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Last week I wrote about agency assets, the things you build that accumulate value over time and give your agency a permanent seat in your market's brain. Newsletters, podcasts, YouTube, frameworks, your LinkedIn presence.
And if, as on cue, OpenAI went out and spent low hundreds of millions of dollars on the TPBN podcast, a Silicon Valley founder darling. You see, even companies with nearly a billion users are investing in creating assets. HubSpot did this a while ago, too, where they bought The Hustle and they've created their own podcast network. Even folks in my line of work, folks like Max Traylor, have published a couple of books as assets. Earlier today on LinkedIn he wrote:
Following the agency assets issue, I got 3 DMs & an email that were essentially the same question:
"Tim, I started [posting, podcasting, newlettering]. But nobody's [reading/watching/listening]. WTF do I do now?"
WTF, indeed.
The shitty truth is creating the asset is the easy part. Getting human beings to actually pay attention to it is a completely different skill set, mindset, and solution set, and in a lot of respects, distribution is what makes or breaks an asset.
It's not fun to think about, but we all know that if you build it, they don't necessarily come. So many agency owners have existed off referrals and warm intros, and they never developed the audience skill set - they have never had to go earn an audience from scratch.
Well, let's fix that…this your distribution primer, aka, audience-building 101, & your "how the hell do I get people to care about this thing I made" playbook.
The Attention Problem
Every agency owner I talk to has the same fantasy - launch a newsletter or a podcast or start posting on LinkedIn and people are going to find them. The innate quality of their content is going to make it easy for the algorithm to work its magic.
Then week four rolls around. You have 47 subscribers (38 of whom are your team and your mom). Your podcast has 12 downloads (and 4 of those are you checking to make sure it works on all the platforms). Your LinkedIn posts are getting 118 impressions and 1 like, and unsolicited pitchslaps from fractional CFOs, LinkedIn AI experts & an ISO 9001 certified web, mobile and application developer who addresses you as “Boss”…
Most agency owners quit. They decide "content doesn't work for us" and refresh their inbox and CRM obsessively, just to make sure they didn't miss anything from that guy who made that referral one time.
Content isn’t the problem, DISTRIBUTION IS.
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The Four Moves of Audience Building
There are exactly four things you can do to build an audience. Seriously, that’s it. Every tactic, every hack, every strategy you have ever heard fits into one of these four buckets. And just like agency ops, the sequence matters.
Move #1: Build (Earn Attention One Person At A Time)
This part is a fucking grind, and you can't really skip it.
You pick a channel, you show up on the regular, and earn attention through sheer force of will. No, actually, that doesn’t work - you have to really focus on being useful, interesting, or entertaining (ideally all three, but you can start with one).
Here is what building looks like in practice:
You write the newsletter every week even when Beehiiv is sending you emails saying, “Hey, are you OK? Maybe you should go touch some grass because A/B testing your subject line when you only have 14 subscribers isn’t gonna help.”
You record the podcast even when the listen numbers & “Yo, unc…” comments from feral tweens on YouTube make you want to cry into your Blue Yeti.
You post on LinkedIn even when the only engagement is from bots, and that one guy you worked with at your 1st job who has since retired and wants to “Hang out & talk about the good old days over a beer?”
This is the stuff that the people who have a million Substack subscribers never tell you - the first giant handful issues of your newsletter probably suck. Mr. Beast’s first video certainly didn't add to his currently 474 million subscribers
The cheat code, if there is one, for the build phase is: consistency is more important than quality. I don't mean that you should publish performative shit that means nothing to anyone. A good-effort newsletter that shows up every week is better than a Hemingway-esque work of art that shows up irregularly every 6 to 12 weeks. Presence is the prize of the build phase. The content, as long as it's not crap, is a little bit less important until that presence becomes expected.
The real benefit of the build phase is that you learn how to get good at creating content when nobody's watching. It's really hard to embarrass yourself in an empty room.
Issue one, issue two, episode seven, LinkedIn post number 12 all might be terrible, but on the plus side, nobody's paying attention yet. Little by little, as you get more practice, you learn your voice, your point of view, and your expressive language. You develop the notations and concepts that define your point of view and IP. You can't skip this phase. You shouldn't try to rush through it, because that's not possible. Just commit to it.
Quick story: My original Focus Friday newsletter was under 500 subscribers for at least two years…and it was just this year that I cracked 10,000 subscribers to this newsletter across all the places that I publish it. That said, there are places that I have yet to crack. My YouTube channel has been stuck under 250 subscribers forever. I have 316 videos on there - the fact that I don't have many subscribers doesn't really phase me, because eventually, someday it'll click. I'll figure it out. Every time I make a video, even if nobody watches it, I end up learning how I sound, what I say, what feels right, and what feels crappy. It's all just practice. Now, won't you do your old pal Tim a favor and reward his YouTube channel with a cute little like and subscribe?
Move #2: OPA (Other People’s Audience)
Building is slow. but borrowing and audience is fast (most agency owners completely ignore it.)
Borrowing means you get in front of someone else's audience, deliver massive value, and a percentage of that audience follows you home to your thing.
It sounds complicated - but it's just marketing. Borrowing someone else's audience is like buying an ad, except instead of costing money, it costs you time and communication.
Guest on podcasts: This is the single most underutilized distribution channel for agency owners. There are literally thousands of podcasts that need smart, experienced guests who can talk about agency life, marketing strategy, leadership, sales, whatever. You have 10, 15, 20 years of stories. Use them. Every podcast appearance puts you in front of an audience that already trusts the host, and that trust transfers to you for the 45 minutes you are in their ears. Just a week ago, I was on Chris DuBois' podcast, Agency Forward. I have no idea how many listeners Chris has, but he is a terrific guy, and it was a great conversation about vibes, vision, and values… my favorite topic
Get featured in other newsletters: Find 5-10 newsletters that serve an adjacent audience (not competitors, complements) and pitch the author. Offer to write a guest section…offer a quote…offer a case study. The newsletter world is surprisingly collaborative because every publisher knows the pain of filling issues week after week. Here is an an example of content that I wrote that was featured in a newsletter from Copper CRM.
Speak at events: Virtual summits, webinars, conference panels, local meetups. Every stage is a borrowed audience. But only borrow an audience if you have an owned asset to catch them. Speaking at an event without a newsletter or lead magnet signup link is like running an ad with no landing page. I’ve done plenty of speaking in my professional career, both on stage and in virtual events. Every time it has generated really great discussions that created referral partners or clients directly from that appearance. (Two stage appearances resulted in a job offer, but I never took them…some days I think I was really dumb to turn them down.)
Write guest content: Guest posts, contributed articles, collaborative LinkedIn content. The key is to bring your actual perspective, not some watered-down, "here are 5 tips" garbage. Bring the heat. Be memorable. Nobody follows a guest contributor home because they were competent. They follow because something you said made them think, "I need more of whatever that was."
The Borrow formula is simple - value first, capture second. You are a guest in someone else's house, so you should act like it. Deliver so much value that the host's audience has no choice but to follow you home and maybe stalk you a little bit (but only in a good way…).
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Move #3: Cooperation (Build A Mutual Audience With A Peer)
This is a variation on other people's audiences, but it has the added attraction of developing a really long-standing and ongoing relationship between you and the owner of the audience that you are borrowing. (When done well, this is also a really amazing start to a referral network that pays dividends for years.)
Here is what sharing looks like:
Newsletter swaps: You mention their newsletter, they mention yours. Both subscriber lists grow - not a one-time shoutout, but a recurring partnership where you regularly cross-pollinate audiences.
Co-created content: Joint webinars. Dual-host podcast episodes. "We interviewed each other" LinkedIn posts. Collaborative research or surveys. When you create something WITH someone else, both audiences show up, and a meaningful percentage sticks around for your solo work. this is so underrated. If you are not looking for non-competitive agencies that address the same audience that you do to create content, you are missing out.
Shared frameworks: This one is sneaky and powerful. If you build a framework or methodology that another expert can reference and extend, you have created a shared language between your audiences. When they cite your concept in their work and you cite theirs, both audiences get curious about the other person.
The key to sharing is finding the right partner. You want someone who serves the same general audience but from a different angle. If you are a positioning expert, partner with a sales expert. If you are a content strategist, partner with a paid media specialist. The audiences overlap enough to be relevant but are different enough that neither of you is cannibalizing the other.
Don’t treat cooperation like a transaction. The best shared audience relationships are genuine friendships where the collaboration happens naturally. If you are keeping score ("I mentioned you three times this month and you only mentioned me once"), you are doing it wrong. The energy of scorekeeping leaks through and the audience can smell it.
This is how 5,000-subscriber newsletters become 15,000-subscriber newsletters without spending a dollar on ads. Sharing is the compound interest of audience building.
Move #4: Keep (Retain And Deepen The Relationship)
This is where most agency owners completely fuck things up. They do all the hard work of building, borrowing, and sharing to grow an audience, and then they bore that audience to death with self-promotional garbage. When you have an audience, you really have to think about that audience as people who have invited you into their space. I struggle with how much promotion to put into this missive. Of course I want you to work with me, but I also want to help, teach, and express. I try to keep this a place where there are commercial elements. We have ads to offset the expense, and I put in links about the things that I believe in and the ways that I work because I think I'm really good at what I do.
That's not why I want you to subscribe to the newsletter. I want you to subscribe because you get value. Keeping an audience is about three things:
Consistent value delivery: This is not optional. There are two pieces to this:
Consistency: This newsletter publishes on Tuesdays and Fridays. I try really hard to honor that.
Value: It has to be valuable to you, make sense, and be relevant. That value has to be delivered consistently.
Pattern creation: Humans are pattern-seeking animals. Give them a pattern. Once you settle into what feels right for your voice and for your medium, try not to switch it up too much. Obviously, changing the presentation every once in a while is good, but adding new sections or new modals of presentation can be really challenging because the delivery is for the audience and not the creator. a long time ago, I went to a concert (it was Livingston Taylor, James Taylor's older brother) he said that lots of artists don't like going on tour because they want to play their new stuff, the stuff that they are very excited about. He said that's not why people buy tickets; they want to hear the stuff they know.
Then he launched into a song that he first published in 1968 or 69, I think. By his estimation, he had played that exact song over 10,000 times & he doesn't even like that song anymore, but he loves the people that love it. In short, people pay to hear the hits.
Just like Livingston Taylor, let your audience sing along by not changing up the presentation, the logo, the shape, and the form all the time. Invest in your message, but make it accessible
Deepening engagement over time: Your newsletter reader should become your podcast listener. Your podcast listener should become your webinar attendee. Your webinar attendee should become your client. This is not a funnel strategy - those are dumb and pretty ineffective. (I wrote about that a few weeks ago in an issue that I should have titled Fuck Your Funnel. ) You should try to make every touch with your audience an invitation to go deeper. Each layer of engagement builds more trust, more familiarity, more "I know how this person thinks and I want more."
The biggest Keep mistake I see? Agency owners who treat their audience like a lead list instead of a community. Every other email is a pitch. Every podcast episode is a thinly veiled sales presentation. Every LinkedIn post has a CTA that screams "BUY MY THING."
Stop it.
The reason people stay in your audience is because you give them something valuable on a consistent basis. The sale happens as a natural consequence of that value, not because you crammed a pitch into every paragraph.
Here is my content rule of thumb - give, give, give, give, give, ask. (Why I'm glad you asked, yes, that is completely iterative of Gary Vee's jab, jab, jab right hook, but I've got one more jab. More value vs Mr. Stingy Gary Vee!) Five pieces of genuine value for every one ask. If your ratio is worse than that, your audience will shrink faster than you can grow it.
Trigonometry, Algebra, or Whereever Exponential Things Live
Everything I just described gets exponentially more powerful when you take your assets and share them in lots of different ways.
Every piece of content you create should feed multiple channels. The podcast episode becomes a newsletter. The newsletter becomes 3-5 LinkedIn posts. The LinkedIn post that pops off becomes a YouTube short. The YouTube short drives people back to the newsletter.
This is not "repurposing." Repurposing sounds like leftovers. This is strategic amplification, and it can turn one hour of effort into a week of presence across every channel that matters.
Different people consume content in different ways. Some people will never listen to a podcast but will read every newsletter. Some people live on LinkedIn but have never subscribed to a newsletter in their life. Some people only watch YouTube. If you create one piece of content and put it on one channel, you are reaching maybe 20% of your potential audience. If you redistribute across five channels, you are reaching the other 80% who may never have found you otherwise.
This strategic amplification happens after you have established a presence, created a pattern, and focused on value. Amplifying crap just throws shit everywhere. Consistent quality, thoughtfulness, and helpfulness, then growth. You earn the right to amplify after you've earned trust.
Build The Asset. Then Build The Audience.
Two weeks ago, I told you to build an agency asset. This week I am telling you that you've got to create a distribution opportunity for that asset. There are other ways to create distribution through ads and all that sort of stuff. I have always found that unless you have a clear value proposition and promise that feels like a brand, ads are entirely transactional. Before you try to accelerate, you have to build the audience for your asset by building the asset as you go.
Building an asset by itself gets you nothing. Building an audience that you don't share value with also gets you nothing. It's not exactly a chicken-and-egg perspective, because your asset and your audience evolve in concert over time. Your assets will look different after multiple months than they do today. it may not be fast or glamorous, but building an audience that is interested and pays attention to your assets will yield benefit for years,
So here is your homework:
If you are at zero (no audience, no asset), start with Move #1. Pick one channel. Show up consistently for 90 days. Don’t worry about growth. Worry about getting good and getting consistent.
If you have a small audience (under 1,000), start borrowing. Get on 2-3 podcasts a month. Do newsletter swaps, speak at virtual events - every borrowed audience accelerates your build.
If you have a growing audience (1,000-5,000), find your sharing partners. Build reciprocal relationships with 3-5 people who serve your audience from a different angle - co-create content & cross-pollinate.
If you have a meaningful audience (5,000+), focus on Keep. Deepen the relationship & create layers of engagement. Move people from casual consumer to committed community member.
And once you feel the trust from your audience, start to amplify.
Self-Promotion Alert (sorry/not sorry)
This is exactly what DemandOS is built to help you do, by the way. Not in a theoretical "think about your brand" way, but in a practical "here is how you build presence in your market so that when prospects are ready to buy, you are already in their consideration set" way. If you are serious about building audience and visibility, let's talk.
The best time to build an audience was five years ago. The second best time is right after your DemandOS call with Tim. 😂
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