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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Many companies fail to drive more traffic to their content because of a simple false belief that they have.

I’ll explain what it is in just a second. But first, let me test you to see how good you are at recognizing false beliefs.

Which one of these two statements is true?

1. Marie Antionette said, “Let them eat cake.”
2. An ostrich buries its head in the sand.

Believe it or not, but the correct answer is that neither of them are true.

1. Antionette did not actually say, “Let them eat cake.” The phrase was credited to her by people who were in opposition to Louis XVI. The reality is that this statement had been used by other important figures long before her.
2. An ostrich doesn’t really bury its head in the sand. It just looks that way. It can appear that way when it lowers its head in fear, or feeds itself, or when it covers its eggs for protection.

Do you see how easy it is to believe the wrong thing?

In the case of these two statements, believing either of these incorrect statements isn’t going to ruin your life.

But when it comes to getting more traffic to your website, there is a false belief that is keeping many companies from harnessing a very powerful traffic building strategy.

The False Belief That’s Limiting Your Traffic

This is the false belief: no one is going to want to share their audience with us.
Today, I want to show you how false that belief really is.

In my last post, I told you about the most important, powerful, and reliable traffic building strategy that exists. One that the top content marketers and top content marketing companies use.

It’s the strategy of borrowing an audience instead of trying to create one completely on your own.

In case you missed my previous post here it is: Want To Drive More Traffic to Your Content? Who Has the Audience You’re Wanting to Reach?

You see, the thing that stops so many companies from implementing this strategy, which in turn causes them to miss out on a lot of traffic to their site, is this simple thought…

Why would anyone let me borrow their traffic?

Why Would Someone Let You Borrow Their Audience?

There’s a simple reason why someone would let you borrow their audience.

It’s because every content creator has a never-ending need for more and more content. That’s why they are looking for people to create it for them.

That’s why they would let you borrow their audience.

If you can come up with a way to help them with this problem, and at the same time satisfy their audience, they’ll gladly let you create content for them. Not just once, but over and over again.

You just need to make sure that when you create content for their audience that you do two things:

• You need to create great content that their audience needs and wants.
• You need to make sure that you don’t try to overly promote your own company, product, or service.

If you do those two things, then they will let you borrow their audience.
Who are these mythical people, websites, and organizations who will share their audience (aka traffic with you?

They’re actually everywhere.

Where to Find the Audiences (aka Traffic) That You Can Borrow

You might not believe this, but there are so many different types of audiences that you can borrow from. You’re really only limited by your imagination.

Let me give you a list of some of the places where you can go looking for audiences to borrow:

• Blogs
• Websites
• Podcasts
• YouTube channels
• Local or online magazines
• Local newspapers
• Local radio
• Local TV
• Even local associations and clubs (speaking is a form of content)
• And the list goes on…

Hopefully, this list gets your creative juices flowing and inspires you to think of even more places.

Now that your false belief has been corrected, there’s only one thing keeping you from beginning to capture and drive more traffic to your content.

Action. You just need to go out and approach some of these potential traffic sources and see if they’d be interested in letting you or your company create content for them.

Stay Tuned

In my next post, I’ll share an example or two of how I’ve successfully implemented this strategy in the past and how it increased my audience.

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