This is the first part of a series on rocking your audience at whatever stage you’re at. As we go through each stage, I’d love to discuss it like crazy and do some q&a before moving on to the next one. So got comments? Leave ‘em. I’ll be adding everyone who participates to the Twitter list so that we can keep up with each other.

Everyone wants a community to be built right into their website. Because what’s a stage without an audience? Community = more content and more usefulness to your users. It also means credibility, which leads to more sales and/or opportunities to work with really cool people. Community also makes your site stickier so that your audience will grow even faster. In a nutshell, yay community!

But building a community takes a lot of work. And t-i-m-e. It doesn’t hurt to have a good dose of luck thrown in either.

We all want this growth to happen super-fast. Some of us don’t have the time, money, or patience to burn while we wait for our audience to gather strength. But every healthy site goes through growth stages of community, so we might as well be prepared for them.

The Peanut Stage: My site looks more like a ghost town than a party

If your site is strategically well-developed, it will only be a matter of time before this stage is a thing of the past. But while you’re in it, it seems like forever. When will people start leaving comments? When will I get past 25 subscribers? Le sigh.

Stuff to do while you’re in this stage

• Make the most of the credibility that you do have. While you may not have a force of people proving to others that you are awesome, you ARE awesome. Let that awesomeness shine through your amazing content, packages, and samples of work that you’ve done in the past. (Haven’t done any work yet? Kelly Parkinson’s got some ideas for rocking out case studies when you don’t have results yet.)

  Show your work to its best advantage. Write stuff that doesn’t need others vouching for it for people to realize that it’s golden. Stick to your publishing schedule. In other words, do your thang as if 10,000 people were watching.

• Offer your services. Surely you can do something for people, even if your long-term goal is to sell products. You need lots of bodies in the door before your products start to sell enough to support you, your family, and your three dogs. You need a much smaller audience to successfully make a living selling your services.
• Tweet it up. Even if you’re a local business and people in your scene haven’t caught onto Twitter yet, start now. You’ve got the time after all. And when you’re way too busy to worry about things like getting followers, you’ll thank your savvy self.

  Even if you’re not set up to offer products or services to the people on Twitter, their comments and sharing of your amazing stuff will be invaluable for your credibility and future reach. I do not care what industry you are in. Social proof is a powerful thing. Much of the time, it is the thing that makes the difference.

• If you ever plan on writing a book or developing products, start now. Once you’ve amassed your audience, it will be harder and harder to find time to work on long-term, non-urgent goals. Not just setting them, but putting the practical legwork in to reach them. Work a little on these goals each day in your gallons of free time.

What NOT to do in this stage

• Don’t advertise yourself as part of the lonely hearts club. If no one comments, stop mentioning the fact. It’s quite likely that people won’t even be looking at your comment numbers if you aren’t constantly saying “Please, PLEASE comment so that I don’t look like such a loser!” Or “To all of my wonderful readers (who, at last count, totaled 3)”. Self-deprecatingly funny, sure. But not worth mentioning. (Don’t ask me how I know this.)
• Don’t build a forum or social-networking functionality. Forums and social networking features work best when they naturally extend from the desires and goals of a thriving community. If you build it when your community is small, it will earn the reputation of sucking before it even has a chance to thrive.
• Don’t do giveaways or contests. Yes, the point of a giveaway is to attract more readers. But you need at least an inkling of a community before a giveaway or contest will be successful. The last thing you want to do is offer up a fantastic prize and only receive 10 entries. Don’t do this to yourself unless some A-list blogger has written a pact in blood to promote your contest for you.
• Don’t despair. If your goal is to work for yourself full time, you probably need less of an audience than you think. As I mentioned before, service-based businesses do not need an audience of thousands to thrive. If you’re selling products, start brainstorming how you could supplement them with a service until you’ve got a large enough audience to support your e-commerce endeavors.

If you’re in the peanut stage (or have…ahem…a “friend” who is), what are you struggling with right now? If you’re past that stage, what helped you get where you are? Questions? Comments? Pie? (Mmm…pie.)

“Run away! Run away!” (I’m picturing Monty Python and a deranged rabbit as I’m writing this post. And horrible body odor. Should be a fun one.)

Certain things repel me in real life. Halitosis. Obnoxious laughter. Speedos. Online, it really is no different. It may be harder to pinpoint them, but there are definitely…things. And I want to be sure that I’m not doing any of them.

• A website with exclamation points all over it. Hire me now! See what cool-daddio-product can do for you! Save 50 cents on your next order! Tell your friends! If someone has to make their stuff look exciting by adding a bunch of exclamation points, it probably isn’t exciting enough to begin with.
• A website that is all about the company. Show me a website that is all about a person, product, or service, and I will show you a website that is not living up to even a 10th of its potential. How bored do I have to be to listen to some company talk about themselves page after page after page? Very. Nothing could make me run away faster.
• People who hawk stuff all over Facebook. I was in deep conversation with my unconsumed-by-the-internet friends, and I was shocked to hear the extent that they were offended by friends proselytizing their products and services on Facebook. All 8 of them seemed to think that it was all well and good for Twitter (which they perceive as more for business), but apparently they don’t go on Facebook to hear their friends advertising to them.
• Self-proclaimed “social media experts” who have exactly 10 Twitter followers. It’s kind of like having toilet paper on your shoe. Except you put it there.
• Sites filled with corporate cliches. They might as well replace every cliche on the site with a blank space — it has about the same effect. Our eyes gloss over things like “We’re a cut above the competition.” “World class service” might as well mean “We couldn’t think of any compelling reason why you should hire us.”

I could go on for the rest of both of our lives, but I’d rather hear from you — what makes you run in the opposite (online) direction?