Learn From Proven Entrepreneurs

I got a question from Gabe Audick, who’s building out Mixergy’s Facebook Fan page along with David Turner.

The question

Gab wants to know how I got my first viewers.

My answer

My biggest audience came by drawing in the fans of the people I interviewed. I think many people give up on blogging (or building any kind of business) because they can’t get a big enough audience. It’s hard to spend hours and hours writing something useful and insightful and then have nobody care enough to even see it.

What’s nice about doing interviews is that each of my interviews has a built-in audience.

Jason Calacanis, for example, has a passionate Twitter following. When I interviewed him, he tweeted to his people that he was on Mixergy. Many of them came to check out what Jason said. Some of them returned to hear what my future interviewees said.

Seth Godin isn’t on Twitter and I don’t think he blogged or otherwise promoted my interview with him (though he might have). But his followers are so into Seth that they somehow found me. Many of them posted my interview on their blogs and added their own analysis. Some of Seth’s audience only checked out his interview. Some of them returned to hear what my future interviewees said.

Gary Vayernchuk is another entrepreneur with a huge following. During the live interview, I could see my audience counter grow as his audience came to watch him live on Mixergy. Most of that audience didn’t come back (yet). But some of them returned to hear what my future interviewees said.

As you can see, I added a few fans from each interviewee’s fan-base, and pretty soon I had a real audience.

Then something else happened. Mixergy started building a reputation for interviewing top entrepreneurs. In the beginning, entrepreneurs let me interview them because they were my friends or because they wanted to support my work. But I don’t think they were especially proud to be on a site that many of them considered “just another blog.” So they never (or hardly ever) linked to Mixergy from their sites or added it to their press pages.

But as I added more and more high-profile entrepreneurs to the site, being included in the mix became a point of pride. Past guests started linking to their Mixergy interviews, many from the homepages of their sites. That added even more viewers.

Then, finally, I started to have my own fans. That was killer. I started getting people who liked my work not because it was connected to people they were fans of, but because it spoke to them. So they started promoting my interviews on Twitter and blogging about it and finding other ways to bring others into the program.

That’s how I met Gabe and David.

That part of Mixergy is just starting. But I’m going to do this work for a long time and this is the most meaningful part of the work for me.

In a few years, I can envision that many of my interviewees will be people who used to be listeners, people who were turned on to this work by someone like Seth or Gary or Gabe or David and had their lives changed by what they heard.