What proactive actions do you take to grow your audience?

I try to be interesting enough that people want to know more about me.

Audience growth for the sake of growth at the moment isn't important to me.

All I care about is improving my craft.

My craft

As I mentioned before, my goal is to have in three years, a profitable online freedom business that can sustain my life and research career for the next 60+ years.

I decided to build the freedom business around the personal brand. Why? It's an authentic way of promotion and can last for life if you do it right.

With all of the constraints in mind, I realised that I need to run my business with as few expenses as possible. Without knowing, I started building the required skillset years ago.

In 2010 I started photo blogging. Why? Out of passion.

• In 2015 began learning how to coding. Why? So I don't need to hire a coder to get stuff done.
• In 2018, I started writing. Why? So I don't need a writer.
• In 2020, I started drawing. Why? So I don't have to hire a designer.

With that in mind, it means that I'm doing all of it in the house. Is this most effective in the way short term? No. But it means I get to build all the essential parts of my craft, needed to write a high-quality blog.

My business expenses are 30$ for the web sites maintenance, around 30$ a month for accounting, and that's it—everything else I control and do my self. I can fix pretty much everything because I've built the whole system myself.

Yes, I've written my blog from scratch, wrote web site analytics myself I even wrote the newsletter system and email sender myself.

At this point, I control every inch of my brand.

Could parts of the brand/page/business be better if I hired professionals? Yes. If the freedom business starts making money, I'll hire professionals to improve my craft even further.

My crucial advantage is that I build things that are within reach of my skillset. That allows me to stay small, iterate and move fast. It's a freedom business fit I decided I want to pursue.

So what do I do to promote my work actively?

I'm trying to be so good with my craft that people around me can't ignore me.

Now, of course, you can't stay in the cave and expect that others will come and admire your work. I don't expect that people will find me themselves. I'm aware that I need to get in front of the people.

So my two main promotion strategies are:

• 1.) Interact with people in online communities & Twitter. Be interesting enough so that people want to know more about me. That they will want to subscribe to the newsletter, ...
• 2.) SEO to guide the people that are already searching specific topics towards my web site.

That's it. I'm not interested in fast growth. I'm looking for a sustainable long term online audience that I interact with for years. Meet people from the audience in person, ...

I used to have a large social circle in scouting that I left several years ago. The scouting world was my playground for years. Now I want to build a social circle containing friends from across the globe and do professional stuff together.

I want this whole online citizenship to be a large part of my lifestyle. Not to make quick cash, but to build something sustainable.