Your audience is bigger than sales personas. If you’re only using your sales funnel stats to guide content strategy, you’re missing out on enormous opportunities for domain and brand authority rankings. When aimed at the right audiences, Authority Content can build links (domain authority) and awareness (brand authority). In this webinar, we’ll outline how to find and define your various customer audiences and how to plan on and off-brand content to fulfill their needs. In this webinar, Garret French and the Link-Building geniuses at Citation Labs are going to show you: How to build Off-Brand Audience-Directed content that helps build your brand authority. Where you can refocus your content efforts into On-Brand Audience-Directed content. Why you need to redefine audience utility in order to create the most effective original content. To help build the keyword and competitive profile you'll need to effectively develop Authority Content, attendees of this webinar will have access to a FREE 15 Day trial of SEMrush Guru

1. DESIGNED FOR
LINKS
Content That Builds Domain & Brand Authority

2. What You’ll Learn From This Webinar:
1) Characteristics of Content That Builds Authority Links & Brand
Hint: It’s bigger than a blog post.
2) How to design In-Funnel Content for your market’s audience-facing
media. (+ tactics to-go!)
3) How Out-of-Funnel Authority Content can build domain rank.
(+ more tactics to-go!)

3. What is Authority Content?
Content that crystallizes expertise in a way that saves a specific audience time,
money, or undue hardship.
● High Utility - answers a specific audience’s specific needs.
● Evergreen - it’s perennially valuable.
● “Relentlessly Useful” - thorough, leaves reader feeling confident that they
have everything thing they need to get started
● NOT necessarily “news-worthy” or “viral” content; it’s not fireworks.
● Often links out to other resources or sources of advice.

4. In-Funnel Authority Content:
We’re Building Brand Reputation/Recognition
In this section:
● Drop the personas
● Audience Discovery
● Examples + Tactics To-Go

5. Drop The Personas (... for now)
Sales personas (i.e. “recent email subscriber,” “income level of 120K+,”
“stressed out at work,”) don’t always mesh with customer audience as it truly
exists. If you use the wrong terms to describe your audiences then you will
never thoroughly reach them.

6. Audience Discovery
Are you calling customer audiences by ‘buyer persona’ terms, or are you calling
them what they call themselves?
● Test: Is there an online publisher who speaks to your audience as it self-
labels? How granular can you get?
Places to Learn:
● Forums, Online Communities and Non-Commercial Blogs
● Customer Phone Calls (qualitative, not quantitative)
Questions to Ask:
● How are they self-identifying?
● What are audience groupings we haven’t noticed?
● What are their pains (besides the one my product directly solves)?

7. Examples:
If you’re not recognizing the distinction and the power of self-labelling, you’re
missing a very human aspect of your audience.
1. Cat Owner v. Cat Lover
2. RV Owner v. RV Fulltimer

8. Tactics To-Go!
Audience Discovery Starter Kit:
● “audience term(s)” + blog
● “audience term(s)” + forum
● “audience term(s)” + community
● “audience term(s)” + news
● “audience term(s)” + publication
1. Identify distinct audience needs by reading widely
2. Create high-utility content specifically for these audiences
3. Promote content to audience-specific publishers

9. Out-Of-Funnel Authority
Content:
We’re Building Links!
In This Section:
● Step Outside the Funnel
● Find Linker-Valued
Audiences
● Get on a mission

10. Step Outside The Funnel (...for now)
High volume, high value link opportunities requires the targeting of linker-
valued audiences.
Linker-valued audiences = Audiences in need, not of a product, but of
information. They are served by 1000s of potential linking domains.
● Educators
● People with safety concerns (parents, pet lovers)
● People with disabilities
● People who care about a cause (e.g. “animal rights”)
● Veterans
● Family of people with mental health or substance abuse issues
To build linker valued authority content, address these audiences’ needs.

12. Finding Linker-Valued Audiences
STEP 2: “topic” (1-3 words) + inurl:links.htmlSTEP 1: “Seo keyword(s)” + site:.edu
(or site:.gov)

13. More Tactics To-Go
(hope you’re hungry…)
1. Create High-Utility Content for Linker-Valued Audience
2. Prospecting
● “Audience Term(s)” + intitle:links
● “Audience Term(s)” + intitle:resources
● “Audience Term(s)” + site:.gov
● “Audience Term(s)” + site:.us
● Co-citation Analysis
3. Outreach

14. Bonus: Get On A Mission

15. Get On A Mission
Align linker-valued content with your brand with a MISSION. Get your brand to
connect with linkers in need.

16. Mission Viability Checklist
EXTERNAL
a) Does this mission help change or save lives (even to some small degree)?
b) Are there ENOUGH people who care enough to promote the concept?
c) Has this been done? If so, was it executed well?
d) Does the concept serve a disadvantaged or disenfranchised group in some way?
e) Are there organizations that serve this disenfranchised group?
INTERNAL
a) Can we massage the concept into the client’s brand?
b) Are there internal experts who can contribute in some way?
d) Can we find a minimally viable portion of your concept so we can justify further investment?
d) Can we win enough internal support to test our minimally viable portion?

17. Questions? Comments?
Email megan@citationlabs.com