You want your blog or website to be visited everyday. You want your content to be read by the visitors. And you want to sell your products to them or increasing clicks from their visit. Those are the common relations of what we are doing right now – in making profit with our blogs or increasing its popularity and visibility over the Internet.
The question that you should think is – who want to visit my blog and read my articles?
And some of the answers are:
- The people who love to read the topic
- The people who are searching for guides
- The people who are looking for particular content
- The people who are looking for related products
- The people who are just passing by
- Your subscribers
You will realize that most visitors looking for what they really want to search and the rest of them visit your content without finding what they are looking for. Some of them might turn into your subscribers – if something in your website attracting them.
We ignore the randomness for now. Now let’s see some points of focusing on your target audience.
The first step of getting your target audience is by knowing what you want to offer for your audience:
- What I can offer?
- Which group of people will take my offer? (based on age/job/monthly income)
After knowing about your own product or content that you can offer, it’s time to start building your website based on the questions above. I use these steps for every website that I build for particular target audience.
- Determine the niche of the site
- Get domain related to the niche
- Building the site (Involves installing WordPress, etc.)
- Create first content (content must be related to niche, of course)
- Do SEO
- Install traffic widgets such as FeedJit, SiteMeter or FeedStats plugin for WordPress.
- Connect with other blogs/authors under the same niche (Linkbuilding/Commenting)
The next thing is to promote what you had done and make it visible to the world. Search for forums related to your niche and involve yourself in the discussion especially discussion on critical topics. From this method, you can spread the words about your site while getting information about the target audience from the discussion. You can advertise your site through Google Adwords or premium advertisement at any related site but I prefer forum as it’s free and interesting.
Do remember to maintain your site through updating contents frequently and ping your site for every new contents that you update. Comment frequently on other blogs/websites related to your niche will be really helpful.
After certain period of time (usually I do this after a week), check your traffic data, statistics and feedback.
- Number of visits per day/week
- Sources of the visits
- From which country the visits come from
- Any comments by the readers
Study these data and you could know whether you are reaching your target audience or not.
One more helpful idea is by creating a poll so you can understand your visitors better while knowing whether your website reaches you target audience or not.
The enjoying moment of this practice is when we receive continuous profit from our website or seeing amazing number of traffic and when you feel satisfy with the current performance, it’s time to set up an e-course of newsletter with autoresponder so you could make more profit and better performance with your site.
If you have any idea to share, feel free to share with us through your comment below =)
I don’t think wordpress is required except for the blogging about blogging/internet marketing niche but that’s just because links coming from their own domains are more powerful and I’m sure most people in that niche get traffic from being do-follow. Then when they see the link in google webmaster tools or site explorer they come back. To get more links but at least they read the post and possibly more(I have found blogs I like this way).
And I don’t think it’s so much finding blogs within your niche as it is that everyone has to get links from the internet marketing niche. Do-follow attracts traffic from internet marketers, why would you try to target that traffic in outside niches?
I’m impressed that you can resist the urge to only check your traffic data once a week 🙂
Need to provide what your Readers want. Every blogger need to think of it.
Informative. I think most newcomers make that mistake of not caring too much on who their audience really are. I made that too but its worth doing a poll once in a while to get that in.
This was a pertinent post. Search engines are not mind readers; they’re basically computer programs, and search engines need a bit of help in order to find your site and connect your potential customers/audience to your information/business. That’s where targeting your audience comes in. In order to create a searchable site, you must know who you are writing for. Your target audience knows what they want and what they are searching for, and you must know what that is before you can deliver what they want.
Josh
Great post, you touched on some great points. I like ping.fm to ping my social networks and max blog press ping optimizer plugin for wordpress. I had some success with polls on a few different blogs, being able to collect data from readers can be very useful.
The synergy of content and product is key. You don’t want to promote something that is unrelated to the topic but (as you said) you have to also consider your audience.
You also need to realize that not all niche topics are profitable. Many people are just looking for information, they’re not in ‘buying mode’.