No matter how wonderful your product, how fantastic your service and how much you’ve spent in getting your business off the ground, unless you reach a “massive” audience, you will fail.
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This is part I of a three-part series on ‘Is Your Business Idea worth Investing In?’

I’ve read a lot about startups, established businesses and what goes into creating a successful firm. And here’s what I think all those tips, theories and observations boil down to:

A successful business is characterized by two things: a good idea and a good strategy. Feel free to tweet this statement.

So, if you think you have an awesome business idea, what you need next is an awesome strategy to make it a success. 

In this three-part series we will discuss three questions you need to answer to draft a workable strategy for your business.

These questions come from Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, entrepreneur and venture capitalist. He has revealed the ‘The Three Rules of Investing’ that he applies to any startup he wants to invest in. 

These three rules are just as applicable to businesses that want to understand how they can make a strong case for their business model to investors.

Here’s the bitter truth: 


No matter how wonderful your product, how fantastic your service and how much you’ve spent in getting your business off the ground, unless you reach a “massive” audience, you will fail. 

This is especially true of online businesses.

By massive, I don’t mean 1,000, 10,000 or a 100,000 different individuals. I am talking in terms of millions. How will you do that?

There’s a lot of difference between the number of people you reach, and the number that actually buys from you. So, if you want to earn substantial profits, you need to reach a massive audience. 

And, today, when you have businesses vying for consumers’ attention left, right and center, how will you make your presence felt?

Here are some suggestions:

I am assuming your business will have a website. If not, you really need to reconsider your marketing strategy.

Use your website to land you clients by search engine optimizing (SEO) it. Technicalities aside, SEO refers to optimal usage of keywords, quality back links and fresh, quality content. 

Update your website with quality content regularly to ensure that your website ranks better in search results.

Hire a professional writer to write content for your website, if you feel you won’t be able to do justice.

Initial advertising can help increase exposure and boost sales. However, it can cost quite a bit.

You could invest in on-ground or online advertising methods. On-ground advertising includes billboards, flyers, television advertisements…they’ll cost you a pretty penny.

Online advertising includes marketing via social networks (promoted tweets, Facebook ads, Youtube ads etc) and online advertisements (Google ads and ads on high-traffic blogs or websites).

Here’s a small anecdote I heard a while back. Three women were participating in a contest, which involved raising money for a nonprofit. They were given a week to raise money – the one with the highest donations would win. 

The winner collected $12,000! How?

Email marketing. That’s how.

To do effective email marketing, you’ll need to invest not in terms of money, but in terms of time. Building an email list takes time, nurturing it with quality information takes even more time. 

But, the more you share useful content with your email subscribers, the more loyal they’ll grow. Feel free to tweet this statement.

These loyal subscribers will be the ones most encouraging of your business idea, your products and services and will be willing to make a purchase when you request them to – for they feel they kind of owe it to you.

The best way to build a massive audience is to make smart use of social media. Again, this needs perseverance. 

Reaching millions with little to no investment is a very real possibility with social media networks, like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Youtube.

Encouraging people to follow your business brand, like your FB page, view your videos on Youtube and spread the word about your services is not easy. 

But, quality content, quick responses and building interactive relationships with your target audience will get you a response and reach that conventional advertising cannot.

What are your currently using to reach a massive audience? Which method have you had success with? Share it with the rest of us in the comments below.

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Author: Urooj Kazi is a professional freelance business writer. To hire her to write content for your business, visit this website's Contact Urooj page.