A couple of weeks ago I read Copyblogger, Brian Clark’s blog, a term I liked a lot and which in turn is inspired by the fashion book in the world of start-ups that is called “The Lean Method Startup “by Eric Ries.
This is the concept of the Viable Minimum Audience.
It is a fundamental concept that all those who intend to start high in the online world and try to develop a business in digital channels must be very clear.
And today I’ll explain.
# 1 Size Does Matter
There are several ideas behind the Viable Minimum Audience. The first is the idea that the size of your audience does matter.
If basically in your blog now you have 30 or 50 visits per month, you should be very clear as a short term goal to increase your traffic and start having around 100 or 150 visits a day, since with this we would have the embryo of a minimum audience viable.
So you should not worry so much at the beginning about launching offers or many products to the market because, anyway, your current problem is that you have no visibility and that very few people are visiting you.
It is okay to be working on developing your portfolio of services and your product portfolio, but it is not the top priority issue NOW.
You should focus on reinforcing your online networking, both commenting on blogs and through social networks, to try to attract recent visitors to your blog. This would be your short-term goal.
# 2 Traffic is not everything
It is important that the visits that you get to the blog are very qualified, that is to say, that they are people who have a need and that in the blog try to respond to this need.
Here, if you do not want overkill, you have to do is understand very well what is the profile of the ideal reader you want to attract to your blog and crush with the editorial line of your blog on these issues.
Why?
Because you attract to whom you write, whether or not you are aware of it.
The more focused and focused your editorial line, the higher the quality of these visits. And this will help you quickly achieve this Minimum Viable Audience.
# 3 Can you buy your product or service?
Within the important things when building a Minimum Viable Audience with the idea of selling (products of sale, services or something more than advertising), you must be very clear that the purchasing power of the target group does matter.
The other day a student told me the idea of her mother, who is currently unemployed and is becoming an expert in techniques and ways to find work, and I said two things about it:
- Congruence: Your mother’s experience would be exciting from the moment you have found work in this environment so complicated that we are living right now in the USA. In this case, it would be important that he succeed, so that his example serves as a replicable model for others.
- Purchasing ability: Beyond this, it is very likely that unemployed people have a shallow purchasing power and do not have the money to pay for an ebook, digital product or workshop where they are helped to improve their chances in the market. Which the purchasing power of your audience also has a direct impact on sales.
# 4 You do not build the house by the roof
Behind the concept of minimum viable audience, what I like most is the recommendation that Brian: before having this Minimum Viable Audience you should not even think about launching your first offers in the market, because the idea is not to start with products and with services and then try to sell them.
Quite the opposite. It is about building the first audience and then launching the products and services that this audience expects from you.
Develop the product your readers expect, not the one you have in mind
The idea is to identify a group that we want to help, better understand the needs of this group better, publish a series of high-quality articles on the blog and develop, over time, a relationship of trust with this audience.
This presupposes to continue doing this work of publishing interesting and useful contents for a sufficient time and, from there, to do surveys, to ask this audience that you have built what they expect of you and to put you to produce not the product or the service that you have in mind. But the product or service that customers have in mind on the blog.
This little detail in the creation process changes everything absolutely.
Anticipate the promotion phase of your product/service
If you have a good idea to share in your blog the making of this product, so that it serves as a re-launch of the product, the day you launch it and put the buy button is likely to get an impressive sales volume, which is already going to monetize the time invested in this product.
These concepts, of first listening to the market before launching anything, being stuck in the market and dealing with the feedback of the market itself, to fine tune the product are fundamental, are what we find in the Lean Method of Eric Ries.
Minimum Viable Audience or setting up a business is a slow process
If you want to start an online business, it is important that you have this idea clear.
There is a mandatory time that can go, depending on how well you are doing, from 3 to 12 months where your only concern should be to build an audience.
Anticipating sales during this initial process is taking the unnecessary risk for near-potential sales, and running the risk of scaring away your few readers before consolidating a nascent relationship with an audience.
Do not give up too fast
Once you’ve started building your audience, be very clear that this is a job that never ends.
With the snowball effect that usually provides good rankings in Google, this initial effort will be more than recompensed for later. As long as you exceed this time threshold, you’ll not give up too fast.
Focus on the market, your readers and stop thinking about you. This is the central message of the concept of minimum viable audience.
Of course, you will have to learn to listen to your readers. Do not think it’s that easy.
So, why do not you start today and see for yourself all you can get?