Grow Your Expertise as Your Customers & Clients Grow
One way to ensure that your business has a long life is to grow with your audience. This is not a requirement. You can choose to always stay the “baby sleep training expert” if that is your passion, or you can grow with your baby and your audience by moving on with new things like potty training, the first day of school, and college. The cool thing about this idea is that you only need to stay one or two steps ahead of your audience to be a respected, authoritative person in their lives.
This is one of the most amazing things about having an online business. You can start today teaching those who don’t know how yet to set up their first blog to get started making money blogging. A year from now, you may realize that your audience now needs lessons on how to set up their marketing funnel, so due to your own experience doing it, you start teaching that. But the truth is, you only need to be slightly ahead of your audience for this type of business to work.
The remarkable thing is, it’s not hard to figure out what your audience wants from you once they trust you because they’ll tell you if you are listening. For example, if you have a Facebook group related to your eBook - How to Set Up Your Website Using Self-Hosted WordPress - once your audience learns that, they’re going to start asking questions that you realize are about the “next thing.” Now you can move on to what’s next, like how to fill your site with the right content to attract the right customers.
In a way, you’re just moving up with your audience by teaching them the next thing you felt like you needed to learn in your own business. This is true if you are also part of your ideal target audience and in fact, tends to work well for most online business owners that started due to solving their own problem and then seeking to help other people just like them with the solution they found or created themselves.
If this is you, once you have your first product selling well, keep an ear to the ground with your audience to learn about the other things they are concerned about that is related to your skillset and the first product you created. What’s the natural progression for what you offer? If you offer info products about being organized, maybe a segment of that audience is interested in minimalism, and you can offer info about that too.
The trick with this is not to jump on everything that’s next right now. Start with the beginning, stay with the beginning until your audience starts asking the questions that signify that they are ready for what’s next. Depending on your audience, that may never happen. For example, if you teach people how to use self-hosted WordPress, you may always be teaching people how to use it and not another software even if that is something your audience is interested in because it doesn’t fit with your skillset.
Growing with your audience is a great way to grow your audience, your income, and your reach. However, it’s imperative to ensure that the next thing is truly next and not outside of your niche so that it does not confuse your target audience.