Blog World Recap: How to Attract a Large and Loyal Audience

(Reading time: 7 – 12 minutes)

Sean “Deacon” Neprud gives us his final installment from Blog World Expo in Las Vegas back in October. By the way, Deacon won tickets to Blog World Expo through a commenting contest on Mashable. Just so you know…

Blog World Recap: How to Attract a Large and Loyal Audience

-by Deacon

Jason Van Orden from the Internet Business Mastery podcast (and other businesses) spoke about building a large and loyal audience at Blog World Expo on Friday. This is the third article in a series covering the information and the take-aways from the presentations I attended.

Having a voice online that leads to sales is about, above all, influence. When anyone is looking for advice, they look for experts and peers to tell them what matters. It is up to us to be either a peer or and expert, so that we can influence people’s behavior for mutual benefit and profit.

The previous article was about 8 ways to monetize your media once you have an audience that follows you, and that you have influence and mojo with.

Jason’s talk was about how to get that influence and mojo in the first place.

What leads to action?

To make money, we need our audience to take some sort of action and buy a product or service. Above all else, the thing that leads to action is influence. Without influence, it will be difficult to convince someone to take action. Another way to think of influence is trust. We want people to trust us and our voice, opinions, and thoughts. People buy from people they trust.

Before we gain that influence, however, we have to engage our audience. Before we can engage the audience, we have to have their permission to do so. Before we can even gain their permission to engage them, we have to get their attention.

Put this all together, and we have what Jason refers to as the New Media Money Map (catchy title, huh?):

Attention -> Permission -> Engagement -> Influence -> Action

Jason’s talk covered the first 3 of these steps, Attention, Permission, and Engagement. I will discuss those three in the rest of this article.

Attention

Attention is scarce. There is so much information on the internet that we can easily get information overload. That said, marketing is pretty simple. It is about producing content that is relevant and entertaining. Your product may be amazing, but without gaining that initial attention from people, they will never know how fantastic your content is. In order to get this attention, use the laws of Magnetism.

The Laws of Magnetism:

• Relevance – Your content is focused towards your intended audience
• Reciprocity – Your audience gives back after you give something to them and vice-versa
• Authority – You are seen as an expert
• Trust – People trust you
• Convenience – You provide content how they want it, when they want it
• Desire – You give them what they want, not what you think they need

Be everywhere a person look. Every format, every media type. Do this by syndication and re-purposing. Syndication gets covered by RSS, but these days there are ways to syndicate your content to twitter and facebook (and others) automatically. You can re-purpose media to create tons of different content. A live video can become a youtube video, audio podcast, a transcription to post on a blog, an email newsletter, and an article. Use automated systems to do this.

Get your content into many different search engines. Everybody knows that our posts and websites need to show up in Google. There are other search engines for media content, iTunes, YouTube, etc. Get your content to show up in these search engines.

If you are serious about getting your content out there, consider ways that you can re-purpose your content in other media.

Grab Attention by being Relevant

You need to make your content look relevant to two distinct audiences: potential readers and search engines.

You make your content relevant to search engines with proper tags, titles, descriptions, meta keywords, etc. You want it to be clear to the search engine that your content is relevant to whatever is being searched for.

You make your content relevant to readers by getting ratings, reviews, and testimonials, having a good description of the content, and producing content on a regular basis. You have to show that you are supplying the information people want and that it is up to date and relevant.

Permission

Your Number 1 goal should be to get people to opt-in.

When someone opts in, you have their attention, and they are giving you permission to contact them more. Opting in can take many different shapes:

• Subscribers to your Email Newsletter List
• Subscribers to your site’s RSS feed or podcast
• Fans on Facebook
• Followers on YouTube and Twitter

You have some control over some of these listed above, and total control over others. You control your email list, website, and RSS feed. Twitter, Facebook, Youtube each have control over their own means of communicating with people, so ideally, you want to move people from those to your website, newsletter, and RSS feed.

Promote other channels to people so that you have redundancy, which allows you to convey your message better. Promote the newsletter in the RSS feed, the website on the podcast, etc.

Last of all, give your audience an incentive to opt in. We are familiar with the various shapes these come in. The two that are most common are a PDF ebook or a 7-part email training course. It may also be a video, an audio program, or any other thing. It is important though, that you give something to your audience when they opt in.

The Number 1 Takeaway

More than anything, the following point was made: if you don’t have an email newsletter, get one. After that, get people to sign up. This is the goal number 1 if you are building a large, loyal audience. I can vouch for Aweber, as I believe Dr. WordPress can.

Engagement

Engage your audience so that they will know, like, and trust you.

Speak to your best customers

Determine who you do the best business with, and speak to them. If your best customers are “soccer moms”, then speak to them. If your best customers are tech geeks, speak to them. You may feel like you are ignoring some of your potential customers, but when you do this, you will be engaging your best customers more strongly.

“Customer” does not necessarily refer to someone that pays you. If you are starting out with a blog, or a podcast, video show, or whatever media you produce, your customer may just be your audience. Speak to that audience that you are trying to build.

Speak with stories

A great way to engage your audience is by telling stories. Jason recommends the book, The Story Factor as a resource to learn how to use stories to engage your audience. If you are teaching something, go through your outline twice. The first time through, convey the information. The second time through, tell stories that illustrate the information.

Perform dependably

Be consistent with your content. Produce your content on a regular schedule, so that people can depend on it and so that the search engines can depend on it.

When you produce content on a regularly, it becomes a part of your audience’s life and their schedule. They will be able to depend on it and make it part of their routine, rather than something that pops up from time to time outside of their routine.

Regular content also keeps your search engine placement high. This keeps your information accessible. If you are in a very competitive market, a couple weeks can make your position slip in the search engines. Note that this counts for every search engine; Google, Bing, iTunes, Youtube, etc.

In Review

Take a look again at the New Media Money Map. Do you have each of these pieces in place? Can you improve one or more of these steps in the sequence?

Are you placing your media in enough channels and being specific enough to get the attention of your target audience? Have you made opting in a priority? Are your regularly and dependably producing content?

One last thing about Blog World

On a coincidental side note, I ended up at the Blue Man Group show on Friday night with Jason Van Orden and 8 other folks. I a girl at one of the after parties who had met someone who had received 10 free tickets to the show, and got the invitation through her. The group consisted of 10 folks, many of whom had just met that weekend. It’s nice to know that all us “social media” folks are, well, social.

Sean Neprud operates Bad Deacon Design under the moniker Deacon (surprise!), where he works in a range of mediums from wood block to web design.