How to get attention *without* an audience 🪩
28 practical tactics for marketers with no audience and no PR team.
“Tom, your ideas are great, but I only have 400 followers. Is this even worth it?”
I get this question all the time.
And to be 100% honest, most of the “viral marketing” playbook (including a lot of mine) is built for people who already have an audience.
If you don’t, you’re locked out. ❌
I know that feeling.
You did the right things: The website looks great, the case studies are out, the LinkedIn posts go up every week, the webinars happen on schedule.
But nothing leaves your bubble. 🫧
Your posts get 7 likes (4 from your team), and the strangers you actually want to reach never show up.
So I built the no-audience playbook 🌀
A list of 28 practical things you can do this week to break out of your bubble - get strangers to notice you.
This is the “Attention Hacking” cheat sheet I wish someone had handed me when I was starting out with no audience of my own. 📄
By the end you’ll know how to:
✅ Get people with 100x your reach to promote you, for free
✅ Reach total strangers who don’t know you yet (without ads)
✅ Make people stop and care about a brand they’ve never heard of
✅ Do all of it with no budget, no team, and no followers to start with
And the cheat sheet does double duty: drop the whole thing into Claude Code (or turn it into a Claude skill) and it’s trained on all 28 tactics in seconds, ready to aim at your exact product. Works shockingly well.
Most of these took me years of expensive trial and error to figure out. You only need one of the 28 to hit for the whole thing to pay off.
🔒 Here’s the full cheat sheet, all 28 tactics + the download link: