How to Build A Large, Passionate Audience From Scratch with No Connections

Speakers: Derek Halpern & Rob Woods

Moderator: Sonia Simone

Building an engaged and loyal audience is the only way to create a website that is truly defensible against search engine changes and algorithmic fluctuations. Luckily, a focus on audience building is also a great strategy for growing a site that ranks very well.   This panel will take an in-depth look at what it takes to fully understand and appropriately appeal to your audience.   A variety of angles will be considered, from the psychology of motivation, to methods for traffic generation, to the variety of technologies available to marketers that enable us to better understand the actions of our visitors.

Our panelists will show real life examples and the strategies they employ for building audiences that are engaged, highly targeted, and ready to be sold to.  They will also discuss the differences between building and growing a smaller, more niche audience, as compared to effective strategies for building a larger, more broad base.

Derek Halpern, Founder of SocialTriggers.com

Derek Halpern is an expert marketer and entrepreneur, taking the digital marketing world by storm with his highly popular website, SocialTriggers.com.   Derek approaches marketing from the perspective of a scientist,  always looking for methods to better understand the motivations of his visitors.   This approach has helped Derek to build a loyal and impressively large following in a relatively short amount of time.   His in-depth blog posts provide nuanced insights that are expertly translated into actionable tasks any marketer can immediately use to better their business.   Using his own examples, Derek will give us valuable insights from what he has learned as he’s built his website from the ground up.

Rob Woods, Senior Online Marketing Manager, Reinvent Inc.

For this session, I was looking for an in-house expert who (a) didn’t work for a big brand (b) knew their stuff (c) was able to show us real results. Say hello to Rob Woods. He’s a Senior Online Marketing Manager at Reinvent Inc and has the unique experience of managing and building a wide variety of domains from the ground up, across a diverse cross section of verticals.  Reinvent is certainly not a household name but they have built up audiences consisting of hundreds of thousands of users with a very diverse set of properties such as BlackFriday.com, Snog & CheapTravel. Rob will be discussing the high-impact methods he and his team employ to achieve lasting results along with real-life examples and how-to’s.

Sonia Simone, Chief Marketing Officer at Copyblogger Media, LLC

Sonia is a marketer for people who hate marketing. Her superpower is creating better customer relationships with incredibly effective communication. She not only knows how to ‘build an audience’ but she knows how to cultivate and engage that audience. She is the CMO and a founding partner of Copyblogger Media and runs ‘Teaching Sells’, Copyblogger’s elite course on creating membership-based businesses. I have been fortunate enough to see Sonia in action on many occasions and I have learned a lot from her (both in person and through her writing) on how to constantly do a little bit more to build and engage your audience.