How do you make sure people stand in line to hear what you have to say? It’s not that difficult. It just takes clear planning and some effort. Don’t quit your job yet; this is easily done on the side.
In part 1 we’ve looked at our core-passions
In part 2 we’ve looked at our core-target group
Putting these together using the right ‘core-carrier‘ is the complete furmula.
What’s a ‘core-carrier’?
If you’re building a company on the side there isn’t much time to do pro market research, search engine optimization, PR, ads or other time-consuming trickery. Fortunately, we don’t have to. There are plenty of websites where millions of people already go to find ‘stuff’, which shows up high in search results.
One of those is YouTube, another is Tumblr. You could probably list a couple more (I didn’t list Facebook, since it isn’t as ‘open’ due to the ‘approval-of-friends’ structure, but if it works for you, go for it!).
Let’s put it all together:
Core-Passions + Core-Target-Group + Core-Carrier = Fan Funnel
It may take a little bit of fiddling around to make your formula work for you. In our case, we built YouTube’s number one Game Development channel using the following formula:
Teaching & GameDevelopment + Young Professionals + YouTube = A-Z tutorial videos
How did we know to do A-Z (beginning to end) video tutorials? Easy: there weren’t any yet. We did a thorough search on YouTube to find out who was teaching game development, and there were a bunch, but none of them took you through the making of a full game. So we did.
Of course, other people were far more popular than we were, so it was intimidating. But all we had to do was beat them to show up as the number one video on Google (see image). That just made the challenge a lot easier.
How to show up in top searches by utilizing your Fan-Funnel
How do you beat your ‘competitors’ on YouTube? Well, that’s also very easy. Almost none of the big YouTubers talk directly to their subscribers or reply to their comment. And so for the first four months of our channel we replied to EVERY single comment. This invited more people to comment and created a close group of fans. Nobody does that.
Once your channel gets too big (six months later) you can’t really do it anymore. We got up to 300 messages a day (not including comments). Impossible. But the good news is: now you have a big channel.
FROM FAN-FUNNEL TO SALES
The entire A-Z series we did was for free. ‘FREE’ attracts thousands of people, as long is the information is as good as it would be when you pay for it.
The idea of building a funnel is to create a tight fan-base before you sell anything. But how do you lead people that come for ‘free stuff’ to actually buy stuff? We’ll look at that in future posts.
Stay tuned,
-The Twins
PS: If you like this post, why not tweet/Facebook/G+ it?
PPS: Please leave a comment with your formula and we’ll comment on it to kick ideas around!
Teaching + Animation/Game Development + Children (edited content for age) + YouTube = On-line fantacy RPG that teaches philosophy through gameplay (A Tale of two Knights)
Sure am looking forward to that “next episode” – the one where you lead people to buy stuff.
i want to start doing my own tutorials…
what software can i use to record whats on my screen??
FOR WINDOWS
Very creative topic! The only thing that’s missing and you guys definetely have been through is if it doesn’t work, drop it, start fresh with the same enthusiasm.
The tricky part is trying to decide if it actually doesn’t work, or if you just lack a little discipline to follow through and should just try to power through it.
What happens when it’s hard to tell the difference? If you’ve lost the “fire,” should you really give up? I’ve heard both sides and I’m still not sure what to think.
Part four isn’t done yet?
Can we expect it at all, or this ‘project’ is one of those u have abandoned?
I decided to write down your exercise from part I and now that I got here, I see I was right to be skeptical about this planning method (at least until we get the next part…)
#music-performance > #Geeks and #Historians > #YouTube (videos of electronically produced period music)
#coaching > #indie-musicians > #Twitter (how to become more productive and more successful as a musician/band)
I know I could do these or many others, but . . . where is the money?