5 Steps to Convert Followers into an Engaged Audience.

In today’s issue, I’m going to show you how to convert followers into an engaged audience.

If you follow these steps, you’ll drastically improve your chance to transform your followers into raving fans, who support you and your products and services.

And even if people aren’t ready to buy, you build powerful connections with other creators:

Unfortunately, most creators don’t have a predefined system for doing this.

Let's dive in.

No creator ever said: I wish I never built an engaged audience.

The strategy that we’re going to set up today is an engagement strategy.

The benefits of this strategy are:

• It’s easy to implement this into your LinkedIn routine.
• You’ll naturally grow confident.
• You’ll see results within a week of starting this strategy.

Here's how to get started, step by step:

Step 1: Focus on outbound engagement

You can have the best content in the world, but without a network, it’s hard to get seen.

If you think that your content will magically arrive on the feed of like-minded creators, we’ve to break your bubble: it won’t.

Every day, 2+ million posts, articles, and videos are published on LinkedIn.

You’re not going to win the volume game.

The key to audience-building is to find and connect with the right people first.

You want to tap into their audiences.

If you’re starting out on LinkedIn, your engagement is mainly based on goodwill.

You can increase this by engaging with other creators first.

This is how you do it:

• Find creators you like the content of or want to be affiliated with:
• Use the search of LinkedIn.
• Type in the topic you want to learn more about or find people that are related to this topic.
• Apply this tactic long enough till you have a solid collection of creators to interact with.
• Enable the 🔔 of your favorite creators
• Interact with their content the moment it’s published
• Do this for 30 days straight like clockwork
• Watch the engagement on your content grow

Step 2: Optimize the inbound engagement

The better a job you do at your outbound engagement, the better results you yield in this step.

This a couple of reasons:

1. More profile views as more people see your comments
2. You have a more relevant audience as you selected who to engage with first
3. Creators who you engaged with want to "pay back" your efforts.

There are a couple of things you can do to improve the engagement with your content:

Scenario 1: Initiate a conversation

When someone responds to your content, don't simply reply with a "thank you".

Ask a question back, either about their comment or something about their headline for example.

The goal here is to increase the time they spent on your post, aka "dwell time".

The longer the dwell time, the more it signifies to the LinkedIn algorithm that your post is valuable.

Scenario 2: Be social

In an attempt to attract more people to your post, you can tag creators you had previous conversations with.

An example:

Scenario 3: Be collaborative

You can choose to include other creators in the conversation, similar to the previous scenario.

The beauty here is that you initiate big conversations on your content, which increase the dwell time and overall engagement.

Step 3: Reach out through DMs

Just had an interaction with another creator on the feed?

This offers a great opportunity to take the connection to the next level.

You do this by reaching out through DMs.

Yes, send that DM.

Scary right?

Send that person a personalized connection request and open the conversation.

(Steal these 8 DM tactics to initiate a conversation with anyone online.)

This way, you build engaged and real relationships, one step at a time.

3 scenarios you can use to initiate a conversation with anyone online:

1. A mutual connection
2. Recent engagement with your content
3. A shared interest

Step 4: Have an "IRL" conversation

Connecting on the public feed, and in private conversations is great.

Yet, you can do more: hop on a 1:1 call.

Scary, right? I know.

If you want to grow an engaged audience and a powerful personal brand, it’s one of the steps to take.

The goal here is to network and learn about each other.

Aren't you curious about what they are working on?

Perhaps it can help you or you can get inspired. You never know what’s possible.

Broadly speaking, you can decide to speak with 3 types of people:

• Peers
• Clients
• People with interesting profiles

This part of audience-building is definitely an element that sets you apart from most creators.

Step 5: Watch your engagement roar

The average engagement rate per post on LinkedIn in 2021 was 0.35%.

But by consistently following steps 1 to 4, you're able to reach engagement rates like:

An engagement rate like this doesn't happen magically, and once realized, doesn't stay like that.

You have to keep putting in the work.

But, well.

I can tell by the fact you kept reading till this point, that you're serious about this creator's thing.

Now you know what you do to create an engaged audience.

If you're ready to build a product, here's the 11-step process to get started.

TL;DR

1. Focus on outbound engagement
2. Optimize the inbound engagement
3. Reach out through DMs
4. Have an "IRL" conversation
5. Watch your engagement roar

Much love,

Your Personal Creator Guide.

Jessie

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