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Grow Your Business With Audience AND Community
The Two-Pronged Approach to Scaling Your Business
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If you’re starting or growing a business, the advice is always the same: build an audience. Need to sell a product? Audience first. Launching a newsletter? Get subscribers. Writing on Medium? Rack up those readers.
But is an audience really what you want? What if you aimed for something deeper — a community?
Building an audience and building a community are two distinct approaches with different goals, methods, and outcomes.
Building an audience
When building an audience, the primary goal is to gather followers or readers to consume your content. We are told to create something valuable and then use tactics to reach them.
It’s a numbers game.
Communication is mostly a one-way street — you to your audience. And success is measured by followers, likes, shares, views, reads.
Building an audience makes sense for the following:
- Getting subscribers for your YouTube channel for ad payments.
- Traffic to your website to gain sponsors and partners.