🧑‍🍳 How do you build an audience that survives platform changes?

In today's episode of Things We Saw Coming But Somehow Still Weren't Ready For 👀

TikTok's banned in the US and everyone's realizing why putting all your eggs in one basket might not be the best move.

Long before this chaos, Adriana Tica has been showing us how to build an audience that doesn't crumble when algorithms change or platforms disappear.

In this recipe, she shares her signature framework for turning scattered platforms into a connected ecosystem.

With the way things are going lately, this isn't just good timing. It's exactly what we all need.

🎁 Adriana teaches the framework in her Audience Accelerator course (worth $200). If you’d like to win a sponsored spot, read this recipe and vote for her in a week when we pick the winning chef.

Get ready to discover:

🥣 How to create self-feeding growth loops across platforms

🥣 Why having one main focus (hint: email) beats scattered attention

🥣 How to choose the right collaboration partners (and who to avoid)

🥣 A framework for creating content faster across multiple platforms

— Linda

I started Ideas to Power Your Future, my newsletter back in November 2022. I’m not new to the online space — I’ve been running a digital marketing agency for a decade now.

The newsletter was my way of writing what I wanted to write, about the topics I cared about, without hiding behind a brand name. My main goal? Teaching people proper, foundational marketing, not the BS hacks you usually see online from bro marketers. 

Even though I’ve been in marketing for 17+ years, this personal branding/solopreneurship space came with a few challenges I was not expecting.

Chief among them — growing your audience. The tools I had been using to market “regular” companies fell flat.

I was spending hours on social media every day with modest results. That’s what led to the creation of this newsletter.

In the first year, I managed to attract 1,000 subscribers to my newsletter. I know the first 1,000 subscribers are the hardest and I was proud to reach that milestone but I felt like it wasn’t enough.

So I rolled up my sleeves and put those 17+ years in marketing to good use. 

The usual advice — “show up every day and comment on others’ posts at least 50 times” was utter crap. Plus, with two businesses to run, I had no time for that. I’m sure you don’t either.

Here’s what I did instead:

• Built a framework that gives me maximum results with minimal time investment

• Focused on platform diversification — as I diversified, I prioritized email subscribers first and foremost, NOT social media because it’s a bad idea to build your home on someone else’s land

• Made sure the process was repeatable and replicable — it had to work for others too, not just for me. If you are your only success story, then your success is an accident

Let’s take a look at my signature audience accelerator framework to identify the steps I took to grow an audience beyond vanity metrics. In other words, an audience that’s engaged and trusts me enough to buy from me.

Craft hyper focused messaging

I speak a lot against hacks and bro marketing and I make sure that every time I advise people on certain marketing tactics it’s something that’s rooted in psychology and sociology. I teach experts to build a future-proof business and I walk the talk.

In this post, for example, I advice on whether a value ladder or product ecosystem is best suited to increase your customer LTV:

Pick one main focus

My main focus is to retain attention and this means moving people to my email list — a space I, not algorithms, control.

This is not to say that social media audience is not important — social media is a discovery platform i.e. it allows people to discover me and it gets me attention.

This means that you’ll often see me post links to my newsletter or digital products directly in social media posts — despite what online gurus advise you to do.

Does it bring my reach down? Yes, undoubtedly. But it’s a compromise I’m happily making because it helps me build my core asset, the email list.

Create reusable social media frameworks

I have a list of 5-6 frameworks that work as social media posts. They are carefully divided among:

• Grabbing attention — funny stuff, contrarian takes, commentary on current trending topics)

• Establishing myself as an authority — actionable how-tos, in-depth proprietary research, snippets from podcasts I’ve been on, highlighting my experience, talking about how in-demand I am

• Direct selling — customer stories, case studies, outcomes I got for my clients, discounts

• Driving people to my newsletter

I use these frameworks for 90% of my social media content, which allows me to create content faster and get actual results. I spend less than 1 hour a week creating content for three social media platforms so it works.

Here are the frameworks in action:

Leverage collabs and partnerships

I do newsletter cross-promos, host online events with my peers, and many others.

This is hands-down the best way to get new subscribers who are engaged and already trust me. Because what I’m essentially doing is tapping into other people’s audiences and borrowing the trust they enjoy.

I have two criteria for these partnerships:

• No bro marketers or “growth hackers”. This will dilute the trust my brand has earned

• Audience overlap: our ideal customer profile doesn’t have to be identical but there has to be some overlap

Other than that, I’m happy to partner with creators and entrepreneurs who are earlier in their journey with a smaller audience than my own.

Create self-feeding growth loops

I don’t have 20+ hours to spend growing my audience so I came up with self-feeding growth loops that seamlessly move people across my various platforms: social media, Medium, newsletter.

This way, I get constant growth even when I have zero hours to actively work on audience growth — it happens when you’re running two businesses like I do.

Here’s one of my self-feeding growth loops:

Most people (myself included) advocate for moving people from social media to your email list.

This is excellent advice BUT there is value in doing the reverse too. Not everyone will open all your emails; some people will bounce off your list because they changed their email address; you’ll end up in their spam folders — there’s a host of reasons why you can’t reach everyone on your email list.

That’s why it’s a good idea to have people follow you across channels. I achieve this with a simple “Follow me on...” CTA at the end of all my emails.

Explore paid growth

More recently, I started investing in paid growth. It’s nothing major so far but it’s helped me accelerate my growth even further.

This framework has led to a a 230%+ audience growth in my second year of running this newsletter. Plus a 244% revenue growth that’s directly related to my bigger audience.

Better yet, I just deleted over 500 inactive subscribers so my list is not just larger, it’s also very engaged.

As I know this framework works, I wanted to share it with my audience. In February 2024, I ran a live workshop called Audience Accelerator. It was a test to see if people were interested in learning how to build an audience without spending ages glued to their laptops.

The feedback was amazing so I turned it into a hands-on course with all the templates, frameworks, and actionable how-tos to help my students see results as fast as possible.

My signature framework, that you just tasted a sample of, doesn’t rely on social media algorithms and passing trends to get you results. It relies on perennial principles rooted in psychology and sociology. Because social media platforms rise and fall, channels go obsolete, but people will make decisions the same way for centuries to come.

And that's a wrap on our first ever recipe battle in the Operator Kitchen!

You've now tried two recipes for audience building:

• Renee's approach to building a reputation that makes people eager to hear from you — ICYMI read it here

• Adriana's framework for creating a connected ecosystem that survives platform changes

Take a week to digest these recipes and start testing what resonates with you. Next week, you'll get to vote for your favorite approach, and if you pick the crowd favorite, you could win one of these sponsored products:

• A seat in Adriana's Audience Accelerator course to master her ecosystem framework

• A 1:1 coaching session with Renee to craft your online reputation strategy

Meet me back in the kitchen next week to cast your vote!

In the meantime, I’d love to know 👇