The purpose of creating content is so that you, your company, or product or service becomes known.
You want people to look to you for answers, solutions, and help. To do that, you must become known by your target audience. They must look to you as an authority, expert, and influencer.
As you probably know, the way to achieve all of this is through content marketing.
There’s only one problem with content marketing.
If no one sees or consumes your content, then it will have no impact.
It’s like to trying impact and influence an empty room.
For that reason, as I’ve been discussing in my previous posts, you must not only drive traffic. You must also build an audience.
And the main way to do that is by doing what I call “borrowing an audience.”
If you’ve missed any of my previous posts, you can see them here:
(*All links will open in a new window.)
- How Charles Dickens Became the Accidental Content Marketer for Christmas
- Want To Drive More Traffic to Your Content? Who Has the Audience You’re Wanting to Reach?
- The False Belief Keeping You From Driving More Traffic to Your Content
How I Borrowed an Audience in the Early Days
When I first began writing about content marketing on my other site RecessionSolution.com, I was getting an ok amount of traffic and slowly building up an audience.
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SIDE NOTE: The name of that site came from some books I put together to help business owners survive and prosper in a recession. (It was another form of content marketing.)
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This was in the really early days (2011) when content marketing was just becoming known. I say “known” because, as I’ve written about before, content marketing isn’t new. It’s been around for more than 200 years.
Anyway, I wanted to drive more traffic to my site and build an audience, so I did exactly what I’ve been suggesting that you do. I decided to borrow an audience.
I reached out to ContentMarketingInstitute.com and asked them if they were open to receiving guest posts.
They were. So I sent them my first post. It was called The Content Strategy that Made Justin Bieber a Star. (Don’t laugh. It has some good tips in it!)
Do you know what was interesting? The same type of post I would’ve normally written for my site, and gotten a certain level of comments and shares, now was getting many more comments and shares.
Why? Because they had a bigger audience.
Remember how in my last post I told you not to try to overly promote you, your company, or your products/services? I didn’t. The only real reference to my site was in my author bio.
But by simply doing that, and by consistently creating content for them, my traffic began to grow and so did my audience.
This simple act began to make me more known in the content marketing arena. And that began to provide me with more opportunities. What kind of opportunities?
- Opportunities to write for other sites
- Opportunities to speak
- Opportunities to write a book
- Opportunities to be interviewed on podcasts
In case some of you are curious about how I got an opportunity to write a book, let me just explain it really quickly for you.
In 2015, I took the blog posts I had written about content marketing from my own site, CMI, and other sites and I compiled them into a book that I released on Kindle called 51 Content Marketing Hacks. This book was later nominated for Smallbiztrends.com’s 2016 “Small Business Book Awards.”
Did you catch that? I repurposed content that I created for other audiences (with their permission) and I used it to create a book, which gave me a platform to attract an even greater audience.
None of these opportunities would’ve come my way if I didn’t first take the chance to create content for someone else’s audience.
You will never know what opportunities will come your way, or your company’s way until you take that same first step.
In case you’re not convinced yet, let me tell you about a unique opportunity that came in 2017.
An Opportunity to Create Content for a Very Unique Audience
At the end of 2016, I saw that a friend was teaching a course for UC Berkeley Extension. I asked him how he got that opportunity. He explained the process and later introduced me to his contact there.
I submitted my name and some ideas and was asked to teach an “Intro to Marketing” course for them. I ended up teaching for them in the fall of 2017 through the spring of 2019.
That was an audience I would’ve never imagined having the opportunity to speak to. Don’t miss this fact: this was still content creation. How? Because I designed the marketing course from scratch. In other words, I created the content for it.
What results did this bring? Here are just a few of them:
- This course allowed me to teach people from important, local companies such as Oracle, PayPal, and NetGear.
- I received testimonials and endorsements from former students (people in important roles at these companies).
- It opened up new opportunities for me to work with local business owners.
All of these results continued to provide me with even more opportunities because opportunities produce opportunities.
Just to clarify, these opportunities weren’t just opportunities to create more content. Over time, all of these opportunities combined began to produce a financial return.
That’s why I’ve written these articles for you. It’s because I’ve personally seen the benefits of “borrowing an audience” and I know that it can do amazing things for you and your company too.
You can do this. You just need to take action.
But, if for some reason you prefer to have someone coach/consult/advise you through this process, feel free to reach out to me. We can then talk about whether this would be a good fit for both of us. And we can discuss what the time and cost commitment for a partnership would look like.
P.S. This website is relatively new (especially since I haven’t gotten a chance to write very much here in 2020). I still need to apply this method to this site and increase its traffic and audience.
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