Newsletter

📈 Will You Grow Your Audience This Year?

January 15, 2025

Today at a Glance:

I share the fastest way to know if you're audience growth is on track
Why you can't ignore analytics as they show the objective truth
Discover a new mindset shift for achieving your goals by focusing on short timelines

The Power of Trajectory Mapping

How often have you set a follower goal, only to fall short?

You're not alone.

Maybe it’s “10,000 YouTube subscribers in 6 months” or “50,000 LinkedIn followers by year-end.”

Here’s a method we use with all of our clients to track progress and stay on course.

A map is only helpful if you know where you are. Trajectory mapping works by facing the numbers, creating a plan, and adjusting when needed:

Where are you now?
Where do you want to go?
What needs to change to close the gap?

One common mistake creators make is avoiding the numbers. But visibility is key—the numbers aren’t judgement; they’re just the truth.

Let's Take A Common Example

A founder wants to reach 10,000 followers on LinkedIn by 2026.

Their current follower rate is 20 followers per week.

Unfortunately, by running a projection, they'll run out of weeks before they hit that target. Something has to change, but most people will continue with the same strategy and never course correct.

Here's my favourite quote from James Clear's Atomic Habits:

"The impact created by a change in your habits is similar to the effect of shifting the route of an airplane by just a few degrees. Imaging you are flying from Los Angeles to New York City. If a pilot leaving from LAX adjust the heading just 3.5 degrees south, you will land in Washington DC instead of New York. Such a small change is barely noticeable at take off – the nose of the airplane moves just a few feet – but when magnified across the entire United States you end up hundreds of miles apart.”

James Clear’s famous graph illustrates how small changes compound over time:

How to Master the Art of Continuous Improvement

If you’re not looking at the numbers, you’re neglecting your responsibilities.

Feel hesitant about doing this exercise? Ask yourself why don't you want to look. That's a big question to sit with.

Creating Follower Projections with ChatGPT

Let's use LinkedIn as an example (but this works for any platform's analytics)
Head to your profile -> Click on Analytics -> Select Followers -> Open the Audience tab and select a time period e.g. past 28 days (for your most recent rate of follower growth)
Take a screenshot of the graph and write what your target is. For example, "Hey ChatGPT, this image shows my current follower rate on LinkedIn from the last 28 days, I want 10,000 followers in 2026, how long will it take me to get there?"
Lastly, if your current trajectory won't achieve your target, ask ChatGPT how many followers you would need per week to achieve the goal.

My LinkedIn Target for 2025

Rather ambitiously I'm aiming for 150,000 followers on LinkedIn by EOY and at the time of writing this I have 61,708 followers.

My current follower rate, according to ChatGPT, is 278 followers per week and I'll need my current follower rate to be 1,731 followers per week to achieve my goal.

I'll approach this in two ways:

Focus on producing higher quality content that serves my audience better. This is in my control and will lead to increasing our average rate of followers per week for a steady improvement
I'll focus more on the bigger ideas that can create outsized returns. It's not uncommon to gain 10,000 followers on LinkedIn from a viral post. Whilst this is out of my control, over the course of 12 months I'd expect this to happen once or twice from 300+ posts.

Reply to this email if you try this method of trajectory mapping. I'd love to hear from you!