In Part 1 of Define your niche. Research your audience, we talked about finding a niche in an area of your audience’s interests. In this post, we discuss how to go about defining your audience and finding that target reader you will be writing to. By identifying who you will be writing for, you can fix that image firmly in your mind when you write. A fixed image keeps your work focused and your writing consistent with your reader’s interests.
Not surprisingly, you can do all you can to please your audience, but if you hate what you are doing, why bother? The purpose of online marketing is to get away from the hated 9-5 job, working for the other guy, doing what your boss tells you. Online marketing is a place where you can express your ideas and creativity without the critic watching over your shoulder.
Along with defining your audience, you must also define your passion. The key to success here is:
Do what you L-O-V-E
and the M-O-N-E-Y will follow!
DEFINE YOUR AUDIENCE
The advice of knowing who you are selling to has been around as long as there have been merchants. The more you know about your customers, the better you can serve them. Once you have a vision of your reader firmly in your mind, you write to that reader.
Rather than imagining a huge audience of a million people, imagine one or two. Depending on your niche, you may find the same needs fit more than one audience, but remember, the best way to succeed in affiliate marketing is to drill your niche down as far as you can. The beauty of this is if you see another need, build another website.
With the availability of 25 siterubix sites and 25 regular sites at Wealthy Affiliate, you can build websites to your heart’s content.
To help you define your favorite client here is a handy checklist:
- Name
Age- Gender
- Family situation
- Income
- Education
- Job title
- Industry sector
- Biggest problem, fear or need
- Goals
- Values
- What do they purchase?
- What sites do they visit?
- What are their interests and hobbies?
- What do they do for fun?
Spend some time on this. Go on your social media site and look at the profiles of the people you hang out with. What are their interests, likes, dislikes, dreams? You can find plenty of information about people just by reading their profiles and their posts on social media.
Here’s an example:
Judy is 40 years old, a single mother of three children, two boys, and a girl. She makes enough to pay her bills and take care of her kids, but she feels strapped every month. With her bachelor’s degree in accounting, she makes a decent income, but always feels she could be making more.
Her biggest problem is making ends meet. Her goal is to find extra income without leaving her kids at home for a second job. She is a hard worker, motivated and a self-starter. She looks for bargains online for her children’s clothing and school supplies and buys most of her household goods and personal care items online. When she has time, she likes to sit down with a good romance novel or thriller, watches Netflix with her kids, but spends most of her time working at her job, running her kids to activities, and being the house mom. Once a month she loads her kids up in her SUV and takes them to an amusement park or museum or – anywhere to have some fun and relax.
Is this someone you recognize? This lady is ripe for an affiliate marketing website that will provide extra income while allowing her to stay at home with her kids.
Now that you have your target reader and you know what she likes and what her biggest fear is, you can write your posts to ease her fear and give her a way to make extra income.
The funny thing about your target reader is that you will find they are a lot like YOU!
THE NEXT STEP IN FINDING YOUR NICHE IS DRILLING DOWN YOUR INTERESTS AND EXPERTISE
What interests you? What are your passions? What burning question do you want to answer? Know yourself.
Write out your profile by answering the same questions you answered about your client.
You will find something amazing! Your interests are much the same as your favorite reader, and you hold the answer to their burning question.
Congratulations. You just found your niche.
POSITIONING STATEMENT
The hard work is over.
- You drilled down a niche with possibilities for great affiliate links.
- You identified your target audience.
- You identified your passion.
Now write it out:
[Name of website] is a [niche] that helps [my audience] achieve [purpose/need].
Unlike my competition, [my website] has/contains/helps people with [what your niche will do].
It takes a little bit of work, but once you define your niche and your audience, you will have a clear idea of who you are, where you are going, and who is going with you.
There is no need to complicate this process. KISS. Keep it sweet and simple. Less is more.
The last thing you want to do is overwhelm your audience with too much information. But by keeping your reader in mind at all times, you will naturally write to their interests, their attention span, and their pocketbook.
After all, aren’t you like your ideal reader? You want to make extra money online or you wouldn’t have read this far.
Now you can see why niche and target audience must be considered together.
A QUICK SUMMARY OF HOW YOU CAN PUT THIS TO USE:
- Research categories that follow your passion.
- Research the interests of your contacts on social media.
- Pick an audience based on the profiles of your contacts.
- Discover your passion.
- Find a niche that follows both your audience’s and your passion.
- Write a description of your ideal reader.
- Write a description of you.
- Write a positioning statement.
Now you are set to begin constructing your affiliate marketing website.
- You know who will be reading your posts
- You know what you will write about
- You know what you will be selling.
By taking the time to do the work, you will have a website that enjoys great traffic, high conversions, and many sales.
