Shane Melaugh – Audience from Scratch

Yes, it is possible! Serial entrepreneur Shane Melaugh finally reveals the complete system for how to do it:

Let me ask you a question: what does online business success look like?

In your mind’s eye, do you see any of the following:

•  Startups that growth-hack their way to a massive user base and then get bought out by a tech giant (for $$$ millions)?

These, among many others are those “shining examples” that lead millions of wannabe entrepreneurs astray. Trying to emulate these kinds of success stories is a commonly walked path to frustration and failure.

Vanity Metrics: How Big Corporations Get You to Work for them… for Free.

There’s a term for metrics that don’t matter, beyond stroking your ego: vanity metrics.

Get immediately download Shane Melaugh – Audience from Scratch

A vanity metric is data that strokes your ego, but doesn’t actually grow your business.

These metrics are easy to measure. Social platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube report these numbers publicly. If you’re a creator on such a platform, they rub the vanity metrics in your face every chance they get.

Vanity Metrics Include:

The number of likes, shares, upvotes a social post gets.
The number of views a video gets, the amount of traffic a blog post gets, the number of times a social media post is seen.
The number of followers or subscribers an account has.

These numbers are like targets that have been lined up for you. They’re the targets most online entrepreneurs frantically scramble towards.

They promise salvation: work hard enough, get enough followers and you too can make lots of money!

To be clear: I’m calling these numbers vanity metrics because they don’t matter.

That’s hard to believe, I know. But you can easily prove it to yourself.

You can have a website with lots of traffic that makes virtually no money.

You can have millions of followers and have a completely failed product launch.

Here’s an tragic/amusing example of this problem:

You can be a “success story” in the online world but suffer from burnout & struggle to make ends meet.

At the end of the day, likes, followers, even traffic won’t pay the bills.

If you think about it, this makes sense. After all, where do the vanity metrics come from? They are prominently displayed by social platforms. They’re used by these platforms as a “carrot” to get users/creators to do what’s good for the platform.

The goal of a social media platform is not to help you, the creator/entrepreneur. Their goal is to make money. And if they have loads of people desperately creating loads of content in the hopes of some far-off reward, that’s great for them! Free labour!

The reason so many online entrepreneurs fail is not because something’s wrong. It’s because the system works! The system does what it’s supposed to do. All the struggling creators are just unaware of the system.

The Holy Grail of Email Marketing (?)

While we’re in the process of slaughtering sacred cows, let’s talk about email marketing. Building an email list is the ultimate non-vanity thing to do, right? The money is in the list! How often have you heard that one?

And yes, I’ve preached the importance of building a mailing list as well.

BUT…

You can have a mailing list full of people who don’t open your emails and don’t want to buy anything from you.

There’s nothing wrong with building a mailing list (I recommend it!) but if you’re just chasing that subscriber number, if you’re just trying to get that number to increase, you’re still stuck on the vanity metrics treadmill.

So, what’s the solution? What’s the alternative to the futile pursuit of vanity metrics?

There is a solution to all the problems described above. There is a way to get unstuck – a better way to do things.

In fact, I’ve been following a set of strategies that are way off the beaten track from typical online marketing advice for years. And I’ve been very successful in doing so.

From my vantage point, I can see all the struggling entrepreneurs flailing and failing as they scramble along the well-trodden highway to frustration. It’s clear as day to me why they’re struggling. It’s clear that doing more of the same isn’t going to get them the results they want.

But there’s a problem: the way I’ve done things is so different, it’s hard for some people to believe. I can show you what I do differently (and I will – just keep reading). The question is: can you open your eyes to it? Or will you return your gaze to the shiny mirages and resume your struggle to chase vanity metrics?

The choice is yours.

Alright, enough beating around the bush. The solution to all these problems is this: build an audience.

Ummmm… what?

Isn’t that what we’re trying to do already?

“Build an audience” means: get more Twitter/Snapchat/TikTok/whatever followers, right?

Get those numbers up and then (somehow) make money. Desperately struggle to get more traffic from more keywords to my blog posts, etc. That’s what we’re already doing!

Yes. But that’s not what I call “audience building”.

Your “audience” is not your followers or subscribers. It’s not your traffic. Building an audience operates on a whole different level from building a following or generating traffic.

Definition of “Audience”

Your audience are the people who know and care about you and your brand. They’re the people who don’t just stumble across one of your posts from a random search or social post, only to leave and never be seen again. They’re the people who actively seek you out want to learn more from you.

Here’s a simple test to illustrate the (massive) difference between vanity numbers and an audience. Think of all the online content you have personally come across in the last 10 days. Check your browser history if you want a really detailed view.

In all likelihood, you’ve visited hundreds of different pages over the last 10 days. You’ve visited dozens of different websites and scrolled past posts made by hundreds of different creators, companies and brands on different social media platforms.

For each one of those, you were “traffic”. You showed up in their vanity metrics.

Now: how many of them can you still remember? How many of those websites can you name and remember the URL of? How many social media or YouTube creators can you name, off the top of your head? How many of them do you actively want to come back to and learn more from?

My guess is that it’s nowhere near hundreds. Maybe not even dozens.

In other words, you consume content by hundreds of brands and creators. But you only remember and deliberately return to a small handful of them.

THAT is the difference between traffic and audience.

Small Scale, Big Results: Why All This Matters

Why is it so important to define what an “audience” is, anyway?

Here’s why: what keeps most online entrepreneurs stuck is that they don’t realize how much success is possible at a small scale. They’re chasing big numbers because they don’t know there’s a better way.

My own business journey is proof of this. If you looked at the vanity metrics for my brands, you’d guess that I’m a broke wantrepreneur. Here’s a sampling (numbers as of my writing):

One of my brands is ActiveGrowth. Here’s the sad picture the vanity metrics paint:

A measly 2,169 followers on Twitter

2,169 followers

The YouTube channel has only 8K subscribers

8k subscribers

The now abandoned FB page: 2,000 followers

2,000 followers

Even traffic numbers for the website don’t look very impressive, with fewer than 10,000/month.

> 10,000 visitors/Mo

For a brand that has operated for many years, surely this doesn’t look like a success story… or does it?

• Did you know that in 2019, I launched a small productivity course under the ActiveGrowth brand and made more than $40,000 in sales before the course was even available?
• Did you know that there are blog posts on the ActiveGrowth website that make several hundred dollars per month… each?
• Did you know this level of success was possible with a tiny audience?

Even Thrive Themes (my primary business) doesn’t look all that impressive, when we look at the vanity metrics. Thrive Themes has:

Fewer than 2,000 Instagram followers

>2K followers

Only about 3,500 followers on Twitter

3.5K followers

And around 23,000 subscribers on YouTube – decent, but nowhere near a success story on YT.

23K followers

And yet, Thrive Themes is a 7-figure business…

The Upstage Method

Borrowed Authority

The Beast Method

The Superfan Method

Trend Hopping

+1 Bonus Recipe

The Seed Audience Challenge

What’s the fastest way to implement the Audience from Scratch principles while also growing your mailing list?

Glad you asked!

The course includes the Seed Audience Challenge which is perfect for anyone with a mailing list of under 100 subscribers. This challenge helps you validate a business idea and get that first set of subscribers as quickly as possible.

And we’re not talking about the usual “list building” stuff here. This isn’t about getting your subscriber number to go up, only to discover that most of those subscribers don’t even open your emails.

In the Audience from Scratch course, we’re using email to stay in touch with highly engaged “true fans” and that’s a whole different ballgame.

BONUS
Challenge44: The Shortest Path to Excellence

“Challenge44” sounds pretty strange, right? To explain what this is, I need to tell a story:

In 2015 I was faced with a problem.

My business was growing fast and I needed to hire a marketing team, so that I could offload some of the marketing work I’d been doing on my own.

But hiring was a frustrating experience. I found that the candidates I interviewed lacked the kinds of skills and mindset I was looking for. They were all operating in the “treadmill” paradigm. They were from within the system and I couldn’t see how I could get them to fit my unconventional approach.

So, I decided to run an apprenticeship program. For 3 months, I worked intensely with a small group of people to teach them my way of marketing an online business.

It worked!

In fact, it worked so well that I used this apprenticeship model several times more, to get people’s skills upgraded in record time. By now, I have a lot of hands on experience in turning someone from an average content creator into an excellent content creator.

Challenge44 is distilled out of all my experience teaching marketing skills in intense learning environments.
Challenge44 is:

1
My answer to the question: “how can I learn to make outstanding content?”
2
The fastest way to go from “meh” content that no one cares about to “OMG” content that grows an audience of fans.

If you want to seriously level up your content creation game or you want someone on your team to level up their content creation game, have them do Challenge44, following the Audience from Scratch principles.

Why am I telling you all this?

Because Challenge44 is included in the Audience from Scratch course, at no extra cost.

What Makes the Audience from Scratch Course Different?

The Audience from Scratch course is not your average online course.

Here are 3 reasons why:

1) Use the Power for Mental Models

This course utilizes mental models to change the way you think and make decisions about your online business. You can think of mental models as thinking tools or as “software for your brain”. The course is structured in a way that doesn’t simply aim to add more information on top of what you already know. Instead, it aims to give you the thinking and decision making tools as well as the lenses through which you view the world that the highest skilled experts in the field use.
2) Pragmatic & Implementation Focused

It’s nice to learn new things, but just learning won’t get you better results for your business. That’s why this course is all about implementation. That’s why we provide loads of real-world examples, deconstruct everything to the most basic building blocks and then give you practical recipes for implementing what you learn. The value of this course comes from what you’ll do differently, not just from watching a bunch of video lectures.
3) Growth & Leverage – Get the Best of Both Worlds

By now, you know that the entire Audience from Scratch system is built around the principles of finding 1,000 true fans. That means you don’t have to reach millions of people in order to be successful. But what if you learnt the best techniques and tactics used by brands that do reach millions? What if you combined the best of rapid-growth strategies with a model that doesn’t require that much growth? That’s what we call leverage and it’s a major focus in this course.

Warning: This is Not a Get-Rich-Quick Business Opportunity

Unfortunately, in the online marketing space, there are always people selling the idea of quick riches, hacks and shortcuts. There’s always some douchebag promising you the easy way to big riches, right after you max out your credit card on his or her latest bullshit product.

This nice red icon and this part of the page you’re looking at right now exists to make one statement as clearly as possible: THIS. IS. NOT. A. “BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY”.

This is not a shortcut. None of the numbers I’ve used in the examples above are to be construed as any kind of guarantee for income or results.

I don’t do get-rich-quick. What I’m offering here is actual, real-life, battle-tested business skill & knowledge. If you want to succeed, you have to be the entrepreneur. What you make of the course material is entirely up to you.

If you don’t like that this sounds like you have to do actual work, now is a great time to leave this page.
Content is the Key to Shockingly Effective Audience Building

The Audience from Scratch course is all about content. In the course, you’ll learn exactly what it takes to make content that gets results.

In fact, this is one of those “mental model” things. Once you’ve gone through the course, you’ll never see content the same way again. You’ll have x-ray vision whenever you read an article, watch a video or even see a social post. And you’ll understand exactly why one content piece gets loads of shares, comments and engagements and another gets ignored.

Why this focus on content?

Because the simple truth is: only content can build an audience.

Get immediately download Shane Melaugh – Audience from Scratch

You can get “traffic” without much content. Mostly by paying for it. And for some business models, that’s all you need. If you’re a locksmith and you need people to find your phone number when they accidentally lock themselves out of their home or car, paying to get those eyeballs from a Google search to your phone number may be all you need.

People have a problem (“I’m locked out!”), they find you, you fix the problem and they pay you. End of story.

That’s traffic, but it will never build an audience.

To build an audience, we have to create something that resonates with people. Something that they want to come back to, something that makes them feel: “I want more of this”.

And there’s a science to creating this kind of content.

This is the science that the Audience from Scratch course teaches. And the reward for building an audience is that you have a real, growing asset. If you’ve ever dreamed of being able to send out a single email to generate loads of sales, an audience is what you really wanted…

Website, YouTube & Beyond

Audience from Scratch is a course for content creators & for businesses that employ content creators.

The course focuses primarily on 2 channels: growing an audience on a website or blog and growing an audience using video content on YouTube. Almost all the examples used in the course are either website or YouTube examples.

That’s because these are the 2 channels that I have focused on the most. This is where my experience lies.

BUT the course teaches fundamental principles of audience growth. I have used these tactics to grow an audience on online forums (back when those were big), then used the same tactics to grow an audience of fans for a blog and later used the same content creation strategies to create videos that attract an audience.

These tactics have worked for forum content, website content and video content. These tactics have a proven track record – they worked 10 years ago, they worked 5 years ago and they still work today. There’s no reason to think they won’t work for your podcast, for social media or for whatever other channels pop up in the coming years. Ultimately, this is about understanding human psychology.

Having said that, I highly recommend that you focus your growth efforts on a website and a mailing list. And in the course, you’ll see why (and learn how).
Does this mean you have to be “on stage” and parade around the Internet like a wannabe celebrity?

Maybe you’re thinking: sure, having an audience of fans would be nice. Sounds great to have loads of people who keep wanting to buy more stuff, after all.

But that’s not you. You don’t want to be on video. You don’t want to do the whole personal branding thing and parade around trying to get people’s attention. Your name and face everywhere? No thanks.

I’ve got good news for you! Showing your face is entirely optional.

Check this out:

Doesn’t immediately make sense what that’s about, I know.

This is a post I made on a forum, publishing my findings from testing some different radiator types. This was years ago, why I was still active in the computer hardware market.

Now, notice what isn’t featured: my face. Or even my real name.

When I started with online audience building, I did it all with usernames and forum posts. Completely anonymous. I built an audience for my brand, not for me, the person.

Since then I’ve done a lot of personal branding and these days I work a lot with video. But what I teach in the Audience from Scratch course is not “personal branding”. It’s not dependent on video work and you can do it entirely anonymously. This is about a more effective way to build a business, not about putting your face out there and becoming a celebrity.

Although, if that’s what you want, you can certainly use these strategies to do it.