The Denominator Strategy
Why growing your audience beats optimizing conversions (almost) every time
Hi,
Everyone obsesses over how many customers they have, how many “true fans” they’ve gotten, how many backers their last Kickstarter had, and/or how many paying members are behind the paywall of their community…
…and all of them, every one, are focused on the wrong thing.
If instead you exponentially increase the total number of people in your audience, the rest takes care of itself.
Think about it as a simple fraction:
Customers / Total Audience = Conversion Rate
Most businesses fixate on moving that top number, the numerator. They A/B test their buttons, rewrite their headlines forty-seven times and hire conversion optimization specialists who charge $15,000 to tell them their checkout page should be blue instead of green.
And sure, optimization matters. I’m not saying it doesn’t, but it’s probably not that important until you have a critical mass of people in your audience. After all, if you only have 100 people on your email list, the difference between 3% and 10% is seven people.
Meanwhile, if you have 1,000 people, the difference between 3% and 4% is 10 people. At 10,000, that’s 100 people. At 100,000, that’s 1,000 people.
Do you see how this compounds?
Think about it this way. Taylor Swift sold 10.1 million tickets to her Eras tour, which is massive, but that’s out of 561 million social media followers.
When you do the math, that’s less than 2%. If she could increase that even .1%, then that’s more than most people make in their lifetimes.
Most authors don’t even have a fraction of a fraction of that.
Still, authors will spends six months increasing their conversion rate from 2% to 2.3% to make a few more dollars when they could have spent that same time growing their audience from 10,000 to 100,000 people.
Do the math.
The first scenario increases the numerator by 30 (assuming the generous 2.3%)
The second increases the numerator by 2,000 (given the original 2% conversion rate).
It’s not even close and, better yet, that group focused on growth over optimization were probably giving stuff away instead of asking people to pay, which at the end of the day is just a more fun way to live.
It’s mathematics, pure and simple, and it’s not even close. Yet, I watch intelligent creators spend entire quarters obsessing over micro-optimizations while their audience stays exactly the same size it was last year.
They’re rearranging deck chairs while ignoring the ocean of potential customers they haven’t reached yet…
…and they are miserable every single day.
Meanwhile, if you focus on the denominator, you’ll find that audience growth creates its own momentum and compounds on itself.
When you focus on reaching more people, you’re not just increasing your immediate conversion opportunities. You’re building distribution, creating network effects and generating word-of-mouth that brings in even more people without additional effort.
A larger audience means:
More social proof
More testimonials
More case studies
More referrals
More content amplification
More data to work with
All of which, ironically, improves your conversion rate anyway.
The Denominator Strategy doesn’t just give you more at-bats. It changes the game entirely. Your 2% conversion rate on 100,000 people produces better absolute results than a 5% conversion rate on 5,000 people.
And the 100,000-person audience is simultaneously building the assets that will push that 2% higher organically.
When you have a larger audience more people have a chance to shares your content. Each time that happens, their audience sees it, a portion of them follow you, and some of them share it with their audiences.
Your reach expands geometrically, not linearly, which creates a virtual sales cycle that feeds itself.
Meanwhile, the creator who spent six months split-testing button colors has a slightly better conversion rate on the exact same audience size. No compounding. No network effects. Just a modest improvement that stops the moment they stop optimizing.
One of these approaches builds on itself. The other requires constant intervention to maintain gains and stay at the same place.
On top of that, a bigger audience has more give in it. If you 10x your audience, and your conversion rate falls, then you’re still doing much better than you were before. However, if you increase you’re conversion rate slightly, then you’re still fishing in the same pool.
I’m not arguing that conversion optimization is worthless. There’s a point where it becomes crucial.
If you have 500,000 people in your audience and a 0.5% conversion rate, you have a fundamental product-market fit problem that more audience won’t solve. At that point, yes, you need to figure out why 99.5% of people who see your offer aren’t buying it.
But most businesses never get there.
Most authors are stuck at 500-1,000 people in their audience, endlessly tinkering with their checkout flow, wondering why growth feels so hard.
They’re optimizing for a problem they don’t have yet.
If you’re converting at 2% with 100,000 people in your audience, a jump to 2.5% is 500 additional customers. That matters. That’s worth testing and optimizing and investing in conversion rate improvements.
If you’re converting at 2% with 5,000 people, a jump to 2.5% is 25 additional customers. That doesn’t move the needle. The question isn’t whether optimization works. The question is whether it’s the highest-value use of your time right now, given where your business actually is.
For most authors, the honest answer is no.
The authors winning right now aren’t the ones with the best conversion rates. They’re the ones with the biggest audiences.
They’re not smarter about optimization. They’re simply playing a different game where the denominator does most of the heavy lifting.
The newsletter that reaches 500,000 people doesn’t need perfect subject lines. The one reaching 5,000 people obsesses over them because they don’t have reach to compensate for conversion inefficiency.
This is what people miss when they study successful businesses. They see the polished funnel, the optimized landing pages, the tested copy. They don’t see that all of that optimization is resting on top of a massive audience that was built first.
The optimization makes the huge audience more effective. But the huge audience is what made the business successful enough to invest in optimization in the first place.
It’s way past time to stop obsessing over extracting maximum value from the 1,000 people who see your launch this month…
…and start obsessing over how to get 10,000 people to see it next month.
The math will take care of the rest.
At the end of the day, the numerator is finite. At most you can only close 100% of the people in your funnel. The denominator, by contrast, is infinite.
Even if you have a million people on your list, there 8,000x more than that in the world. You will never run out of new people t
The work is simple. It’s just not easy. It requires you to delay gratification, do things that don’t show immediate results, and trust that consistent effort on audience building will compound into something meaningful.
Most authors won’t do this work because they want money now at the expense of building more money later. They’ll keep optimizing the numerator because it feels like progress and provides immediate feedback…
…which means if you actually commit to building the denominator, you’ll have less competition than you think.
The opportunity is sitting there, obvious and ignored, waiting for someone to do the unsexy work that everyone knows matters but nobody wants to do. The best way to make a million dollars as an author is to give away a million books…
…and that’s also the most fun way to do it.
What do you think?
Have you been spending too much time optimizing the numerator?
What are some ways you can give away some free books that worked well for you?
Let us know in the comments,
