The first step to building an audience is creating good work.
People are looking for good work too, you should make it easy for them to find you. Be on the internet, get active on social media, and start writing a blog.
Share what you have you will be amazed by how many people will find it helpful.
Sharing is not only for experts, actually, but a beginner can also share things an expert can’t because he is not in the same environment anymore.
People don’t want just your work, they want to see the process too.
You have to include documenting what you do in the process of work, keeping a notebook, and your phone closer, capturing interesting parts of your work, and sharing them later.
After a while you will start detecting small pieces and creations that you can turn into bigger work, tweets to blog posts, and posts to a book, … or anything else. You use your previous work to create new work, that’s cool.
At some point you’ve got to create a website, to have control, it’s unpredictable what might happen to external platforms: changing rules, or fading away completely …
In their book, Significant Objects, Joshua Glenn and Rob Walker recount an experiment in which they set out to test this hypothesis: “Stories are such a powerful driver of emotional value that their effect on any given object’s subjective value can actually be measured objectively.” First, they went out to thrift stores, flea markets, and yard sales and bought a bunch of “insignificant” objects for an average of $1.25 an object. Then, they hired a bunch of writers, both famous and not-so-famous, to invent a story “that attributed significance” to each object. Finally, they listed each object on eBay, using the invented stories as the object’s description, and whatever they had originally paid for the object as the auction’s starting price. By the end of the experiment, they had sold $128.74 worth of trinkets for $3,612.51. — Show your work, by Austin Kleon
Your bio is your digital bait, use it wisely, including a quick introduction about you and your work, plus actions you want visitors to take: checking out your blog, or new book, … keep the actions few and clear to gain results.
When you share your work, and what you learn, people start filling holes in your knowledge, they start recommending books, blogs, podcasts, channels, …
When you teach people how you work, you will gain more interest and appreciation.
Pay attention to other people’s work too, you need inspiration, good work doesn’t come from a vacuum.
Seek quality of followers, super fans, focus on those, treat them well, they will support you, and do great marketing.
My best way to deal with criticism is to listen only to the right people, if you are a writer, don’t listen to someone who has never read a book in his life!
You just have to be as generous as you can, but selfish enough to get your work done. — Austin Kleon
You are not only building an audience, you are helping other creators to do their work too.