When you first approach content marketing, you spend a lot of energy on publishing content and driving traffic toward your platform.
Once you’ve developed a content base – a collection of relevant, timeless content and an audience hungry for more – you can begin concentrating on harvesting.
Harvesting your audience means converting visitors and one-time readers to loyal followers and subscribers.
Creating Email Subscribers
One of the best ways to form a committed relationship with your readers is through an email subscription.
Email subscribers enter into a two-way relationship with an individual or business: the subscriber offers a contact method and the chance that they’ll consistently read your content.
You hold up your end of the deal by providing worthy content that matches your content tilt via email newsletters or another subscription-based platform.
The Chicken Whisperer
One of the keys to harvesting a bountiful audience is providing information the audience really needs or wants. The Chicken Whisperer, Andy Schneider, has been doing this since 2009.
Speaking to a growing audience of small-time farmers and self-sustainers, Schneider draws on his own love of and expertise raising chickens. It seems like a small niche audience, but by providing exactly what the audience wants, Schneider has built a niche media empire.
Capitalizing on AM radio and initial podcast success, Schneider currently delivers podcasts to subscribers; his podcasts spawn approximately 30,000 a month.
Pampers
Audiences respond when you provide something of value. In the case of The Chicken Whisperer, the value is in the content alone. Diaper brands have long been among the top content marketing experts, and Pampers takes a two-prong approach to providing value.
First, it offers helpful advice to parents via an email newsletter timed to arrive at certain milestones in a baby’s life. Second, Pampers sponsors a popular rewards program.
Subscribers can enter codes from Pampers products – and codes received for free in email newsletters – on the Pampers sites. As codes build up, subscribers gain access to reward items including toys and free diapers.
Harvest Your Own Audience
By the time you arrive at the harvest stage, you have planted content seeds and worked your garden on a regular basis. During that time, you’ve learned a lot about yourself, your brand, your content, and your audience.
Put that knowledge to use: ask yourself what you can offer that would be difficult for your audience to turn down. Frame that offer in a call to action for email, podcast, or other subscribers.
Learn more about how you can put content to work for you. Check out the line up for the 2016 Content Marketing Conference to be held at the Rio All-Suite Hotel in Las Vegas this coming May.