How Your Success Hurts Your Audience

Back when I was doing a lot more blogging on my blog, I wrote a post about email marketing and my strategy behind it.

A comment was left on the blog that basically said, “The bigger someone’s name becomes, the less valuable their content gets.”

I found the comment fascinating and it took me a moment to understand what was meant by it…

This is my interpretation as well as some advice to avoid falling in to the same trap…

I do believe that what often happens with bloggers and marketers is that, as their personal brand grows, they tend to fall in to a trap of “chasing the money”…

Email marketing becomes easier, getting their blog posts in front of a wider audience become easier, and getting social media to pay attention becomes easier…

All of this means that making money becomes easier…

So, instead of creating the value that originally built their personal brand, they start promoting “low hanging fruit” products and wallpapering their website with annoying ads to attempt to make more money quicker.

It’s shortsighted.

It may work for a quick cash infusion for a little while but, over time, their audience just slips away. I’ve seen it over and over again and some of the biggest names that I once followed are barely talked about anymore with any sort of high regard.

I’ve also seen quite a few people grow beyond their audience…

What I mean by that is that they start off teaching one concept and build an audience of those interested in that concept… Over time, they become more savvy and start teaching at a level beyond the level of their audience.

This is one place that I certainly have messed up in the past… I often create content and forget the fact that some of the people following me may not know some of the terminology I use or be at a level yet where the concept is relevant to them…

Sometime’s it’s tough to step back and remember who your core audience is and why they initially began following you.

So, here’s my advice…

Focus on the value you are creating to people above everything else.

If you ever find yourself thinking something along the lines of “is this affiliate product going to make me a lot of money if I promote it?”, shift the thought process to “will my audience get a ton of value from me telling them about this product?”

If you’re always focused on creating value with the content you are putting out, you will never have to worry about losing people because you’re just trying to suck money out of them… Money is a byproduct of creating value. Always remember that.

And, as for the issue of teaching past where your audience is at…

Just always remember what built your audience initially and speak to those people. Bring them to your level by creating content from the perspective of someone at the place you where at when you started.

Success is built through creating an audience and then providing value to that audience in the place that they’re at…

It’s not created by trying to show your audience how smart you are by teaching a concept that they can’t yet relate to.