You have a good well designed website, one that serves as a resource to all its visitors (clients, vendors, prospects, and employees alike). You produce regular articles, either for your blog or newsletter. You have a valuable product or service that you want to share and a unique selling proposition. Now you just need to figure out how to direct people to your site – and not just any people, but those who will produce a good return on your investment.

That means knowing your audience and targeting your outreach. How can you spread your content to others who can share it with the same sort of clientele, or expand your influence in a profession where you have had good dealings before?

If you haven’t already done so, you may wish to consider professional organizations. And not just those organizations that fit how you think about yourself. If you serve a professional clientele, you may wish to look at their professional organizations as well. If your creations have been of service to that profession, there may be a place for you within that organization as well.

For example, the definition which the AMIA (the association of moving image archivists) uses to define its members includes everyone “responsible for preserving, restoring, and making accessible moving image heritage, including film, television, video, and digital formats.”

Even if you do not normally think of yourself as an archivist, if your best custom comes from clients that want you to convert their library of old promotional videos into digital recordings for online use, you could join the AMIA.

So how do you start?

1. Find Relevant Organizations

Some clients will actually list what professional organizations they belong to as part of their professional literature.

Others are not some forthcoming.

If you cannot learn this information directly from your clients, the WEDDLE’s HR website maintains a categorized list of major professional organizations.

2. Explore the Organization’s Literature

Once you have located a relevant professional organization, look to see what publications produces. Some limit themselves to online list-serves, while others have a full complement of print and online magazines, newsletters, and directories.

Not only are these publications prime locations for targeted advertising, and in reading them you can learn what issues are currently driving your target profession.

3. Respond in Your Own Voice

Now that you know what issues are important to your target profession, use your own writing to respond. What products do you offer that would help? How does someone on the vendor side of the relationship view the issue? What steps do you, as an invested outsider, think would be necessary to help the organization advance its outreach and education goals?  Marissa Berger offers additional advice on how to come up with blog topics.

Once written, give this material another look. Better still, get one of your contacts within the target profession give it another look. You may want to submit your work directly to the professional organization’s own journals.

4. Form Relationships with the Visible and the Vocal

Look for the most prolific, best places, and most followed writers in the organization. Get to know them. Let them know about your own writings on the subjects that you discovered through professional organization’s literature. Provide them with links so that they can look for themselves.

As Eric Ward mentions, it’s not about getting the most links, its about getting links and references from trusted individuals.

5. Tie it all together

If your best custom has come from the targeted profession, then you already know you serve one of their needs.

Give those professionals a reason to come to your site, and they’ll realize it too.

Entice them to return regularly by writing to their interests and providing them with online resources. As Lindsay Gower writes, most visitors what to know what’s in it for them.

If you have succeeded in getting the targeted professionals to view your site as a valuable destination, when it comes time for them to address the need that you serve, they’ll know where to find you.

Get involved in the Conversation:

What methods have you used to learn your client’s interests?