213 | The 3 Strategies That Built Every 7-Figure Personal Brand (And How to Use Them)

Every major seven plus figure personal brand, whether it's Alex Hermosi, Amy Porterfield, Gary Vee, Mel Robbins, or any other content driven entrepreneur, was built using just three organic audience growth strategies. Today, I'm breaking down exactly what those three strategies are and how you can use them to grow your own personal brand and use it to fuel a profitable online business. Once you see this, you're not going to be able to unsee it because after today, you're not only going to understand audience growth better, but you're also finally going to see why your audience isn't growing as fast as you want it to. And of course, once this is unlocked, your personal brand is going to go faster and it's going to be easier to organically grow your online profitable business and get your audience to buy your stuff. My name is Kevin. I am the founder of Grow the Show. Grow the Show is a seven-figure company that has worked with over 400 entrepreneurs over the past five years to help them grow their audience organically online so that they can get more leads and sales to their online business. And what I have found after studying audience growth full time for more than five years is that there's really only three ways to organically grow an audience. Every single strategy you have ever heard of, ever thought of boils down to one of these three ways. So let's break them down so that you can decide which one is best for you right now and decide which one you probably shouldn't touch. And don't worry if you're feeling overwhelmed with the choices of different audience growth strategies. At the end, I'm going to tell you which one I think you should start with if none of these are working for you right now. Let's dive in. All right, so like I said before, there's really only three strategies that work to grow an organic audience online today that you can use to feel a profitable business. Now, the reason I'm making this video is because I work all day every day with online entrepreneurs to help them grow their audience. And I talk to eight figure ones, seven figure ones, six figure ones, and below six figure ones. And what's crazy to me is that all of them seem to be overwhelmed with all of the different options that they could employ in order to grow their audience online. They all have the same goals. They all want a larger audience. They want lower marketing costs, you know, they want a solid social media presence, a personal brand that shows their authority, all these different things. But everyone's just confused as to how to make it happen, how to get their audience growing. So assuming that you have clear positioning, what I mean by that is you can clearly say that I help take people from point A to point B. And if you don't know what that means, let me know in the comments. And I'll make another video explain what that is. But if you have clear positioning, then all you need to do is pick one of these three strategies. The first strategy to grow an audience online is an algorithm. So right now at the time of this recording in this video, which is 2025, the way that people are growing audiences unbelievably fast is by leveraging algorithms. And this is probably not a surprise to you. It's obvious, right? Yeah, of course, I got to get to know the algorithm. But there's a couple of pitfalls that I have found most entrepreneurs fall into when trying to establish algorithmic growth. And so I define algorithmic growth as anytime you're trying to grow your audience using an algorithm. So that's going to be on TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn, SEO is included in this because search engine optimization means you're optimizing for the search engine algorithms. This is going to be Twitter and X, whatever YouTube and really any other platform where you post something and people can see it who don't already follow you. Now right now in 2025, algorithmic growth is explosive because of what Gary V calls the TikTokification of social media. And so a very, very short history lesson is that when TikTok hit the scene and really took over in 2019, 2020, 2021, TikTok was the first platform where you would open up your phone, open the platform and you would see content from people that you don't already follow. So TikTok was the first one to create an algorithm that could just show you stuff that you're probably interested in. That's why TikTok exploded because it became seeing content not based on your network, not on based on people that you already know and follow, but just based on whatever you're interested in. TikTok got very good at just knowing what you're interested in based on your behavior on the platform. And so the other platforms, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube have gotten really good at that as well. And in particular, the social media platforms have gotten really good at this. So if you were on Twitter in like 2021, 2022, before Elon Musk bought it and turned it into X, Twitter was the next social media platform that really took this step, introduced a for you area where it would just show you tweets based on whatever you're interested in. And so in 2020, 2021, people's Twitter audiences exploded compared to previously, because before TikTok, before 2019, social media algorithms weren't good. And so the only way to get new followers and use the algorithm was like hashtags or the platform like featuring you or using strategy number three, which I'll dive into in a little bit. But now in 2025, the algorithms are so smart, they're so freaking good that if you post a piece of content that is good, the algorithm will simply show it to the right people. This is awesome for us as creators. If you are good at creating content, so you have to be able to understand what content is good. And so that brings me to a major, major pitfall that entrepreneurs don't really get today. And that is this, the algorithm, every algorithm everywhere. So YouTube, all the social media platforms SEO is based on psychology. Okay, so there's a lot of entrepreneurs who think that the algorithm is this techy thing that is to be hacked. And that used to be true pre 2019 in order to grow on social media, you needed to understand how to hack the algorithms, use the right hashtags, post at the right time, all these little different things. But now the algorithms are so good that they see right through the hacks. And it is literally a content meritocracy, which means that your stuff must be awesome. And the reason that we say that the algorithm is based on psychology is because success on social media and on YouTube is very plain and simple. It's does it get the people who see it to click on it, watch it, keep watching it, and engage with it. That is it. So the algorithm is just a pass-through thing. So if you find that you're not growing on social media, that means that the people who see your content currently don't like it enough for the algorithm to show it to more people. Am I really good friend Travis Brown actually changed the way that I think about algorithms? He's a partner at a company called Social Boom. They're really good at helping people blow up specifically on Instagram. And he taught me how algorithms actually work. And so here's what he said. The algorithm is nothing but a referral engine. So anytime you post a piece of content to social media, what the algorithm does is it says, okay, I'm going to make a guess at what this is, I'm going to use AI to try to figure out what this content is about. And then I'm going to show that piece of content to a bunch of people. And you actually have a baseline on every single algorithm, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn. At this moment in time, your account has a baseline. So what that means is every single time you post a piece of content, the algorithm is going to show that to a certain amount of people. So on Instagram, the default baseline is 500 people. So if you create a brand new Instagram account from scratch and you post a real, it's going to get 500 views. Boom. So this is the default baseline of an account. So what the algorithm does, it says, okay, I'm going to take this piece of content. I'm going to show it to 500 people. If those 500 people like it, watch it. That's why everybody talks about watch time or especially right now on Instagram, share it. Then if that happens, I'm going to share it to 5,000 people. And if those people also like watch and share it, maybe comment as well. Oh my goodness, look at this. Let me show this to 50,000 people. And this is how stuff goes viral. Right. So if you post something and it gets 500 views and it stops there, what that means is the algorithm showed your stuff to 500 people. They didn't like they didn't watch the whole thing. They skipped it, right. They didn't share it. They didn't comment. And so the algorithm says, okay, this is not good. Let me not share it to anybody else. Why? Because what is the algorithm's goal? It is to get people to stay. It is to get people to keep watching the videos stay on the platform. So if you can just understand that I just need to make content that makes people stay and like and watch and share, the algorithm will reward me with riches. So mistake number one that entrepreneurs make when trying to grow algorithmically is that they think that the algorithm is this techy thing, genocide quality that is out to get them. And they just keep putting out the same content. And just like, what the heck, I think I need better hashtags when an actuality the content just stinks. My favorite way to show an entrepreneur that their content stinks is to say, okay, I want you to look at what you just posted. Now I want you to pull up the four you page on whatever platform you posted it on. Or if like you're on LinkedIn, I want you to scroll on LinkedIn. And I want you to stop scrolling when you find a piece of content that looks exactly like what you just published and they scroll and they scroll and they scroll and they scroll and they scroll and they can't find it. I'm like, yes, what that means is what you just published isn't good. What you just scrolled through is good. So make your stuff look a little bit more like that and you'll get it shown to more people. Now the second mistake that entrepreneurs make when trying to grow algorithmically is this too many external links. So the other mistake that I see all the time is that someone is like, I really want to grow my audience. I want to grow my podcast, right? So let me use LinkedIn to grow my podcast. And what they do is they make a post every day and every single post tells the person to leave LinkedIn and go listen to their podcast. I was in a mastermind in 2023 and there was a speaker who put this in a way that really made it click for me. They said, you want to imagine that the platform that you are publishing on, right? So let's say LinkedIn is a conference, right? So like everybody that's scrolling LinkedIn is attending the conference. And when LinkedIn shows your post to somebody else, they are putting you on stage. They are giving you a talk at the conference, okay? Now imagine for a second, you were attending a conference and the speaker gave their talk. They spent 45 minutes and you were like, wow, this is amazing. And then at the end of the talk, the speaker said, okay, everybody, this was awesome. Now what I want you to do is I want you to go across the street where I'm going to be holding a book signing. So everybody come with me now and come with me to this other restaurant where I'm going to sign books and talk with you more. Now if the speaker crushed it, they might get a lot of people to leave the conference. And so here's my question to you. Do you think the conference organizers are going to invite that person back next year? No way. Because the speaker made everyone leave the conference. Well, in this case, LinkedIn, IG, TikTok, whatever platform you're on is the conference organizer. And so the more you ask people to leave the conference, the less they're going to show you and put you on stage because that's not what they want. They want people to stay and watch ads so that they make money. So then I can hear what you're thinking. How on earth do I then get people to leave and do what I want them to do? Like enter my sales funnel, buy my products, buy my services. Well, again, we can ride the conference analogy and say conference organizers also get that the people who are there speaking are there for a reason. They want the people there who are watching them speak to do something to buy their stuff, buy their book, whatever it might be. And so the conference organizers get that. And so they give that person an avenue. So they'll say feel free to send people to a freebie. And so you've been at a conference where at the end of the talk, there's like a QR code. And it's like if you want this thing, get it here. And it's up there quickly. They're safe. You want this? Go here. I'd really enjoy it. But that's it. Thanks everybody. I'm going to hang out here and answer questions. Okay. So the presenter at the conference doesn't overdo it. Doesn't remove everyone from participating in the conference. But the conference organizers still gives them an out. Still gives them a way to build their audience and achieve the goal that they had in speaking in the first place. The same thing is true on LinkedIn and the other platforms. They give you a link in bio. LinkedIn gives you a featured place to add links that people can click on. And even recently LinkedIn is out of feature where people can just like click on your name and like book a call or whatever, which is cool. So LinkedIn gets it. Here's what this means for you though. Instead of every single post asking people to leave LinkedIn and leave the platform, play the game and focus on growing your audience within LinkedIn. So fewer CTAs have a longer term approach and say this LinkedIn post. My goal is to make it so that people read it. They like it. And they follow me on LinkedIn. That's it. I'm not worried about getting them to enter the funnel. I'm not worried about them going consuming content elsewhere or joining my email list. It's just I want this to be a great LinkedIn post that people like and engage with. And when you do it that way, LinkedIn's going to be like, yes, this is what we wanted. And they're going to show your stuff to more people. And your audience is growing to grow organically. And then, first of all, the audience is going to find other ways. You know, they're going to Google you. They're going to go to your website. But also, they're going to go to your profile. They're going to click the link and LinkedIn's going to be happy. You're going to be happy and everyone's going to be happy. So strategy number one is algorithmic growth. And the key to getting algorithmic growth to work is not to send people elsewhere too often, not to constantly be making CTAs for people to do stuff. Because side note, that actually also makes your content suck. Like people don't like you to tell them do other stuff. So if you keep doing that, they're not going to pay attention. And you know, the algorithm's just not going to show your stuff. But the platform doesn't like it either. But number one is that you just have to get good at publishing content that works. That is good on that platform. And that competes with everybody else that's publishing content on that platform. And the last thing I'll say is that every entrepreneur thinks that they need to be on every single platform. Because that is what they have been told. What I have found and what I have seen is that if you can just pick one platform to focus on, grow that platform to at minimum 10,000 followers these days. Really, it's 100,000 followers. Get yourself to 100 K on one platform. And then it'll be way easier for you to grow on all the other platforms. So it's like focus on one to 100,000. And then you can expand. And it's just going to be way easier rather than trying to grow from scratch on all platforms at the same time. All right. So the first one's algorithm. The second one is going to be collaborations. This is where you essentially identify who are the creators, the influencers, who have already done the work of building the audience that I want. So somebody's already done it. Somebody's already spent 10 years gathering your people into one place. And so if you can just pick those people, befriend them and collaborate with them, your audience is going to grow much faster. And so what do collaborations look like in this day and age? Well, there's really three things. There's you profiling them. Okay. So that's where you either interview the big creator or you make an analysis post. This is where you just make content that analyzes a big name or a big creator. What I like about this one is that you don't need their permission to do it and you don't need their time. So you'll see like if you scroll on TikTok or Instagram and you're like in the online marketing space, you will see tons of people analyzing like Alex Hermose and they'll be like, here's how Alex Hermosey grew his audience, right? And so Alex Hermosey's face shows up at the beginning of the video and people who know Alex are like, whoa, oh, I know Alex Hermosey. Let me let me watch this video. And then the actual creator who is analyzing Alex Hermosey gets the attention right and gets the follow. You don't want to overdo this. And I think a lot of people do overdo this, but it can be a great way to get growth by again, analyzing other creators. My favorite example of this is, so I'm in Philadelphia, Go Birds, huge Eagles fan at the time of this recording, the birds just won the Super Bowl. And so for the two weeks after the Super Bowl, I was obsessed with consuming Eagles content. And really before that, but you know, incredible team. I'm like, oh, I couldn't get enough. So I was watching these Eagles videos on YouTube. And I watched this video where this like 15 year old kid broke down the Eagles defense and how they beat the chiefs. And they like, you know, broke down zone coverages and and reads and all these football holiday blue terms that I never took the time to learn. And I sat and I watched this video, and I think I learned more about football defense in that one video from that 15 year old kid than I ever have before. And I was like, wow, look at this. This kid, I followed him, grew his audience by analyzing a big creator, the Eagles that I already know and love. So they profiled the Eagles, that person profiled the Eagles, analyzed what they were doing. I learned from it, which meant that I followed that person. But I never, like if it was, hey, 15 year old kid tells you how to read a zone coverage, I would never watch that. But because it was breaks down the zone coverage of the Eagles, I was like, oh, let me watch this and I learned. So that kid essentially collaborated with the Eagles in a way where he didn't need the Eagles permission. He was able to leverage me who I already follow the Eagles. Now I follow him. So that's the analysis way. The other more obvious way is to interview that person. Beware though, because this is something that can be super fun. But usually people who interview their dream guest or interview a huge influencer, they're usually pretty disappointed with what happens. And that is because you probably think that interviewing Alex Armose or some big time influencer is going to make your audience blow up. And I used to feel the same way. It's just if I just can just get this one guest, then I'll have made it. My audience will explode. And then that my life will be so much better. But usually what actually winds up happening is nothing because that guest, first of all, has done a bajillion interviews. And so they tend to not be the best guests because they've done so many of them and they've repeated themselves so many times. But also they don't do anything to send traffic to their interview on your show. They're not going to share it with their audience. They're not going to tell anybody that they're on your show, like you think they're going to. Even if they say they will, they're not going to do it. They're just on too many shows. They do too many collaborations. It wouldn't make sense for them to share it with their audience. That said, it still can be pretty powerful. And in fact, one of my best performing YouTube videos is where I interview Pat Flynn, who is an OG in the online marketing space. And I get a lot of views from that. But what's funny about that, the like 201 level is that that's really like algorithmic growth because what happens is people see their face in the algorithm. So they like, Oh, I know Pat Flynn. I know Alex from Aussie. Let me watch this. And the algorithm's like, Oh, this person loves Alex from Aussie. Let me show them an Alex from Aussie video. So really sneakily when you do the analysis collaboration, the permission list collaboration, what that really is is algorithmic growth. But we'll keep it simple and just go from there. The second way you can collaborate is that they profile you and that's basically they interview you really. So it's interviews. It could be guest blog posts, you know, whatever it is. But basically the person who already has the audience that you want tells their audience about you. And so the way that I talk about this the most is podcast guessing. So this is the one that you probably have heard me talk about. I have other episodes, other videos about this. But podcast guessing has been a really solid way to grow your audience. What I will say is that the cat is out of the bag a little bit. And nowadays podcast guessing, it's getting harder and harder to get meaningful audience growth from podcast guessing because number one, it's super saturated. And number two, which is the big pitfall is that most podcasts have no audience. Really little to no audience. The vast majority of podcasts have 50 to 150, maybe 200 listeners. So I've seen many times CEO's business owners do a podcast guessing tour and they get on 30, 50 shows. All of those shows have very, very little audience. And so nothing really happens. And then the CEO writes off podcast guessing altogether. But I can tell you right now I have in the past doubled my audience overnight by being on the right podcast. So the key here is to focus on getting profiled by bigger accounts. And so that's going to be big podcasts. That's going to be media outlets or blogs or subreddits or Facebook groups somewhere that has a decent amount of the people that you want to reach have them interview you or tell their audience about you. And then that is an incredible way to grow. Now I did just warn you about podcast guessing. But what you're going to find is you look at any of the big time seven figure plus personal brands. They are featured on other podcasts all the freaking time. Now since they are a bigger brand, they're able to access bigger shows and you can get there too eventually. So my point to you here is that you want to have collaborations be a regular constant part of your growth strategy. So I'm kind of giving away the answer here because I'm going to say here's what I think you should do. But the answer is all three. You want to have one algorithm that you're really working on getting good that you want to be constantly collaborating with creators who have already gotten the audience that you want to reach. And then the third strategy is direct. And what do I mean by that? You are literally one on one telling your audience to check out your stuff. And what that essentially looks like is DMing, which can be cold or warm and engaging on social media. So there's a framework that I used to have as my like chief audience growth framework. It's called targeted daily engagement. And in 2020, 2021, the people that worked with me, I would teach them this is the best way to grow your audience. It's by engaging on social media every single day. Gary V calls this the dollar 80 strategy. So basically if you check out any audience growth content of Gary V's from like 2010 to probably 2018, he would have told you the best way to grow an audience online is the dollar 80 strategy, which basically means you add your two cents to 90 posts on the internet every single day. And people did this. They would go and they would comment on 90 posts. And this is like the direct hands to hand combat way, which means you are just going out and getting in front of your audience one on one and getting them to pay attention to you. It is laborious, right? It is a lot. But for some people, it's what they can do. If they're not good at the algorithm, then they just get out there and they interact with people one on one. So TDE targeted daily engagement is one way to do that. That's tons of commenting all the time. But guess what? The biggest creators do this too. So if you look on social media, some of the biggest name creators, they are commenting on other posts all the time. And that's a form of hand-to-hand comment. They're getting out there. They're getting in front of people so that those people see them, click on them, follow them, et cetera, et cetera. And then the other one is DMing, like I mentioned. And there's two ways to do this. There's cold DMing. And so all of the DMs that you get on LinkedIn from people that are just like, hey, excited to be in your network. That's an automated way of doing direct hand-to-hand combat where they DM 100 people a day and say, follow me. And then you can also do that in a warm way. So this is something that's being done on Instagram right now where people are DMing. They're everybody that follows them. And it's just super manual. You can either do it yourself or you could hire a virtual assistant to do it. And if you've got 10,000 people following you, you DM all 10,000 of them and say, go listen to my podcast, right? And so I won't talk about this too much just to say that like most people don't want to do it. You don't really have to do it. But I see two groups of people doing direct hand-to-hand outreach. So like the people who have no audience have to do tons of hand-to-hand just like get that momentum going. And then they start growing and they can just kind of like rest and let the algorithm and let collaborations grow. But then as they get bigger and bigger and bigger and better and better and they have teams and they have money and they're looking for ways to grow even more, they start doing hand-to-hand combat. So for a lot of the folks that you follow on Instagram, if they have like a million followers, you're going to find that they DM the crap out of you, right? And that's not them DMing you, but it's somebody and it's literally direct hand-to-hand, you're DMing with them, you're going to each individual person and saying, hey, consume my content, buy my stuff, etc. So these are really the three ways that I have found the three only ways to grow an audience organically online. I haven't touched on ads because that's a whole different story, but actually ads is just paying the algorithm to show you. That's literally all that ads is. It's just skipping the line. It's like when you're at Disney and they get like the fast pass, that's all it is. You just literally pay the algorithm to show you first. That's it. So really the only ways to grow an audience are these. Oh, and also like one thing that I didn't mention in collaborations is that if you like get featured by a huge organization, that's a collaboration as well. So like way back in the day, like look at Dave Ramsey, huge personal brand. How did he get so huge? He was put on the radio, right? So that was a collaboration with a radio company. So the radio company had tons of reach. They brought Dave on. He did a show every Sunday. Kaplan. So that's a collaboration as well. So I challenge you to find an audience growth strategy that is not either algorithmic collaborations or direct hand-to-hand. If you find one, let me know, like comment because I'd love to know so I can stop being incorrect. But I'm pretty sure that these are the only ways. And so what this means for you and how I hope you get to use this is number one, look at what you're currently doing to grow your audience and understand. Am I doing algorithms? Am I doing collaborations or am I doing hand-to-hand? And then from there, understand, am I working on folk on optimizing just one algorithm at a time? If not, I highly recommend you focus on just one and see what happens. Number two, am I regularly collaborating with creators who already have my audience? If no, start doing it, start sending some podcast pitches, get featured elsewhere. And then number three, am I doing direct hand-to-hand combat? And so if you haven't cracked the algorithm and nobody features you on their show, maybe it's time to start DMing 100 people a day. Or if you're really beyond that and you've kind of maxed out the algorithm, you've maxed out collaborations, probably time to hire a DM setting team and get that going as well. So that's going to do it for today. This was a long one if you're on YouTube or Spotify, please leave a comment. Let me know if this was valuable to you. If you're listening on the podcast feed, feel free to write in. Kevin at GrowTheShow.com. I'd love to know how this landed. This is a new format. Part of the ways you'd be successful in online content. You know, I've been doing it for seven years. You got to shake things up, make things more interesting. So let me know if this worked for you. Let me know if you have any additional questions. And I hope that you use this to grow your personal brand, make way more money, sell, high ticket stuff. I'll see you in the next one. I have two things for you before I let you go. Number one, real quick, if you've ever gotten any value from the show, please, if you haven't yet leave us a five star review, I get a notification every single time reviews come through and they almost always make my day. So please, please, I would love to hear from you. It really, really helps us. And then the second thing is if you are a podcaster who needs help with production, if you are struggling with all the time it takes to make these things and you haven't yet, definitely set up a conversation with podcast boutique. They are the team that I've been working with for five, six years. They're my most trusted production agency. And recently they added an incredible service that you're going to want to hear about. They call it record and forget. I've been using it for months. It is amazing. You just record your episode and send it to them. They do the content editing for you. They create titles, show notes. They can make it into an amazing YouTube video clips. And of course, high value production. So the content editing piece is the thing that I know people have been asking for for a long time. It is unbelievably good. All I do is record. I send it off to them. They handle the rest. And by the way, they are also closely in lockstep with me. So anytime I discover something that is working to grow and monetize a podcast, I immediately share it with them. We work to implement it with my show. And then they implement it with the other shows that they work on. So if you're spending time yourself doing any of the editing or post production or if your current post production team isn't cutting it, maybe they're an internal team that doesn't know what they're doing or they're an external team that's either too expensive or does not keep their promises, which is very common. Check out podcast boutique and go to podcast boutique.com. Let them know that I sent you. All right. I'll see you in the next episode.