Why Some Consultants Succeed Where Others Fail
How long does it take to build a following? Well, it depends on the quantity of posts and how reflective and adaptive you are in the process.
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Are You Struggling To Gain Traction?
I spoke with a consultant recently who was becoming flustered by her inability to build a following.
She had tried blogging, but that hadn’t really worked. She tried creating a few YouTube videos, but none gained more than 150 views. She had tried social media but didn’t feel she was gaining any traction.
She was at a loss for what to do next.
She had posted 17 posts and 8 videos over the past year and nothing had caught fire.
What else could she try?
Persistence Is Key
It’s at this point I felt like I needed to make a point.
I shared my screen, loaded up the FeverBee.com admin page and shared how many posts I’ve published.
That’s 3316 posts.
(The real number is probably around 4500 posts - we pruned around a thousand posts last year in an SEO project.)
I don’t recall exactly when the site began to gain real traction, but I think it was between 300 to 500 posts. That means nobody was really reading the first few hundred posts I wrote in that first year. Fortunately, the majority of those posts were terrible so it was a blessing.
The point is that whichever channel you use to acquire clients, you’ve got to commit and persist with it. It takes time to learn how to a) write good content and b) promote your content. If you’ve chosen video, you should be prepared to create 100 videos before you really gain much traction. If it’s blog posts, you should aim to write 100 posts before you really start to build an audience.
I’m scheduling these newsletter posts in advance. This will be around the 65th post since the launch in April. By the time this goes live, I will have 650 to 700 subscribers. That’s it.
Yet, it grows.
Slowly but surely, it grows.
Post by post, it grows.
Sometimes I get a nice bounce from a referral or an article which is shared. But this is just a bonus, not part of the plan. But, for the best part, it’s just a trickle of people each day.
I began attracting 3 to 5 subscribers per week, now it’s 3 to 5 subscribers per day. If things keep going this way, it will be 10 to 20 subscribers per day soon.
If you ignore the outliers and the overnight successes, this is how it works for pretty much everybody. Your platform is your acquisition strategy. But strategy takes time to implement.
Patience Is Your Secret Weapon
Over time this actually works in your favour. It prunes out the people committed to a strategy from everyone else. Once you’ve crossed the barrier that keeps out most people, you find yourself in rarefied air with far less competition.
Almost nobody else in my sector has managed to consistently keep a blog going for several years (yet those that have are the ones at the top of the industry). Most people aren’t patient enough and give up too quickly. While they hop from one strategy to the next, becoming frustrated at their inability to build a following with speed, I’m still here quietly and consistently building my audience on the same platform I have for 15 years.
If you begin with the understanding that these things take time you will find the process far less depressing.
It’s Not The Quantity That Matters, It’s The Reflective Practice
The silly thing to do here be to use ChatGPT to quickly pump out 100 articles over the next 100 days.
That completely misses the point.
It’s not the quantity of posts that matters, it’s the quality of posts. More than that, it’s the self-reflective practice of putting something out there and seeing what resonates. You need time to experiment and gradually figure out what does and doesn’t work - and then get better at it. You need to learn and adapt to what your audience wants and needs. You need to explore ways to stand out in your industry and find the ones that connect.
Once you find something that resonates, you can dive deeper into it. For example, I’ve noticed writing about proposals appears popular here so I can go much deeper into the mechanics of that. When something doesn’t resonate, you might want to experiment and/or drop that topic.
It’s the feedback loop which helps you to grow.
You will discover as you begin to grow, more people are willing to help you. I host regular calls with people in my industry to learn about them and their needs. I tell them up front I’m researching ideas for the blog. This is handy as they’re more likely to promote the blog and it helps me build relationships in this field.
The great thing is as your following begins to grow, more doors will open up to you. You will have speaking opportunities, webinar opportunities, and guest post opportunities - each of which will help you grow your audience faster. And so the cycle continues.
The key though is to have patience, and persistence, and develop a natural process of self-reflection on what is and isn’t resonating.
You probably won’t be an overnight success, but that’s a good thing.