Danny Iny - The Audience Revolution: The Smarter Way to Build a Business, Make a Difference, and Change the World

THE AUDIENCE REVOLUTION
The Smarter Way to Build a Business, Make a Difference, and Change the World

by Danny Iny

Copyright 2015 Danny Iny. All rights reserved.

The content and ideas in this book belong to the author. Youre welcome to learn from it and apply it, but you cant share it, distribute it, or re-sell it without express written permission.

Limits of Liability, No Warranty, Earnings Disclaimer, and Your Success (Or Lack Thereof).

This should go without saying, but well say it anyway: you should do your own due diligence, and think carefully through your own plans, because we cant guarantee any specific outcomes, and ultimately, youll be the only one responsible for the results. (Duh!)

Any Other Questions?

If you have any questions that havent been answered here, youre welcome to contact the author via Firepole Marketing. Contact information is at http://www.firepolemarketing.com/contact-us

TABLE OF CONTENTS

This book is dedicated to the wonderful people that work with me at Firepole Marketing.

If I am the face of Firepole Marketing, then you are its hands, legs, and most importantly, its heart. Thank you all for beating with such passion.

(Meet the whole team at firepolemarketing.com/our-team)

Welcome to the Audience Revolution!

Failure is only failure if it happens in the last chapter. Otherwise, its a plot twist.

This book is the result of a number of plot twists in my own journey as an entrepreneur, that led me to a startling and profound insight. At first it felt strange, and counter-intuitive. As I explored the idea further, I became more and more enthralled by its elegant simplicity, to the point where now I dont understand how I ever thought anything else could be true.

Over the last few years, my business has grown by leaps and bounds. After my last plot twist I had less than nothing: a failed business, and a quarter of a million dollars in personal debt. Now, just a few years later, my company generates multiple-seven-figures in annual revenue and employs almost twenty people. We do it all by serving thousands of customers and touching the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, who feel similarly driven to leverage their knowledge and expertise for the benefit of those around them. They are bloggers, authors, coaches, consultants, freelancers, speakers, and changemakers, and weve done so well because we help them do well, and make the world a better place for us all.

Think about that for a moment; we do well by helping them do well. How different is that from the social responsibility agendas of most corporations, who contribute only so they can offset their own societal and environmental damage? For a long time, that was the world that we lived in; there was always a choice to be made between doing what we knew to be right, in line with our values, and good for the world, versus the smart business decision that would make us more money.

There was a time when that was a real choice that entrepreneurs had to struggle with. But that time is being swept away by the Audience Revolution, and its giving way to a new paradigm of income through impact. The most successful people and businesses in the modern age achieve their results by making the world a better place. And sure, you can still make money by screwing people over, but not sustainably, or for very long. Whether that means months, years, or decades depends on the scale at which youre operating, but even decades are just a blink of an eye on a global scale.

The greatest impact creates the greatest success, and the best way to make that impact is by putting the Audience First. Thats the core insight that drives the Audience Revolution. I will unpack it for you in this book, so that you can understand and apply it to create your own success by making your own impact. Along the way Ill show you how this approach has been used by successful businesses from Netflix and Copyblogger, to celebrity consultants like Jim Collins and Scott Stratten, to best-selling authors like Seth Godin and Jeff Walker, to internationally renowned speakers like Randy Gage and Mitch Joel. Through their examples, youll learn how you can apply this Audience First strategy to your own business, to get you better results faster, make you more profitable, and decrease your risk, all at the same time.

Now before we dive in too deeply, I want to make clear who this book is for because while the principles shared here apply to almost every business in the world (with a few notable exceptions), I personally dont have the experience or expertise to guide each and every one of them. So while the concepts will likely apply to what youre doing, Ill focus specifically on the new entrepreneurship that is transcending geographic regions and national borders.

Im talking about those same bloggers, authors, coaches, consultants, freelancers, speakers, and changemakers; anyone who has knowledge, expertise, or talent that can be valuable to someone somewhere, and who seeks to leverage the online world to reach those people and make their lives a little better. There are four main categories of businesses that will benefit tremendously from what I share in this book:

• Selling Products The most popular products among the entrepreneurs that I train tend to be education products like e-books, membership sites, and online training course. But these ideas will apply just as effectively if you sell physical goods, or even software.
• Selling Services I support many businesses that sell services, from coaching, to consulting, to freelancing, to writing, to design, and other niche and esoteric offers. If you sell a service, these ideas will apply to you.
• Writing and Publishing Whether you write fiction or non-fiction, plan to self-publish or land a traditional book deal, want your work read on paper or exclusively in digital formats, the Audience Revolution is critical to your future success.
• Speaking and Training This includes speaking at conferences, keynoting, doing training for major corporations, and also providing services to C-suite executives. If thats your bread and butter (or you want it to be), you need these ideas.

If your business falls into one (or more!) of these four categories, I promise that the ideas shared in these pages will have a transformative impact on the way you approach and think about your work.

Now, in the interest of full disclosure, there are also three special cases categories of business that will not benefit much from these ideas. They are:

• Commodities If youre selling something that is exactly the same as your competitors, and the only thing you can compete on is price, this Revolution may benefit your competitors more than it benefits you. You might still want to learn about it, though. Doing so will allow you to prepare, and perhaps rethink your strategy.
• Geo-Local Offers The Audience Revolution is driven primarily by the geographic boundlessness of the online world. While some of these concepts will still hold for hyper-local businesses (i.e. dry cleaners, massotherapists, etc.), you may need to think a little further outside the box to see the fit and application.
• Procurement via RFPs This refers to large corporate or government sales (usually in the five-, six-, or seven-figure price range), which are done through a request for proposal (RFP), and structured referral process. While the Audience Revolution can still buoy your chances, those processes are inherently designed to weed out the advantages offered by these strategies.