Having an active community is the first step in developing an audience.
The larger the community you have, the quicker your audience will grow.
The community consists of contributors who associate with your content. They will be active with your brand, from spreading your content to creating content for you.
There are three main steps for building a community capable of significant audience development. These steps include:
Recruiting: You need to start by recruiting people who connect with your brand, are passionate about the subject matter, and would be interested in actively engaging with your audience members. People who are already blogging about your topics online would be great to recruit. Search through the community that already exists to see if there are bloggers to work with. Try using social networks to find some of these ideal people.
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Managing: Supplying these community members with topics to write about each week is one way to manage their output. Your staff should edit all of the content before publishing it, to make sure the content is grammatically correct. This will allow you to target specific topics, optimize content, and stay relevant to your audience.
Motivating: Your community members will want a reason to be active with your brand. Offering outbound links from their articles is one way to interest them. If these community members have their own personal blog, an outbound link would be very beneficial to them. If your community members start seeing more traffic coming from you website they will be more motivated to continue creating great content for you.
The Audience Development Summit 2012 is all about building a robust online audience. Strategies will be shared on blogging, optimizing content for the best keyword phrases, using social media and user-generated content to find your core audience members. Join us next month for this program so you can learn how to develop your online audience.
Originally posted on 3/27/12
