"Just Be Consistent" Is the Worst Advice for Growing Your Audience
Let's jump into a little time machine and travel to one year from today.
Imagine that over this past year, you were super consistent. You did everything you thought you needed to do to grow your audience and finally start making money from your content. Maybe you posted every day on Instagram. Stories every day. A new reel every day. A new YouTube video every week, or even two.
What would you predict the outcome would be? A much bigger audience? Finally making money?
Honestly, I'd like to propose that the results might not be as spectacular as you're hoping. And I say that because I've lived it.
A few years ago I was ready to finally grow my audience and start my online business, so I posted as consistently as I could for 2 years. And at the end of that time, my audience had barely grown and I wasn't making much of any money at all.
I don't think I'm the only one. In fact, I know I'm not. You've probably seen it too - people posting consistently on Instagram for ages, friends trying so hard to make it, YouTubers who have been uploading for years and still have a few hundred followers. I've seen it so many times.
So let's talk about why this happens. Why consistency isn't going to save you, and what to do instead - so you don't waste a massive amount of time over the next year, or the next several years.
The trap: thinking you're the problem
Here's the story we tell ourselves. If I could just finally be consistent, then everything would change. My audience would grow. I'd finally start making money from my side hustle, or finally start getting customers for my business.
That belief feels responsible. It also happens to be a dangerous trap. Because it leads you to pour more time than ever into strategies that aren't working - and quite possibly never will.
So instead of "try harder," let's start with a diagnosis. Why isn't your content growing your audience? We'll set consistency aside for a second, because yes, it's a possible reason, but it's not the main one for most people.
The 3 most common reasons your content isn't growing
1. You're not actually being consistent.
This one's sneaky. Maybe you think you're being consistent, or you're trying to be, but the reality is it's not really happening. More on that in a moment, because it ties into everything else.
2. You're not choosing popular enough topics.
Sometimes this is a research problem. You're not doing the keyword research or checking what's actually trending, so you're choosing ideas that just seem like they'll work, or copying a video or a post that went viral and hoping for the same result. You're either guessing, or chasing trends without enough data to back them up.
Other times, you're doing the research, but you're posting "business" content - content designed to attract your target customer and market your business. And that kind of content often falls flat on social media. It doesn't get engagement, it doesn't get reach, and it doesn't grow your following at all.
3. The quality isn't high enough yet.
Maybe you're posting consistently and you've even got good topics, but the videos aren't structured well, the image quality is low, the captions aren't compelling, or the shorts just aren't interesting enough. Content has to be good enough to stand up to the competition and actually earn attention.
These are just a few of the common reasons (there are more - I made a whole separate video on five of them). But here's the point I really want you to sit with: your content isn't growing your audience right now. And no amount of doing that same strategy harder is going to change that. Being more consistent with a strategy that isn't giving you results won't suddenly start giving you results.
It's not a character flaw
This is the part I care about most.
If your audience isn't growing, it is not a character flaw. It's not because you're not consistent enough or disciplined enough or somehow not cut out for this.
I have a pretty big audience now. And it's not because I have better character than you. It's not even that I'm more consistent than you.
Here's the thing almost nobody tells you: as your audience grows, it becomes easier and easier to be consistent.
Why? Because you start to feel obligated. I have all these subscribers who are expecting a video. I have over 60,000 email subscribers who are expecting an email from me tomorrow. So when I finish recording, I sure as heck am going to go write that email. Consistency gets easy because of that sense of obligation.
Which leads to an obvious chicken-and-egg problem. Can you even be consistent before you have an audience creating that obligation? And if you can't, how do you ever get the audience in the first place?
Confidence is the thing that breaks the cycle
There's one other thing that makes consistency easy, and it's available to you right now: confidence.
If you have a strategy you're confident will work - one you believe is going to grow your audience and actually pay off - then it becomes so much easier to consistently show up and post.
That's exactly what happened to me on YouTube.
I'd been posting slightly inconsistently for about 2 years, telling myself that if only I could be consistent, my audience would finally grow. But I was struggling to be consistent precisely because I wasn't seeing any growth from the effort I was putting in. Why show up when nothing's happening?
So I did something a little drastic. I took an 18-month break from posting, and I spent that time studying YouTube like a scientist. I analyzed thousands of channels and thousands of videos, looking for the patterns that separated the channels that took off from the ones that never grew.
By the end, I'd identified a handful of factors. If a creator did those specific things, they grew. And I couldn't find a single exception - not one creator doing those things who wasn't either already big or quickly getting there.
That gave me a ton of confidence that if I just did those things, I'd grow too. And spoiler: it worked. But it worked for two reasons. The strategy was right, and the confidence I had in that strategy is what made me consistent.
If I'd had all the confidence in the world but the wrong strategy, I would've been consistent and still wouldn't have grown. And if I'd had the perfect strategy but no confidence in it, I wouldn't have been consistent, and I wouldn't have grown either.
Consistency is important. It's just not enough on its own. Being consistent with the wrong strategy only means wasting more time than you would have wasted being inconsistent with that same bad strategy.
So here's your permission slip
If you take one thing from this, let it be this: you are not broken. You're not even bad at consistency.
I'm confident that if you were truly confident in your growth strategy, you'd find it easy to be consistent. Easy to follow through. Easy to show up every single week without exception.
When I finally trusted my strategy, I committed to one video a week, then ramped up to two. And I kept that up for years - until I eventually chose to slow down to a couple times a month because my audience had grown so much I didn't need to produce that volume anymore. But while I wanted to post every week, or even twice a week, it was honestly easy. Even when I was traveling. Even when I was sick. Because I had so much confidence it was going to pay off.
So consider this your permission to stop trying to muscle through. Stop white-knuckling "just be consistent, just try harder."
If your strategy isn't working right now, don't do it harder. Branch out. Experiment. Explore different strategies and actually try them. When you do, you'll notice some things work better than others - and then you double down on the ones producing real results. It's so much easier to charge forward with a strategy that's proving itself than to keep forcing consistency with one that isn't.
Because once you find the strategy that works - where you're getting new followers every week, hundreds of the right followers every month, the ones who actually become customers - consistency takes care of itself. The strategy and the consistency start working together to get you the results you've been chasing for who knows how long.
Where to go from here
If you have no idea what to experiment with, or you want help figuring out which strategies to try first so you find the winning one faster, that's exactly what I help people do.
I work with creators and online business owners one-on-one to grow their audiences so they can make money online - whether that's through their content, a side hustle, or a full-blown online business. My specific goal for you is to grow your audience past 5,000 followers over the next 6 months, because that's really the threshold where making money online starts to get a whole lot easier.
If you'd like the time you're already putting into your content and your business to actually start paying off, I'd love for you to apply to work with me: https://gillianperkins.com/apply-to-grow
Need to grow your audience?
If you'd like the time you're already putting into your content and your business to actually start paying off, I'd love for you to apply to work with me: https://gillianperkins.com/apply-to-grow
