The early days are a quiet kind of magic.
Nobody’s watching. Nobody’s expecting anything. You can say the wrong thing, publish the imperfect draft, experiment with a voice that doesn’t quite work, and the stakes are beautifully, almost painfully low. It’s the one phase of building an audience where you’re truly free.
Naturally, we all want to get past it as fast as humanly possible.
I understand the impulse. You start a site because you want to reach people, serve people, build something that matters. Sitting in an empty room talking to yourself feels like failure, even though it’s actually the most important rehearsal you’ll ever do.
So let’s talk about how to fill the room, with the right people, not just any people.
But first: you must know who you’re trying to reach. Not a demographic category. A person. What they believe, what they fear, what they know, what they don’t know yet. Keep digging until you can picture someone specific, someone you’d recognize at a party, someone you could write a letter to.
Once you have a vivid Who, here are seven moves to start building your audience.
1. Be Ready for the Traffic You Get
In the early days, when you’re squeaking along with a handful of visitors, every single one of them matters disproportionately. These are your first real humans. Treat them accordingly.
Before you chase new visitors, make sure:
- You have at least a few interesting pieces of content for them to explore
- Your site doesn’t look like it was designed during a power outage
- You have a smart, generous way to capture email addresses
Those first subscribers often become your most loyal fans, the people who found you when you were small and decided to stick around. Give them a reason to stay. Offer a thoughtful email subscription that delivers real value, not just a countdown to your next sales pitch.
You won’t get floods of visitors early on. But if you’re consistently good to the ones you do get, momentum starts to build. Slowly at first. Then not slowly at all.
2. Answer Every Question
Once you know your Who, borrow a tactic from sales consultant Marcus Sheridan: answer every question you’ve ever seen, heard, or received about your topic.
Not as a 150,000-word encyclopedia. One question per blog post. Keep each answer simple and genuinely useful.
This does several things simultaneously:
- It cures the blank-page paralysis, answering questions is straightforward, almost mechanical work
- It reveals gaps in your own knowledge that you need to fill
- It sends you out into the digital world to hunt for questions, which teaches you enormous amounts about your audience
- It creates a steady stream of fresh content, good for search engines, essential for human readers
Publish two or three of these a week. Every other week, swap in something meatier, a deeper exploration, a contrarian take, a personal story with a lesson attached. Build a buffer of the quick-hit posts, because there will be days when even a ten-minute article feels like a marathon.
This is also how you develop the publishing habit that separates people who build audiences from people who intend to build audiences.
3. Do One Epic Thing
If you want influencers to link to you, thought leaders to share you, and potential customers to connect with you, you need to deserve it.
Not everything you publish will be a home run. Most of it won’t be. But regularly, I’d suggest at least once a month, you need to swing for the fences. Create something more thorough, more creative, more surprising than your usual output. A definitive guide. An original research piece. A deeply reported story. A framework that makes a complex topic suddenly click.
Boring content doesn’t earn links. Copycat content doesn’t earn shares. You need at least occasional moments of genuine epicness, work that makes someone stop scrolling and think, “I need to send this to [specific person].”
You’ll create near-misses before you nail one. That’s part of the process. Start collecting your near-misses now.
4. Be a (Disciplined) Social Butterfly
You might love social media or you might regard it the way you regard a sink full of dishes, an unavoidable chore that’s never as bad as you think once you start. Either way, it’s where connections happen.
Schedule one or two short, focused sessions on a relevant platform every day. Maybe you’re posting in a topical group. Maybe you’re sharing your own content. Maybe you’re cultivating relationships with other publishers. Probably a combination.
Two ten-minute sessions, well-planned, can do more for your growth than two hours of aimless scrolling. Choose platforms where your people actually spend time. For B2B, LinkedIn remains surprisingly effective, people go there expecting to do business. For B2C, meet your audience wherever they already are.
And don’t build your empire on rented land. Social media drives traffic; your own site and email list own the relationship.
5. Take One Controversial Stand
We all know someone who flips the table over every minor inconvenience. That person is exhausting. Don’t be that person.
But there’s a word for people who never take a stand, never ruffle a feather, and never say anything that might make someone uncomfortable:
Boring.
Whatever your niche, fitness, finance, parenting, knitting, there are passionate camps and fierce disagreements. Do real research. Question your own biases. Weigh the evidence. Be willing to change your mind when the facts warrant it.
And once you’re confident that your position is grounded in something real, take the stand. Say it clearly. Own it.
You can literally enrage people by asserting that the earth is round. The roundness of the earth is unaffected by their rage.
Speak up. The people who agree with you, your real audience, will find you through the noise.
6. Buy a Little Traffic with Money
Once you have a steady stream of useful content, a few epic pieces, and a clear point of view, you can give the flywheel a push with a small ad budget.
Small. I’m talking $10 this week. Maybe $10 next week. Think “risking your Frappuccino,” not “risking your mortgage.”
The point isn’t to buy your way to an audience. The point is to learn, to see which messages resonate, which audiences respond, and how the whole apparatus of paid traffic works. The lessons you absorb from small, low-risk experiments will serve you enormously when you have a real offer and a real budget.
7. Buy a Little More Traffic with Time
The other way to “buy” traffic: write guest posts for other sites. Appear on other people’s podcasts. Contribute to communities where your audience gathers.
This only works once your own house is in order, there’s no point inviting people to a party where the furniture is covered in dust and the fridge is empty.
Guest posting broadens your audience and builds relationships with other publishers. It has nice SEO benefits down the line, when your site has some maturity. And it puts your work on a larger stage, so make sure the work you put there is excellent. Showing less-than-great material on someone else’s platform is not a growth strategy. It’s a self-sabotage strategy.
Start Where You Are
You don’t need all seven of these at once. You need one, this week, executed with care. Then another one next week. The room fills slowly at first, one chair at a time, one reader at a time, one genuine connection at a time.
The quiet magic of the early days doesn’t last. One day you’ll look up and realize the room is full, and you’ll miss the quiet. But you won’t miss it too much. Because the room is full of the exact people you wanted to reach.
Start now. The chairs won’t fill themselves.