Jason Hobbs

You’re in business for yourself.

Possibly in South Georgia, like me: (912) 381-6318, or anywhere else in the world.

You have customers.

Referrals mainly.

Yet you still relate rather easily to the fears of fellow business owners. For instance:

Ever worry over the safety of your businesses future?

No. You’ll never be able to future-proof your business completely.

But you CAN aspire to achieving the highest possible percentage of safety for your businesses future, right?

No harm in shooting for the stars, every so often somebody hits one. But not by aiming at the ground beneath their feet.

So what’s the best way to safeguard the future of your business?

I’ll keep my answer simple here, because you got things to go get done.

My 3-word answer? Your own audience.

To future proof your business, you want direct contact with your potential customers. You can pay ad rates allowing you to rent access to someone else’s audience in a specific arrangement for a very finite amount of time.

But it’s your business.

I’m not a fan of the funnel analogy for marketing.

I see it as a path.

Over time.

Over the life of your relationship, or two-way conversation between you and your audience.

Everyone starts as strangers

Audience attention is attracted, by connecting with the audience member enough so she wants more.

Be helpful, use your content to educate her decision(s) over time.

You can still rent access, but be strategic with your access to other people’s audiences.

Use paid access, via money for ads, or time and effort to write a guest blog post, or appear on a podcast as a guest; to attract the attention of your audience.

With the express purpose of organizing your audience back at your website. Which uses your domain name as the online address and, which you OWN completely.

Organize and build your audience, in order  to grow your audience

Audience measurement offers analytics but your business goal for investing in organizing, building, and then growing your audience over the life of your business boils down to growing your own customers.

Your audience members of today, are your educated customers of tomorrow.

Started one customer today.

With a second invoice sent.

Focusing on two week sprint online.

Organize, build, and grow your audience.

918 Podcast Downloads to date for Swappin’ Stories.

I started tracking my traffic numbers over again as of July 18, 2015, here is a screenshot of the totals for my jasonhobbsllc.com website from first day of the new numbers through the day I’m wrote the first draft of this blog post, aka August 14, 2015.

But that’s a red herring applied to my business

My business currently puts food on the table and an old roof over my head.

And allows me to ransom intermittent internet access from Mediacom.

Thus I care about attracting the correct person to my site.

To join my audience.

Someone obsessing over a problem, which I can help solve.

View the PDF Report

My last post covered Showrunning.

But you can’t do eCommerce with Rainmaker Platform, can you?

Using Rainmaker Platform? No. Rainmaker will sell access superbly out of the box.

There may be a shopping cart coming to the Rainmaker Platform but unless you work for Copyblogger Media’s, more than likely for the Rainmaker Platform team, you have zero clue when the day and time will arrive.

So if you want to run eCommerce, you need to find a different solution?

No longer the case.

My Marketing Site is on Rainmaker Platform

AND my eCommerce “Shop” is on WebSynthesis Hosting, using Easy Digital Downloads and my technical partner, Devrix.

What does Devrix do for me?

They handle my code for me.

As I need to add new functionalities to my shop, I talk to Mario.

And Mario and his team of developers makes it happen.

Audience is king

Thats the name of the game these days.

Doesn’t matter if you have the best product or service in the world, you’re still at other’s mercy until you build your audience.

And it doesn’t need to be hundreds of thousands of raving fans either.

You need passionate few hundred to really get the ball rolling and growing until momentum is on your side.

But that all begins with the flash point where your entertainment hits the ears of your audience.

We all start as strangers

You gotta get the attention of your audience.

Then you gotta keep the attention of your audience.

Simple to say, not so easy in practice. But you? You totally got this.

Cause you got the whole Showrunner community on your side. Including some super talented people gaining their sea legs together.

Then buoying each other to new heights over time.

Thats the big win to me

The ability to have a supportive community serving as the wind in my show’s sails.

Lifetime Access Is still only $600 (NOT an affiliate link)

Email.

Gotta love it.

I grew up when email wasn’t even a consideration.

I was a Restaurant General Manager over two high-volume locations of Taco Bell before email.

Email took hold of business, then personal communication, and still hasn’t let go.

Of which network effect plays a large role.

As humans we communicate.

We also like the path of least resistance.

We communicate our thoughts, feelings, and ideas one-to-one, one-to-a few, one to a group, and one to many.

We tend to communicate verbally, a lot of the time.

Thus the smartphone revolutionized communication just like the land line back in the day.

The key thing with network effect is that the more people that adopt, the greater the benefit to each member of the network.

Until Grandma and Gramps adopted email, there would be no email communication with them.

Was not possible.

I see network effect potential with Slack

The classic example is the telephone. The more people who own telephones, the more valuable the telephone is to each owner. Wikipedia

I believe this to be the case for me, on an individual level.

The more of my customers, audience, and community I can attract into my Slack team, the greater my value.

And their value as well.

That is assuming I get the Slack setup recipe right on try number one.

My chances of that happening are slim and none.

And slim fell off a cliff.

But that’s the beauty of iteration

I don’t have to get it right the first time. I just have to get them in there.

And help.

Which will still deliver them a better experience than the status quo.