Tap Into the Influence of Your Audience to Grow Your Email List

Once you’ve expanded your personal enterprise with a variety of offers, it’s time to think about growing your audience further. 

It’s at this point that things get really interesting, because now you have leverage. You have an engaged audience that you can team up with to grow an even larger engaged audience. 

You may know what the product is for your audience, but you’re not done yet; getting this product completed and introduced to your people is your top priority. At the same time, you don’t want your community-building phase to stagnate in the process. 

Fortunately, you’re at a point where your audience will be growing on its own, thanks to reaching MVA status. But we can add to that growth by implementing mechanisms that incentivize your audience to do the marketing for you. 

The Joy of Organic Audience Growth 

Once you reach a minimum viable audience, it can be hard to settle down and focus on product development. That’s because one of the key elements of an MVA is that the audience begins to grow organically on its own. 

Here are some of the common ways it happens: 

Email Forwards 

First up is the old-school email forward. When I started in email publishing back in the late 90s, people would forward email newsletters constantly, unprompted. 

And people still forward email newsletters to others today — in fact, more than you think. But now it’s smart to be intentional and ask your people to share each issue with someone who will appreciate it. 

Social Sharing 

It’s always cool to see people sharing your content, newsletter, podcast, etc., on social media. Seeing an increase in social sharing is generally a good sign that you’re at or beyond the MVA milestone. 

As with anything else, it pays to ask people to share. While some will do it without prompting, any call to action (CTA) you deliver to your audience generally results in a better response. With Substack, it’s simple to include a “Share” button in your newsletter or article, but add some encouraging copy to go along with it, and say thank you in advance.

Links from Other Publishers 

Another powerful form of free traffic that accelerates as you grow comes in the form of links from other publishers in your space. If you’re doing good work in a specific industry or niche, people will notice, and some will mention you to their audiences. 

This is a strong reason to link out to others or even add an element of curation to the value you offer your audience. Others will notice when you link to them, and this awareness can be invaluable to building deeper relationships later, even as links back to your site grow your audience and authority. You can also use Substack Recommendations to highlight notable publications and publishers with whom you’d like to develop relationships.

Search Optimization 

Some people start off specifically trying to attract traffic from Google. Problem is, they have no idea who their ideal prospect is, don’t know what their product or service is, and generally rate raw traffic numbers higher than the more important aspect of conversion. 

Once you have an MVA, however, you’re in a much better position on all of the above. Plus, you’re able to drive meaningful traffic to your website content from your email list, which is a signal that Google looks for. So now is a much better time to think about search engine optimization. 

And yet, as you know, SEO is way tougher than it used to be. More content is competing with a dwindling number of first-page Google results, so you have to ask yourself if this is the best return on (time) investment you can make. Plus, AI agents like ChatGPT and Claude are slowly but surely replacing the basic instinct to “Google” for an answer.

So before you commit to SEO, you may want to consider another audience-growth engine. One where your audience itself does the growing, and the time and money spent is considerably smaller than SEO or online advertising. ...