Last year I attended Search Love Conference and was inspired by Guy Levine's and Richard Baxter's excellent presentations and their ideas of sourcing your audience from competitor's content and finding platforms your ideal audience will engage with. I then came back to the office and had the difficulty of trying to explain the idea to my colleagues. Without having a term for the practice, I found it very difficult indeed.

So, in a humble tribute to Guy and Richard's presentation, I wanted to communicate this idea, as Reverse Audience Sourcing - expanding upon it and sharing how to do it. With all the different forms of content outreach, this is a useful method of developing a list of your ideal audience to reach and the platforms they share - without ever leaving Excel.

Tools that you will need to do this. Don't worry they are all FREE:

• Topsy API Access - click the link to sign up for it
• Neils Bosma's SEO Tools for Excel - click the link and follow instructions to download it. PLEASE NOTE: this is Windows only atm and essential to this method.
• SEOgadget API Key - Follow the link and instructions
• My Reverse Audience Sourcing Spreadsheet- click the link to download. Macros must be enabled for this to work

Here's how Reverse Audience Sourcing Works:

1). Find a piece of content that has been successful for a competitor - this can be a blogpost, infographic, webpage, image or anything whatsoever, but it has to have a unique URL. For the purpose of this demo I am going to use SEOmoz's excellent Beginners Guide to SEO.

If you don't already know which content has been successful for your competition then simply use Open Site Explorer. You can enter your competitor's domain and selecting 'top pages' is a great way to find their best content. You can download this data in a CSV.

2). Open the Spreadsheet- once you have identified a successful piece of content for a competitor now is the time to let the spreadsheet work its magic.

Here's what you need to do first:

• Click Data Tab
• Enter Topsy API Key
• Enter SEOGadget API Key

3). Put The URL In The Spreadsheet- once you have completed the above simply just paste the URL into the Query tab of the spreadsheet.

This will use your API key and Topsy's API to pull in the last 100 'trackbacks (mentions of this URL on twitter). This will pull in the users Twitter Handle, Twitter Name, Author Description, Influence level & The Content of the tweet

4). Find The Influential People - from this list you can easily identify influencers by their influencer level. These should be the people you choose to target.

5). Select the People Who Are Worth Targeting - using the information from the query page and their influence score you can quickly identify who is worth targeting and who isn't. You can quickly ignore the bots & people without followers.

Focus on people who have a blog or platform to spread your message on, befriend them and start the earliest outreach process (which in its infancy is reminiscent of on-line stalking).

6). Move to the User Links Page - when done identifying which people you want to influence move to the User Links page. Select the Twitter User in the top right corner to select an influencer you would like to learn more about. This uses the Topsy API to pull in their last 100 tweets. Showing the last 100 links they have tweeted.

Then press Export Links. This will copy their last 100 links, their Twitter name and use Topsy's API and SEOgadgets API to pull data on that Twitter user. This includes: their name, location, followers, website & contact (this is done using a who is contact lookup through SEO gadget's API). Repeat this process for all the people you are interested in.

Should you run out of people that you want to influence, simply go back to the Query page and in the top right corner select page and move up one, as seen below:

7). Analyse This Data- once you have done this enough times you will have a mass of data to analyse. Click into the Output tab to see the data. Explore the things they are sharing and try to get an understanding of how you can get your content in front of them and shared by them.

This breaks down the domains your ideal audience frequently shares and their essential information; enough to kick-start your outreach campaign. All this from a simple tweet.

8). Turn This Into A Content Outreach Campaign - this data is a goldmine of opportunities. Alongside developing a list of people who are interested in similar content, you have found out which sites your audience shares the most and try and get yourself placed there. See my data below:

A brief glance at this would immediately tell me that investing in video content would be a great way to engage this audience, just from looking at how many times they have shared YouTube videos.

There is no limit to what you can do with this. Essentially, you have a mass of data relevant to your topic, audience and targets that you can analyse and manipulate to make the most out of your content.

Now is the time to find a creative way to launch your amazing content in front of this audience you have identified and turn your content into a success. All found from a simple tweet. Amazing!

Additional Reading Resources:
The Future of Small Business SEO - Guy Levine
How SEO Gadget Build Links- Richard Baxter