3 ways to engage and strengthen your online audience

Dec 1, 2012 by

Guest Author: Greg Willits

If you talk to the average Catholic podcaster or blogger, you’ll most likely find that audience sizes for various projects typically hit a viewer plateau that’s virtually impossible to break through. Depending on the project, that ceiling could be a hundred, a thousand, or a hundred thousand. Whatever the number, it seems to represent a nearly unbreakable and perpetually unchanging threshold.

As a website, blog, podcast or other content producer — or someone who wants to start taking a more active role in the New Evangelization through Catholic New Media — the lack of perceivable growth can be a huge source of stress and frustration.

While there’s something to be said about strength in growing numbers, there’s also something to be said about strengthening the numbers you’ve already got.

Would you rather have 1000 blog readers that read your stuff and then go about their day unchanged and unmotivated, or 100 readers who take heed of what you have to say and put it to action that positively impacts the lives of others?

Rather than worrying about continually growing the numbers for the sake of higher analytics, place your greatest focus on providing tools, resources, and information to strengthen your already existing audience to help grow their individual efforts.

Don’t focus on a linear growth of numbers. Instead, concentrate on exponential growth of those who currently do follow you.

Here are 3 ways I believe are critical to building committed and active audiences. This applies both online and in real life on a parish or diocesan level.

1

Be personal

The most successful and meaningful websites, blogs, podcasts, and other new media efforts are the ones that connect to people at their very core. That should be the goal in everything you do online.

In all of my years of podcasting and media production, the number one comment I receive from complete strangers is, “listening to you and your wife on your podcasts or radio shows makes me feel like I’m sitting down to drink a cup of coffee with good friends.”

This is the greatest value of Catholic New Media and one that absolutely cannot be discounted or dismissed. So often in our lives we feel isolated and alone in our spiritual journeys, but in the past ten-plus years this is becoming less and less the case, and New Media is the reason for this.

This is because of the benefits of transparency.

By opening the doorways to our lives, by being personal, others see the light of Christ within us, even if that light is being delivered digitally. And these companions whom we accompany are more often than not inspired to reach out to others in similar ways.

2

Be a cheerleader for others

There is no marketshare when it comes to Evangelization. There is no first prize. We are all in this together when it comes to sharing the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Never be afraid to promote the good works of someone else, to help someone else grow an audience, especially if that person is just getting started. If you read something amazing, tweet about it. Send emails. Talk about it, and get others talking about it, too.

I can guarantee you that telling others about the good someone else is doing will not backfire on you, and in most cases will motivate others to help promote your own efforts, as well.

3

When something’s not working, don’t be afraid to quit

This is a tough one, as it is most often accompanied by a heaping helping of humility. But if you’re no longer being effective, if you’re not seeing active audience engagement, or if your own faith life is struggling, don’t be afraid to either put your project on hiatus or abandon ship altogether. Just because you discontinue one enterprise or New Evangelization effort doesn’t mean that others won’t follow you to new efforts that could be very much improved revisions of your original vision.

My wife and I started the Rosary Army podcast in early 2005 and it was met with an overwhelmingly positive response. When we moved to satellite radio in 2008, we attempted to continue the podcast while hosting three hours of radio each day. After a couple of months we had to admit that the act of juggling the two shows was not working and we sadly discontinued the podcast, much to the disappointment of our original audience. It was the right decision, but a difficult one.

A couple months ago, when our radio show ended after four successful years, we rebooted our radio show as a podcast, going back to our New Media roots. Again, it was a difficult transition, but the evolution of our programs has been noticeable, and the recent reboot breathed much needed new life into our audio productions. As a huge unexpected plus side, we now have the blessing of seeing a merging of our original podcast audience with the audience we developed in satellite radio.

Had we continued with things that weren’t working as well as we’d like, we wouldn’t be reaching as many people for God as we are now.