Leveraging new audiences is incredibly important in online marketing.
New audiences mean more exposure for your content, brand, and company. Improving brand exposure is always a marketing win, and increased exposure can also equate to more links.
While building authority and growing your own dedicated following is helpful in regards to link building and digital marketing as a whole, it’s also important to continually find new audiences to tap into.
One of the most effective ways to leverage new audiences for links is through content. Here are some different options for finding and leveraging new audiences with content:
- Guest Blogging
- Interviews
- Industry/Expert roundups
- Product/Tool Reviews
- Collaborative content
As you can tell, the reason these pieces of content tap into another audience is because it involves a second party - another influencers, website, or company. Depending on the type of content, it will either be hosted on your site or the other party’s. Let’s look at these various strategies and how each can be used to leverage a new audience.
Guest Blogging
Contributing to another blog or editorial website is probably the most common and well-known method for tapping into new audiences.
Although Matt Cutts decreed all guest blogging for SEO to be dead, it remains a viable strategy for getting your content, name, and brand in front of new eyeballs. And yes, through this exposure you can also obtain links.
Typically, your contributed content will be hosted on the other site, in order to reach that website’s audience. But you can also do the inverse and invite a prominent author to contribute to your site for exposure and links as well. If the guest author publishing on your site has an established following, they will likely follow that author’s content to your site.
For example, we had Emma North write an excellent guest post here on Linkarati that was quite popular. Not only did Emma provide us with great content, but by featuring her on the site we were able to introduce Linkarati to a new audience – her followers. Along with some great exposure for our site, the post itself also garnered some links:
(Data courtesy of Open Site Explorer)
These are links that Linkarati obtained through exposure to a new audience.
Interviews
Interviewing industry authorities can be a great way to tap into a fresh audience as well.
By interviewing a prominent person within your niche and hosting the interview on your website you can build recognition and links. The key is to interview someone who is an actual authority and has a devoted following that will likely share and link to the interview. And of course you want that interview to be professional, interesting, and engaging.
A perfect example of how this strategy can lead to worthwhile links is the interview Eric Enge did with Matt Cutts on the Stone Temple Consulting (STC) site.
As the Head of the Webspam team at Google (at the time, he is currently on leave), Matt Cutts is very influential within the SEO industry; people tend to be interested in what he says. This is why the interview Enge did with Cutts is constantly referenced and linked to (I’ve done it myself multiple times) within the SEO realm:
(Again, data from OSE)
While STC has their own engaged audience, by interviewing someone like Cutts they were also able to leverage Cutts’ following to gain increased exposure and links.
Industry/Expert Roundups
Another way to find and leverage new audiences is through industry roundups. Industry roundups are basically hyper-focused group interviews, with all participants answering the same group of questions.
Roundups are somewhat similar to interviews in that it’s usually best to host the content on your own site. While it is possible to create link opportunities from participating as an expert in the roundup, typically the site that hosts the roundup will receive the most links.
With an industry roundup you can reach a number of new audiences by including multiple experts. Again, you want to make sure the people you feature are actually experts and people find value in their opinions. You’ll want the content to be helpful, interesting, and useful.
Each influencer you feature in the roundup will bring a unique audience with them, worth tapping into. If there is any audience overlap it simply means increased promotion and exposure when experts share your content. Roundups allow you to reach key audiences multiple times from multiple sources of authority (the experts sharing the roundup), increasing credibility and improving brand exposure and recognition.
Ideally all the experts you include in the roundup will also link from their own websites, as well as webmasters from their respective audiences.
We featured an expert roundup here on Linkarati and not only did it bring an influx of traffic, but it also brought a healthy dose of links:
(Data from OSE)
This is a great example of how powerful expert roundups can be.
Product/Tool Reviews
Reviewing a specific product or tool relevant to your industry is another great option for tapping into a new audience.
For example, in the SEO industry there are a wide variety of useful tools to choose from. Some of the more popular tools also have large followings that you can reach by reviewing their tool on your site. If you write something that will legitimately help someone use the tool more efficiently, fans of that tool will potentially share and link to your content. It’s also likely that the company responsible for that product or tool will link to your site.
Here is an example of BuzzSumo linking to a post Nicholas Chimonas wrote on Linkarati that outlined a useful process for their tool.
Collaborative Content
Finally, you can collaborate with others in your industry to create content that is mutually beneficial and allows you to engage both of your audiences.
Collaboration is a great way to not only reach new audiences, but also build meaningful relationships within your niche. Also, because both parties have a vested interest in the success of the content you can utilize your combined resources for increased promotion and visibility.
There are a number of different possibilities available for collaborative content, including:
- Co-authored blog posts/case studies
- Co-hosted webinars/podcasts/hangouts
- Co-sponsored contests/giveaways
- Collaborative industry surveys/research
- Etc.
In order to leverage the content you create for links you will want to host it on your own site, although it may be necessary at times to host content on the other person’s site because a positive relationship is all about reciprocation.
Recap
Making a meaningful connection with your existing audience and continuing to build trust is essential. However, it is also important to find new audiences to engage with as it will increase brand exposure and uncover promising link opportunities. Here are some different ways you can find these new audiences and leverage them for backlinks:
- Guest Blogging – write engaging content on industry leading sites or even have an influential contribute to your own site
- Interviews – most effective when you are interviewing a legitimate authority, people need to actually be interested in what they have to say
- Industry/Expert roundups – tap into the audiences of multiple experts and receive boosted exposure through increased amplification
- Product/Tool Reviews – take a popular tool and offer insight into how it can be even more useful, then reach out the product designers
- Collaborative content – collaboration emphasizes sharing: shared responsibilities, shared promotion, and of course shared exposure to one another’s respective audiences
