How to Build an Engaged Audience with Content Marketing

Most bloggers are after the same things.

They want traffic to their blogs, comments on their posts, and sales of their products or services.

These are all great goals, but they’re really just symptoms of something else: having an engaged and responsive audience.

You can’t have a lot of consistent traffic, comments, or sales without a great audience — your traffic source will dry up sooner or later (AdWords, anyone?), your commenters will stop commenting, and your sales will disappear.

But what if you don’t have an audience at all? How do you build an engaged audience if you’re starting from scratch?

That’s the question that I asked 30 different audience-building masters. Let’s take a look at their answers to these questions …

Many paths up the mountain

I reached out to the most successful audience-builders that I could think of; people like Guy Kawasaki, Mitch Joel, and Copyblogger’s own Brian Clark.

I asked them how they would go about building an engaged audience if they had to start from scratch. Something interesting happened: their answers were all different from each other.

Sure, there were some consistent threads (know your audience, provide value, etc.), but the differences were often bigger than the similarities, and the focus of each answer was distinct and unique.

So I broadened the net, and asked more successful audience-builders to weigh in:

• I approached internet marketing experts like Derek Halpern from Social Triggers, Ana Hoffman from Traffic Generation Café, and Corbett Barr from Think Traffic.
• I approached social media pundits like Mark Schaefer from {grow}, Danny Brown from Bonsai Interactive, and Gini Dietrich from Arment Dietrich and Spin Sucks.
• I approached bloggers like Kristi Hines (Kikolani), Marcus Sheridan (The Sales Lion), and Linda Bustos, who blogs at Get Elastic.
• I approached entrepreneurs like Anita Campbell (founder of SmallBizTrends and BizSugar), Dino Dogan (co-founder of Triberr), and Adam Toren (founder of YoungEntrepreneur, and many other businesses).
• And I approached authors, like Alexander Osterwalder (Business Model Generation), Randy Komisar (The Monk and the Riddle and Getting to Plan B), and Sean Platt (Writing Online, Yesterday’s Gone, and many other titles).

Of course, these categories (blogger vs. entrepreneur vs. author, etc.) blur into each other. Mark Schaefer and Adam Toren are both published authors, Dino Dogan and Marcus Sheridan are experts on social media, Linda Bustos is a sharp internet marketer, and most of the people on the list are entrepreneurs.

But you get the point, which is that these people have a great diversity of knowledge and expertise!

Their answers, and those of a dozen others that I approached, started rolling in, and I started noticed the answers grouping around a few common themes:

• Start with the Fundamentals
• Know and Love Your Audience
• You Have to Get Content Right
• Add Social Media to the Mix
• Be Your Passionate Self
• Learn from Experience

The first group of answers was all about the fundamentals …

Start with the fundamentals

The very first step to building an engaged audience is be super-clear about what type of audience you need, and why you need it. For example:

• Do you want an audience to feed an existing business?
• Do you want an audience to drive a new business?
• Do you want to be a celebrity?
• Are you just trying to get the word out about a product or service?
• Will success be measured in followers, in conversations, or in conversions?

You might not need a detailed strategy, and integrity are always going to be important — but if you don’t know why you’re doing what you’re doing, how will you even know where to start, and whether you’re moving in the right direction?

Once you know where you’re going and why, it’s time to start thinking about the audience …

It’s all about your audience

You have to know your audience — that much is a given.

If you don’t know your audience — their wants, their needs, their hopes and their fears — then you won’t be able to write stuff that they want to read, raise issues that they want to discuss, or create products that they want to buy.

So you have to know your audience, but just knowing them isn’t enough. If you really want to build an engaged audience, you have to love your audience, too, for a couple of reasons.

First of all, if you don’t love your audience, you probably won’t end up knowing them as well as you need to, and your audience-building efforts will be doomed from the get-go.

More importantly, though, building an audience is a slog — it’s a long, hard process, and you need to be committed enough to stay the course for the long haul. If you love your audience, then every email and tweet that you receive will give you a small boost of motivation to keep on going.

If you don’t love them, though, the tweets and emails will turn into an annoying distraction, your resentment will rise, and you’ll find yourself in a descending spiral of negative emotions directed at your blog — hardly a foundation for success!

Assuming you’re targeting an audience that you know and love, or love enough to get to know, you’re ready to start working on content.

It’s also all about content

Strategic, high-quality content, as Copyblogger readers already know, is the cornerstone of your audience-building strategy, for several reasons:

• Without publicly available content, it’s hard to get people to come check you out. (What are you going to tell them about?)
• Without content, it’s hard to get them to discuss or engage. (As Cory Doctorow put it, “Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about.”)
• Without content, it’s hard to get people to tell other people about you or your stuff. (What will they point their friends to, if not content?)
• Without content, it’s hard to get people to come back. (Even if they liked you, they won’t return, and eventually they’ll forget.)

Which is all fine and dandy — I already knew that content was important, just like you do. But the experts said a lot more about content than just to say that it is important. They shared what content to create, how to create it, and where to put it to get maximum effect.

In a nutshell:

What content to create: Content that is relevant to the needs and wants of your audience — content that is useful, and entertaining. Extra points if you can get people talking about your stuff by creating content that is in some way taboo, unusual, outrageous, hilarious, or remarkable.

How to create it: By buckling down, and doing the work. All of the experts were very consistent on this point — there is absolutely no substitute for hard work; so spend the time that you need to research your audience’s needs, find solutions to their problems, and give it to them. Extra points if you can do it in a way that is different from your competition (for example, by using a different format, like short vs. long content, or text vs. audio vs. video).

Where to put it: Where people are going to see it. If you’re just starting out, that means on other people’s blogs (yup, I’m talking about guest posting). Alternatively, put it on your blog, but have a plan for how you’re going to get people to actually read it!

Once content is covered, it’s time to start reaching out with social media…

The trick is social media

It turns out that social media is a lot more about being social, and a lot less about the actual media.

That’s good news, because it means that while it’s easy to get confused by all the different social media platforms (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+) and tools (Triberr, Klout, etc.) that are available, as long as you focus on the “people” part of it all, you’ll do just fine.

So how do you focus on the “people” part? In the words of Gini Dietrich, you just need to “stroke people’s egos.”

Marcus Sheridan expanded on this in a discussion of the “Five Levels of Networking Like a Superstar”:

• Level I: Comments/RT 101 — These are the very basics of leaving a “great post”-type of comment, and RTing when you notice a tweet that you’d like to share.
• Level II: Advanced Commenting and RT — Your comments become more thoughtful and insightful, and your RTs include a personal touch and recommendation.
• Level III: Learning to Give Love — This is all about mentioning others. When you see people do good work, mention it to your friends. Share the links, and share the love.
• Level IV: A Complete Focus on Promoting Others as Much as Yourself — At this stage, your attention shifts; you aren’t just promoting people because you want them to return the favor. At this stage, you’re promoting them because you genuinely want them to succeed.
• Level V: Above and Beyond — This is when you go above and beyond, and there’s no script you can follow, because it arises from genuine caring. When you see that someone needs some help, or that you have an opportunity to be thoughtful and nice, you do it.

As you work your way up the ladder, you’ll notice that your social media relationships are getting stronger, and your sphere influence is getting wider — all because you’re actually being helpful!

While you’re working on content and social media, it’s important not to lose sight of yourself.

Be yourself, and be passionate

The fact of the matter is that building an engaged audience can be a scary proposition.

• It can take forever …
• Rewards, if they come at all, can come very slowly …
• You may have to share more of yourself than you’re comfortable sharing …
• People will judge you …
• There’s a ridiculous amount of competition …
• And worst of all, failure is a very real possibility …

For all of these reasons, it’s easy to fall into the trap of emotionally distancing yourself from your audience — both to be whoever you think your audience wants you to be, and to shield yourself from criticism and judgment.

Don’t fall into that trap. Be yourself, be passionate, and eventually, the audience will respond.

And to avoid some bumps in the road, you can learn from the mistakes of others.

Learn from the mistakes of others

It’s great to have a list of things to do (know your goals, love your audience, create great content, network like a superstar, etc.), but it’s even more useful to know what not to do.

Some of the pitfalls that I was warned away from include:

• Brand your name, too. Sure, you can go ahead and create a brand around a business or blog name (like Copyblogger), but make sure that your audience knows who you are, too. (Who doesn’t know Brian Clark or Sonia Simone?)
• Don’t wait to start your list. This was the most commonly reported newbie mistake — even if your traffic is in the single digits, you’ve got to give your burgeoning audience a way of raising their hands and following you.
• Stick with the good crowd. As you go about making friends and forming alliances with other audience-builders, pay attention to how they treat their other friends. If they’re too quick to turn on them at the first perceived transgression, then you might want to look elsewhere.
• Don’t skip the preparation. You may have been able to skip your homework and just wing it in school, but when it comes to audience-building, that isn’t a good strategy. Take the time to research what they really need, and how their needs are currently being met — it’s the only way you’ll be able to offer a better solution.
• Don’t genericize yourself. Don’t try to blend in, and adopt the same practices that everyone else is adopting. Be different, and be unique. Sure, some people will judge you, and some people will complain — but others will remember you, and want to follow.

Do any of these mistakes sound familiar?

They did to me, but hopefully you haven’t made them yet, and now you can avoid them! 😉

Is this enough information to make your head spin? Then I’ve got just the thing.

Get 239 pages of audience-building insight … free!

I compiled the answers that I got from 30 audience-builders into a book called Engagement from Scratch! How Super-Community Builders Create a Loyal Audience, and How You Can Do the Same!

Today, the book is launching, and I’m very excited to be able to share it with you — for free!

Yep, that’s right — the book is free. You can download the entire book without paying a cent. Just visit the book’s website, click on the download link, and tell me what email address to send it to, and moments later you’ll the full-length PDF waiting for you in your inbox.

You see, I wanted to be sure that anybody who wants access to the book could have it. Which is why the digital version is free.

But I do want you to buy the book, and I think you want to buy it, too. That’s why there are tons of launch bonuses that you can get when you buy a paperback copy of the book.

And let’s be honest here… 239 pages is an awful lot of content to read on a digital screen. These aren’t 239 pages that you’re going to be skimming and skipping through, either — every single one of the book’s contributors put their heart and soul into giving you the best advice that they possibly could — so you’re going to want to read it.

Isn’t it worth spending a bit of money to get the paperback version, so that you can read on the couch or in bed, and write notes in the margins?