tl;dr; at the bottom
I hear many-a-person mention that they have no audience, thus, they don’t know what to create/sell.
Well how about you’re totally wrong?
You have an audience.
I have 700+ followers on medium, 1400+ on instagram, 900+ friends on fb, 2000+ connections on linkedin, and I’m active in some reddit communities such as /r/portugal.
You may not have the medium or IG followers, but you have friends on facebook FOR SURE, no?
This IS an audience.
Many of my friends on facebook are Portuguese, because I am too. Many of them think about/want to leave Portugal, many such cases also in /r/portugal. So I created a little side project to help people leave Portugal. (which is like the total opposite of what Pieter Levels is doing, haha) .
Do such things already exist?
Yes. But, these aren’t cold leads. These are people I’ve gone to school with, had beers with, played sports with, etc, etc. So when I post something that is relevant to them, they will pay more attention than if it weren’t someone they know.
I left Portugal and had quite some experience in two different countries. So although I don’t call myself an expert on anything, I can safely say I have A LOT to share about leaving a country and moving to another one from the perspective of someone who hasn’t done it.
What happens when you don’t particularly have that much past experience??
I’m sharing things I experienced 7+ years ago. But what can you do when you don’t really have much experience?
You can use something called the bellwether effect to essentially become an authority/leader on a subject that you don’t know anything about by simply sharing it as you learn.
I’ll leave this video of Colin Theriot below to explain the bellwether effect:
Once you are an authority in your subject (which may take much shorter than you think!) people start asking questions. When people ask heart to heart questions you gain great insight into what they need/want, solve those issues and you got yourself potential income.
So TL;DR: You have an audience, and a subsection of them will have shared interests. Even if you know nothing about these interests, you can use the bellwether effect to position yourself as an expert/authority and leverage your current audience for that hard-to-get initial traction in your audience building process.