Dream 100 – What is it, and why you need to be doing it!

‘The number of followers you have means nothing if you can’t build a community of like-minded people who care and engage’ this kind of encompasses Dream 100 perfectly.

What is Dream 100?

It’s a form of relationship marketing that’s solely about finding your target/ideal hundred people in your market or niche who are already selling to a warmed-up audience and connecting and collaborating with them to grow your own audience and get your name out there.

So while it’s a form of organic growth, there’s no kind of paid aspect to it or affiliation with these Dream 100, it can work as kind of a fast track to really boost your business and grow exponentially because you’re not just engaging with these hundred people you’ve selected, you’re also engaging with their audiences. If all of these hundred have one hundred followers, that’s a ten thousand people you can reach by doing this, and 100 is just an example, some could have much more.

The concept was formed by somebody called Chet Holmes, in the book, the “Ultimate sales machine”. He talks about how he was able to use this Dream 100 method to double the sales of his magazine for three years running. Russell Brunson is another is a huge advocate of Dream 100, he religiously talks about it in all of the things he does. If you really want to get clued up on them that I suggest go ahead and read those to really go the extra mile.

How do you find your Dream 100?

Now you know what it is, how do you go about finding who your Dream 100 is. The first thing that’s absolutely essential to identify when you’re trying to find your top 100 is that they have to share your kind of company’s values and beliefs. They must share your ideal client, or ideal customer. And finally, the relationship that you form cannot just be beneficial to you and needs to be mutually beneficial for the both the businesses that you have but also beneficial to your clients and their clients and their customers.

Now you’ve probably already got people spring to mind who are in your circles who meet this criteria. But another thing to consider with this is their size, it’s immediately tempting to think ‘I know somebody who’s in my industry, and they have millions of followers if I put them on my dream 100 that will really help me blow up’. But the truth is doing Dream 100 on someone that size, you’re just going to be lost in the thousands of comments that they get on their posts every day. If they’re that big, and maybe you’re a bit smaller, it’s probably not quite the right fit. It’s really important that you need to be realistic with who you’re engaging with, but that also that means don’t set your sights too low, you want to make sure you’re picking people who have an existing audience already. If they’re too small, you might be unheard by engaging with them or it might just be a waste of time.

So if you have social media pages already, it’s a great place to start. You can use relevant hashtags to in your industry or to your product/product category to find similar businesses and companies with clients in the same niche that can really help you grow.

Another important consideration is to diversify your Dream 100 across multiple platforms, it can be pretty tempting and easy to just choose 100 people on Instagram, but I think it’s good to get a varied range of different people from across different social media channels.

What to do when you’ve made your list?

Gary Vaynerchuk talks about a great method that goes hand in hand with Dream 100 called the two cents strategy. What that is, once you have followed all of your Dream 100, on a regular basis you should check in with their accounts, see what they’re posting and leave a comment or your ‘two cents’ as people say. But the key is, it needs to be valuable engagement. If the post is someone’s podcast or blog, take some time to actually listen to it, read it. If it’s a product, spend some time actually looking at it, it’s features so that your comment can be thought provoking and relevant to the post – it can’t be spam. That’s not going to work with dream 100 you’re not going to get anywhere doing that.

You have probably seen that as well, we’ve had it on our personal Instagram account, we get people who do comments like ’great post follow us back’ or something with even less effort like just a fire emoji. It’s very obvious that they’ve not read the post, they’re not actually that interested and have likely just copied and pasted a comment that they’ve probably thrown on hundreds of different posts of people that they think are relevant and that’s exactly not what not to do, you’re not going to get anywhere doing that.

You need to be doing this sort of thoughtful engagement every single day. Some platforms allow you to put together people you follow into a list and from that you can filter it so that your feed is only people on that list and that makes it really easy to go away and engage with your dream 100 for that given day. If you carve out 10 minutes, 15 minutes, open up your list and then you’re scrolling through and you’re engaging with that post, you’re looking at what they’ve said what they’re talking about. You can leave your comments and you can know that everything that you’re seeing is from people on your Dream 100.

It’s going to take some time and effort, but you should really consider this a serious marketing strategy for the business. 

So you’ve formed a relationship. Now what?

After some time of commenting and engaging with the same accounts on a regular basis, they’re going to start to notice, they’re going to start seeing your name in the notifications every day, or every few days, or however often it is, and they’re going to start to recognize every time you come in. They’re going to start to form a connection with you and might even follow you back. This is where they are likely to start engaging with your posts too, that’s where a relationship has been formed and it’s safe to say you’re in a comfortable position where you could potentially reach out to them or they might even reach out to you.

If they followed you back and are now engaging with you they clearly see it as a good fit. This is where you can then go ahead and actually leverage that relationship and there’s various ways you can go about that. You can have them on your podcast or you can appear on theirs providing valuable information and content to your listeners while appearing on theirs introduces you to their audiences. Link Building is another huge one, a way of having links to each other’s websites or products/stores. Sending traffic to each other as long as you’re not stepping on each other’s toes. There’s loads of different ways to kind of cash in on this relationship once you’ve formed it and these are just a few examples.

So that’s the essence of dream 100 what it is, how to find yours, and what to do once you have formed that relationship.