If you don’t have a clear idea of who your target audience is then you might as well give up now.
Audience identification is crucial when you’re building a niche list. You can’t just target everybody. You have to drill down to a specific population and people who are trying to solve a fairly narrow set of problems. All the traffic in the world won’t add anything to your bank account unless you target a specific niche market and give that audience the solutions they’re looking for.
But how do you find the right audience?
There are many different audiences out there and targeting one is what you need to do. But it kind of boils down to the commercial value of those people you’re targeting. What do I mean by this?
Well, there are a lot of problems out there and a lot of communities and audiences that need solutions to these problems. But some of these problems are things that people are just never going to pay top dollar for. People are always going to be looking for the right DVD or a set of headphones, but there’s a limit to this budget, there’s a ceiling to how much they’ll spend and different problems also have different priorities in your life.
You need to find a niche that has enough commercial value and also enough of a priority that they’re willing to spend on it. One way to estimate this is to use Google AdWords. You can look at the cost per click that you would pay if you were doing paid advertising when you research the keywords related to your niche.
If advertisers are willing to pay a lot of money per click then there’s a good chance it’s got good commercial intent. There are a lot of advertisers willing to pay a load of money for keyword traffic. Twenty dollars per click is not uncommon. You also need to make sure that you’re targeting a niche that’s big enough, so the niche you’re targeting needs to have commercial intent but also enough demand.
Obviously, the ideal sweet spot is a combination of decent commercial value with decent traffic. But you should also pay attention to competition levels. If you pick a niche that is extremely competitive with massive brands taking over the whole of the search results then you’re probably going to have a tough time making any headway. You should also look for a niece that is somewhat competitive though because anything that isn’t competitive at all might well not have any interest.
But how exactly do you figure this part out?
Well, it’s fairly easy actually. You’ve already got all the keywords you are looking at and you know the cost per click and you know roughly the volume. You can take those keywords and you pop them into Google and when you hit search you will see the number of pages that are competing for those keywords. It’s a bit more complicated than that, but for this sort of level it’s fine to just look at the amount of results and take that as your competition.
This will give you a good enough idea of how competitive it will be.
Regardless of whatever niche you’re going into, whatever audience you decide to follow, chances are very high that your customers are already online. You just need to find them. I don’t mean that there’s a dedicated website that’s just for your particular niche or audience but they will definitely be out there asking questions on different sites related to your niche. They could be sharing images, photos or videos related to it as well. Whatever they’re doing, they’re already exchanging content online. So your job is to find out where they’re doing this.
Then listen to them. Pay attention to the words and terminology they’re using. Pay attention to the solutions that are already out there and they’re talking about the most. Understanding these solutions will probably have shortcomings that you can fix for them. If you spend enough time in these places you should have a clear understanding of who your audience members are and what they expecting from those solutions. You’ll get a fairly clear idea of who your competitors are as well.
For a more advanced technique into this, you could create a long list of your competitors and then reverse engineer them. But as long as you know the sort of people you’re going after. That’s all you really need to know to make a real good go of this.