how painful it is to watch my friends and clients pour their precious energy into Reels that are only gonna live for 24-36 hours or other content that’s only being seen by their existing audience…and likely only a fraction of that.

If audience growth is a goal of yours for 2024, getting featured in the media is the number one place to focus to get huge results for minimal effort.

Next week I’ll share how I got on The Today’s Show and featured by Harvard Business Review and Oprah Daily so you can use those insights to get your own megawatt media features.

Stay tuned!

Xo

Kate