how to build an audience of buyers (not just fans)

There are two very different types of creators.

Creator number one is focused entirely on audience growth. Their entire goal is to create enough content and gain enough of a following that eventually they'll have a profitable business. They hope that just with sheer volume of traffic, it'll somehow turn into an income.

Then you have creator number two, and their entire goal is to build a personal brand and create enough content to drive traffic to their business. Their entire goal is sales and revenue. Personal branding and creating content just so happens to be the vehicle they choose to do so.

Creator number one tends to build an audience of mostly fans and followers. They struggle to build a customer base. Creator number two, inevitably, because their entire goal is building a customer base, tends to build an audience of mostly customers.

Now, I imagine most of you, if you're watching this video, want to be in Camp 2. You want to be a creator who builds an audience of mostly buyers, not just fans.

So in today's video, I want to share with you the four key principles that I've learned over the last eight years of being a content creator that have helped me build an audience of mostly buyers, not just followers.

But before I do that, if you're new to this channel, this is the first time you're seeing me and you're sitting there right now wondering, "Who the heck is this guy and why should I listen to him?" My name is Tom Nooski. I'm a content creator and have been for the last eight years. In the last two years, I've scaled my online education business from zero to seven figures per year. Now, with this YouTube channel, I'm trying to make videos to help some of you hopefully do the same.

So a little bit of context before I get into some of the points I'm going to talk about in today's video. For my first five years on social media, I built my audience to over 880,000 followers for digital art. I was a photographer and digital artist, and I shared the same thing every single day. My only focus was what would please the algorithm.

To a fault, I got to the point where I was creating such a narrow niche of not just digital art but a very specific type of subject matter in a very specific style of digital art. If I deviated even slightly from either of those things, my content would completely flop. I would receive a tenth of the engagement that I would if I posted the very specific kind of content that my audience wanted.

As long as I stuck within those grounds, then my audience kept growing and my content kept doing well because that was my entire goal. I naively assumed when I first started out that if I just gained enough of an audience, if I just gained enough followers, then I'll eventually be able to turn that into an income.

So my focus entirely, every single time I created content, was to focus 100% on the type of content that would receive the highest possible engagement, even if that came at the expense of me sharing anything about myself. Even if that came at the expense of doing brand deals.

I used to avoid brand deals back then because my engagement would plummet, and I was worried it would damage my brand. I used to avoid sharing photos of myself because I knew every single time I shared a photo of myself, I'd get a fifth or a tenth of the engagement I would normally get.

I even spent some of my personal time creating digital art that I was really passionate about, but I wouldn't share on my socials because it wasn't the very, very specific type of content my audience was used to.

Then inevitably, when I got to the point of desperation, I decided I was ready to monetize. I decided I was ready to make an income from this. I decided to create an online course. I created an online course that was very specific to the type of content that my audience loved. It was literally me teaching that exact type of content from start to finish: how to photograph, how to take those photos, put them into Photoshop, convert them into the type of images that I publish, and then even a little bit on audience growth.

I created something that, in terms of what my audience would want, was perfect. Out of my 80,000 followers that I had at the time, out of the tens of thousands of likes and comments that I would get on every single post, I got 20 sales in the launch of this program. 20 sales—a complete and utter failure.

Going through that experience and realizing that there isn't success at the end of that pathway made me realize that focusing on audience growth, putting your entire focus on how many followers you can collect, is antagonistic to business success. Revenue growth, income growth, profit growth—those two goals of audience growth and income growth are very, very different from one another.

It's like swimming laps in a pool and then signing up for a marathon. Sure, the cardiovascular fitness that you'll get from swimming laps in the pool might help you a little bit in your marathon, but it's not really the training plan that I would give you if I was trying to help you run a marathon.

So what changed? How did I go from someone who had 880,000 followers around a very specific and niche topic to now having an audience that I would argue is mostly people interested in my offer? Nowadays, I would say that I'm a business owner primarily who just so happens to use personal branding as my vehicle for marketing that business.

How did I make that shift? Well, there are four key principles that I'm going to share with you in the rest of this video, and each of them, if you start implementing them, should help you start to create content from the perspective of building an audience of buyers, not just fans.

The first one, and arguably the biggest mistake that I made, is start with a product. Stop waiting to monetize. A lot of creators have this perspective that if they just grow their audience first, it'll be easier to then sell a product.

But the issue with this mindset is that the product, or the sale, eventually getting the sale of your product informs so many of the decisions downstream from that action. So if your primary goal is audience growth, you are almost stunting your growth in terms of what is required to make the sale.

Whereas if your goal is making the sale, then every decision you make downstream of that—the content you make, the way that you generate leads, the way that you communicate with your audience, who you know to be your audience—all of those things change depending on the product you sell.

So even if you don't have the ability to sell a single one of your products, even if you don't yet have the audience or the traffic, even if you can't make a single sale yet, you should still have some idea of what your product is going to be in order to speak to that audience, in order to create content for that audience, in order to generate the right kind of leads, and eventually create a sale.

So if you're someone who's creating content right now with this abstract idea that you'll eventually create a product and eventually turn this audience into an income, you need to stop what you're doing right now and create some kind of product. Even if it's just selling your time.

If you're creating content already and you're a follower of this channel, in all likelihood, you're creating content in the education space. You have a skill that you are teaching other people—a skill or point of expertise that you're trying to teach other people. So you have something of value to exchange with people.

Even if it's just selling your time—selling your time one-to-one, starting at 100 bucks an hour, 150 bucks an hour, whatever it is—start selling anything because that will inform so many of the decisions that happen downstream from that sale. Your content will change, your audience will change, the way you communicate with your audience will change. Everything will change as a result of having a product be your end goal.

So the first thing you need to do is completely shift your focus on social media. Your entire goal is not audience growth; your entire goal is driving traffic to your business. If you don't have a product, it is impossible to build an audience of buyers because you don't even really know who those buyers are.

So if you haven't yet, go and create a product. Even if it's just selling your time, start selling it today because that will help in every other decision you make. That will completely change your perspective on your content, on your audience, and the way that you communicate with that audience.

Point number two is people will buy from you when they feel like they can relate to you. A giant mistake that I see a lot of educational creators making is they feel like the more that they can make themselves appear above their audience, then the better they will be perceived, the more authority they will have with their audience.

So they try to make themselves appear as this holier-than-thou character who's impermeable to everything, who's perfect in their execution, and who never suffers with any of the things that their audience do, in the hope that that will somehow make them appear as an authority.

But all this leaves your audience feeling is distrust. They don't listen or trust anything you say because what you appear as is completely unattainable. See, if you portray yourself as this character who was just destined for success, your audience doesn't see what you do or what you say as attainable because they don't believe you.

They live in the real world, and in reality, nothing is like that. There is no such thing as perfect. You have to go through failures in order to create successes because that's how life works. If you don't portray that, they're not going to trust a single thing you say, and they're not going to see what you teach as attainable for them because they don't see you as relatable.

For them to see themselves as capable of achieving what you've achieved, they need to see some part of themselves in your story. Now, the first time I actually learned this was long before I got into content creation. I used to be a personal trainer when I was 18, 19, and 20 years old. I was a full-time personal trainer.

Now, I'm 6'3", I'm 191 cm tall, and back then I was around 95 to 96 kg. I could deadlift a lot of weight, I could squat a lot of weight, I could do a lot with my body in regards to powerlifting and bodybuilding. I used to love that kind of stuff, and I thought that my passion for powerlifting, my passion for fitness, my passion for the gym would translate into a career as a personal trainer.

Out of all the PTs in the gym that I worked at, there were 31 PTs in this gym. The most successful PT, who was booked out from sunrise to sunset every single day, was also slightly overweight. Now, for me at the time, I could not comprehend why this was working. I couldn't understand how someone who was slightly out of shape, slightly overweight, was able to command so many of the clients in the gym and have such a thriving business as a PT.

But it wasn't until I began to realize that for someone walking into the gym floor, for someone walking into the gym for the first time who struggled with their weight—they may be massively overweight or just slightly overweight—and they want to get control of their lives and their fitness, for them walking onto the gym floor, who is going to be more relatable to them?

The trainer who's in their mid-30s, maybe their early 40s, is slightly overweight but looks like they're fit enough to know what they're saying, or the 19-year-old who's 6'3", 96 kilos, and can deadlift 200 kilos? Who's more relatable in that situation?

They might look at him and go, "Well, clearly they understand what I'm going through. They've dealt with their own weight loss issues. They've dealt with weight. They know what I'm going through." But they looked at me at 19 years old and said, "There is not a chance in hell that Tom has any idea what I'm going through."

So there is no way that he's going to be able to help me with my weight loss issue, even if that was completely untrue. Even if I had gone through my own process of weight loss, even though I did struggle with being slightly chubby when I was a little bit younger and did struggle with body issues and body dysmorphia and eating issues and all these things when I was younger, even if it's not true, even if I did stand on the gym floor knowing more than that trainer, it was my responsibility for not having shown that to those clients who walked in the gym.

Those clients who walked into the gym found that trainer who was slightly overweight as more relatable, and so they trusted what he said more. See, if you show yourself as nothing but authority, if you show nothing but your wins and your successes and how great you are and your Lamborghinis and your perfection, and you do everything to create this holier-than-thou character around yourself, no one is going to trust a single thing you say.

Because no one sees that and what you are portraying as attainable for themselves. Some part of your audience has to relate to some part of your story; otherwise, they will not trust a single thing that comes out of your mouth. They won't trust your student success stories, they won't trust your program, they won't trust your content, they won't trust your business—nothing about you or your story, as long as you are trying to be this massive authority figure, will be relatable to your audience.

So the more that you can create content that shows your wins and your failures, your successes and your setbacks, everything in between, if you can share the entire story, people will start to paint a picture of you that looks a little bit like them.

When they can see themselves in your past, if they can look at you and go, "Hey, you know, Tom's all the way up here right now, and he's got this business that I really admire, he's got this content that I really admire, but five years ago he was exactly where I am right now," because I told them that story, they're able to then see the steps to eventually get where I am today.

It's only because I shared that story of failure or triumph or setback or whatever I went through five years ago that they're able to now trust what I say up here. This is why we have so much distrust for these young guys who share nothing but the millions of dollars they're making and the lifestyles they live and how they got it so quickly and effortlessly.

It's because the story doesn't seem like real life. It doesn't appear to be reality. They are doing themselves a disservice by not sharing more of their flaws, not sharing more of their failures, not sharing more of their mistakes.

Because we all know, you and I right now, we know that our lives are nonlinear. We know that some days we get up and we feel amazing, but other days we get up and we feel like... I'll be completely honest with you, I've had a shocker of a day so far. It's 11:30 in the morning, my anxiety has been sky-high since about 8:00. I tried to film this video at 9:00 a.m. I've had a shocker of a day today.

But I listened to some music, I went for a walk, I thought, "You know what? I'm going to get this video out because I owe it to my audience. I owe it to you watching this video to see this video."

So by me sharing that with you right now, you trust everything else I've said in this video far more because it now appears real. I'm not this infallible character that never suffers with anything; I'm real.

So create real content, raw content. Share you. Share more of the things that you're interested in, more of your failures, more of your struggles, more of your setbacks, more of you. People will start to trust your business more, they'll trust your advice more, and they'll buy from you more.

By the way, we are just about to open our ninth cohort of "Time to Build." So if you're serious about building your personal brand and your online business this year, this is the program you need to be a part of. Everything we've done, everything we've put together in this program is specifically designed to help you create a blueprint to build your personal brand and then transform that personal brand into a profitable online business.

We basically take you step by step over the course of six weeks through that entire process of not only building a brand from first principles, from the ideas that I've already shared with you in this content and obviously a lot more, but we take you through that entire process of crafting your perfect brand, understanding your messaging, understanding your audience, understanding everything that is to building an audience of people that are in line with your mission.

Then we transform that into a powerful core offer—a product that truly transforms for your customers and isn't just fluff that you sell and hope that no one realizes it's fluff. Then eventually, we scale into a personal brand that you can actually start to step away from and get some of your time freedom back.

So this program works, and I'd love for you to be a part of it. If you are interested, it'll be the top line of the description. Click on there; it'll take you to the landing page where you can sign up for the waitlist if enrollments haven't already opened by the time you're watching this video.

But if you're watching this video on the day that it goes out, we've got two weeks before we're opening doors, and we're only open 30 days of the year. So make sure you take this opportunity.

Point number three is kind of an extension of everything we've talked about, but stop playing to the algorithm. The issue with playing to the algorithm is the algorithm doesn't exist. Yes, it exists; it's a thing.

But what the algorithm actually is, is people. If you can create content for people that serves people, that helps people, then the algorithm's job is to serve your content to those people. The issue with creating content for the algorithm is you will be forever chasing what the algorithm thinks your audience wants, not what you know your audience wants.

You should know your audience and your customers and the people you're best positioned to serve better than the algorithm ever could. So it's the algorithm's job to put your content in front of those people, not your job to find content that the algorithm wants to put in front of whoever the heck they decide to put it in front of.

So stop chasing the algorithm. The only thing it will lead to is you chasing content formats that aren't even really in line with what you should be doing. If I can be candid with you for a moment, I like making a piece of content every now and again. If you follow me on Instagram, you know these videos.

I'm a super introspective person. I also love writing, I love poetry, I love voiceovers, and really emotional things. I'm an emotional person; I can't help it. So I love making these videos where I take my favorite B-roll, my favorite cinematic footage, I write a really emotive script, I present it in a really deep and persuasive and emotional way, and then I pair some nice music, some amazing B-roll, some good text animations, and I make something that is really impactful and emotional.

Now, does that content serve my business? Absolutely not. Of course, it helps me grow a bit of an audience; it probably helps some of you connect to me more. But does it help serve my business? No.

Now, does that content perform five to ten times better than anything else I post on my feed? Yes, every single time that content performs five to ten times better than anything else I post.

Now, if I was focused purely on serving the algorithm, I would make every single one of my videos those videos. Now, would I have the business I have today if I made every single one of my videos those videos? No, absolutely not. Because that content doesn't serve the very specific type of person I am trying to help.

It serves everyone; it's broad content. It's aimed at going viral. But does it serve the purpose I'm trying to create? Does it help bring people to my business? No.

So I'm happy to take a loss in terms of views and engagement on my account. I am happy to ignore what the algorithm thinks I should be making for my brand in the pursuit of business growth.

So if I can instill anything in all of you watching this video, you should know your target audience, your target avatar—the people you are best positioned to help. You should know them more than the algorithm does.

So you should make content for them and then have the algorithm place your content in front of them. It is the algorithm's job to find an audience for your content that you've targeted at a very specific person, not your job to find content that the algorithm wants to serve to whoever the heck it decides to serve content to.

So stop pursuing the algorithm. Stop chasing the algorithm. Stop creating content for the algorithm; it doesn't exist. If you make content for more people, more people will see your content, and the algorithm will be happy.

Number four, and this one's an obvious one, but it seriously begs repeating: you need to be selling way more than you currently are. One of the things that leads people to have an audience of followers and not buyers is that they don't sell enough.

If you don't sell to your audience enough, you're not creating the expectation that you are going to be selling to your audience. See, the difference between a creator who makes an enormous amount of money and a creator who makes no money is the creator that makes enormous amounts of money sells a lot more than you do.

I have very few metrics that I track on a week-to-week basis in regards to my content. I don't really track views, I don't track audience growth, I don't even track email list growth. I don't really care for those things. The only thing that I track week to week is the amount of calls to action that I make in my content. That is all I track.

I have a Notion template that has a little 100% dial, and then I have a bunch of input metrics based on caption CTAs, based on story CTAs, based on in-video CTAs, based on YouTube videos, on newsletters. As long as I tick those things off, I had a good week.

So for me, on a weekly basis, that may be anywhere between 14 and 20 calls to action in my content regularly. That means I am making calls to action in my emails, in my videos, in my captions, in the things that I say in the videos I post, in the images I post, in the carousels—in everything I do, I am making calls to action multiple times a day, sometimes half a dozen times in a single day across an email, a video, a YouTube video, a carousel post, and an Instagram story.

So if you're someone who's promoting your products maybe once a week, twice a week, three times a week, you are making nowhere near enough offers to be profitable.

The very action of making more offers, the very action of selling more to your audience, will weed out the people who were never going to buy from you in the first place. If you post something that promotes your products and you get called to sell out, you have built an audience of people that expect free, and those people are never going to help you.

Whereas if you sell more to your audience, guess what? Those people are going to leave, and the people that stay are going to be buyers. Even if they're not interested in buying right now, as long as they respect what you're doing, as long as they appreciate what you're doing and they're receiving value from your content, they will stick around, and eventually, they will buy.

So if you are someone who wants to build an audience of buyers and not just followers, sell more to your audience. And when I say more to your audience, I mean way more, way, way, way more to your audience. Sell relentlessly to your audience, and you'll build an audience of buyers, not just followers.

I hope this video helps, and I'll see you in the next one.