Do You Know Your Target Market?
Since we’re mostly talking about niche marketing this week, you my be wondering what your target market has to do with this… it’s simple. It is the various prospects and customers you are ideally trying to reach in your particular Niche.
When I first started out in affiliate marketing, I wanted to reach out to everyone and market just about everything – Not a good idea and I never made a single sale that way. Over the years I’ve learned that the more I “niche down” the easier it gets to carve out a place for myself on the World Wide Web.
Next I figured out that when I clearly defined my target market, it was much easier to “talk” to them in all my various messages (content on my website or blog, emails, newsletters, autoresponders, articles, short reports etc) and I was starting to build trust and rapport with my visitors. That in turn made it much easier to recommend products and services. As an added bonus, a much larger percentage of my visitors ended up buying those.
Let me reword this … I defined my target market, it made my work easier (and more fun) and I ended up making more money!
Ready to do the same? Here’s a little exercise I go through each time I go into a new niche.
How To Nail Down Exactly What Your Target Market Is
Stop thinking of them as a crowd, they are really that one ideal person. Who are you creating your niche website for? Be specific. Start by answering the questions below. What I want you to do is paint a picture (with words ) of the ideal person that will come to your website, find your information helpful and take you up on your recommendations.
This person can be someone you know, or it can be completely fictions (most of mine are).
What’s the gender of your ideal customer? Male or female? How you write to them can be very different depending on gender. As you are building trust with your vistor, you want to share things you have in common. Those will usually be very different for a woman than a man.
For the remaining questions, I’m going to be using “she”. It’s not because I recommend you your ideal customer or visitor is female, it’s just easier to type she than go into the whole he/she thing with each sentence. When you see “she” feel free to substitute “he” or “dog” or “cat” for that matter (though I doubt that either one of the last two has much purchasing power… but then again, my cat get’s credit card offers in the mail all the time)
How old is she?
Is she married or single? Is she divorced?
At this point it may be a good idea to give this person a name. It’ll make her more real in your head. Go all out and give her a first and last name.
Does she have kids? If so, how many and how old are they.
Where does she live? What does her house look like, what kinds of cars does she drive.
What does she do for a living? How much is she making (this will come in handy when you are trying to figure out what price range you should go for in affiliate products).
What hobbies and interests does she have? Does she have pets?
Now that you have a pretty good general picture of this person, it’s time to look at why she is interested in your site and your offers.
Why is she interested in the niche you are in? How does it relate to her hobbies, interests and her family.
How does she land on your website? Is she looking for more information about a hobby, or is she trying to solve a problem (like keeping the dog from barking all the time).
How does she find your site? Through a keyword on the search engines, because a friend recommended it or through a link in an article or a forum post.
What is she expecting from you and your site?
Again, be as specific as you can. The more you can learn about this fictitious ideal visitor to your site, the easier it will be to later go out and find real people exactly like her. Spending the time to figure this out will be well worth it.
Not only will you sound a lot more authentic to your target audience, going through this exercise and creating this one fictitious person will also make it a lot easer to write content, email messages and any type of offer or sales message for your niche site.
P.S. Tomorrow we’ll talk about finding affiliate products to promote on your new niche site.
P.P.S Not sure how to go about finding a hot new niche and making sure it is profitable? Grab a copy of my new report “How To Uncover A Hot Profitable Niche in Just a Few Hours“.
You may also like to read:
- Profiling Your Target Audience
- How To Setup And Market A New Niche Site (in 7 Days)
- Social Media Influence – Why You Can’t Afford Not To Engage With Your Market via Social Media
- Should I Make A Niche Site?
- How To Find Affiliate Products For Your Niche
Tags: target audience, target market
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