borrowaudience

If you perform content marketing regularly, then you’ll know all about the benefits of borrowing an audience to become an authority.

I know, you probably do this already, but what’s the absolute best way to borrow an audience for getting the most out of your efforts?

Here is how you can borrow an audience and begin to build authority for yourself.

Borrowing An Audience:

The first thing you need to know is that you have to find the right audience first.

1. Find The Audience!

This will be an easy and time-inexpensive process. You simply need to head to one of the relevant social networks, forums or answer sites for your niche.

find niche groups

Once you’re on these sites, use the search features available to you and look for the specific audience you are looking to target. This could be a group on a social network, hashtag on Twitter or a specific category or sub-forum on a forum site.

LinkedIn Groups

Request to join these groups if you need to or simply follow, take note of or bookmark where you’ll be looking to borrow an audience.

2. Introduce Yourself.

If you join a group then you don’t want to make the mistake of not introducing yourself. Creating authority and positioning yourself starts here, paint a good picture of yourself and what you do, engage the group members but don’t attempt to sell them anything.

Be sure to leave an opening for a conversation by engaging the group and asking them a question.

3. Begin Posting Useful Information:

Join in with group discussions and post replies that are more detailed and better thought out than anyone else is doing in the group. Don’t worry if you’re not the expert there, you can win by virtue of spending time doing research and creating a reply over the period of a few hours or a day.

After a while on a site such as LinkedIn you can become a ‘top contributor’, you can get similar benefits to this on Q&A sites such as Yahoo Answers.

Once you have responded to a number of posts and held real conversations by adding value to every topic you reply to you can begin to create your own topics of conversation. Your new found authority will ensure people read what you have to say, again don’t try to sell them anything!

After you’ve created a number of useful topics over a period of weeks you’re ready to start engaging your audience by promoting your site content to them.

Give them a personal and direct approach to informing them of your content, this will ensure as many click-throughs as possible, including a better bounce rate from this referral source and more time spent on your site.

You have now successfully borrowed an audience by positioning yourself as an expert and building authority! Props to you!

Your new audience who perceive you to be an authority figure, will share your content, talk about you and most importantly they will buy from you.

By keeping your sales-funnel on your site and creating trust by adding value when you first ‘came on the scene’ you will receive far more value in return than you ever would from a short-term content marketing tactic.

Conclusion:

Borrowing an audience will provide you with immeasurable value in the long term. By no means is this a strategy you will see immediate results from and initially it will be hard to measure the ROI for your efforts.

If you want to become an authority though, this is the best way to do just that.