How To Get To Know Your Audience

Transcription

1 Video One: How To Get To Know Your Audience and Know What s On Their Minds By Gary McLaren The Article Writer s Toolkit

2 2017 Altavado Limited. All Rights Reserved. Published by Altavado Limited PO Box 51389, Auckland, New Zealand You may not sell, give away, share or distribute any of this content without the express written permission of the copyright holder.

3 Two Critical Questions #1. Who is Your Target Audience? #2. What s On Their Minds?

4 You must give your readers something in return... something that makes it worth their while to read your article, e.g. #1 informing your readers of the The latest news Solution educating them on some topic teaching a new skill or technique entertaining your readers Where s the Value?

5 Critical Question: Who is Your Target Audience?

6 #1 Advertising Demographics Most print magazines, and many online magazines, provide detailed reader demographics for their advertisers, e.g. Gender Age Income Level Education Location

7 #2 Alexa At Alexa, you can access several demographics for most high-traffic websites including: top countries, gender, and education. The paid version has even more data.

8 For your own website, you can use Google Analytics to obtain comprehensive data on your visitors including: #1 Gender Age Interests Language Location Devices and Browsers Visitor Behavior Visitor Engagement The Solution #3 Google Analytics

9 #4 Quantcast Quantcast Measure is a free analytics product. You place a special tag on your website, and it enables you to measure visitor data such as: Geographic Location Occupation Household Income Shopping Interests Political Affiliation

10 If you have a Facebook page, then you will be able to get incredible detail on your visitors #1 via Facebook Insights. The Solution #5 Facebook Page Insights

11 Critical Question: What s on Your Readers Minds?

12 #6 Greatest Desires What are the greatest desires and ambitions of your audience? What would they most like to achieve?

13 What prevents your audience from achieving those desires and goals? #1 Search at Google for [topic] or [audience] and: The Solution biggest problems traps pitfalls obstacles #7 Obstacles

14 #8 Mistakes What are the biggest mistakes your audience makes? Search at Google for [topic] or [audience] and: mistakes worst mistakes biggest mistakes

15 #1 Imagine you were starting out today. What would you need to know? The Solution #9 Newbie Shoes

16 #10 Gripes & Complaints What are the most common, or biggest, gripes and complaints you hear from your audience?

17 What does the audience most often misunderstand about: #1 The Solution your topic your brand, or your product? #11 Misconceptions

18 #12 Identify Hangouts Identify where your audience tends to hang out online.

19 #13 #1 Check your inbox. What questions have people been asking you? The Solution Check Your

20 #14 Welcome When people subscribe to your mailing list, send them a follow up message with an invitation to you and ask the one thing they want to know the most!

21 Check the comments on your blog posts. #1 Don t forget comments that you The Solution didn t publish or approve because they were off-topic and not relevant to the particular post. #15 Blog Post Comments

22 #16 Most Popular Posts Check your web stats to learn which of your blog posts have performed the best and the worst. Consider hits, backlinks, shares, and comments. Use Google Analytics to check the bounce rate on these posts.

23 1. Use Google Keyword Planner to identify related #1keyword phrases. The Solution 2. Discover which of these keyword phrases people search for the most. #17 Google Keyword Planner

24 #18 Übersuggest Use Übersuggest to quickly find new keywords that are not available in Google Keyword Planner.

25 #19 Find out what people are saying about a topic by following hashtags. #1 Hashtags The Solution Identify tags using Ritetag, then check how they are being used with Keyhole.

26 #20 Conduct a Survey Create a survey of your audience using Survey.io or even Google Forms.

27 #1 You can run a poll on Twitter or on your blog using the WP-Polls plugin for Wordpress. The Solution #21 Run a Poll

28 #22 Run a Contest Offer a prize to the reader who asks the best question.

29 At Question & Answer websites, questions are asked, answered, and sometimes even organized by a community of users. #1 The Solution One of the best Q&A websites is Quora. #23 Q & A Websites Also see Yahoo Answers and StackExchange.

30 Set up dedicated streams at Hootsuite to follow: #24 Hootsuite Streams a list of Twitter accounts that regularly tweet good material around your topic. several of the most relevant hashtags for your topic. Get creative, e.g. a stream that looks for a relevant hashtag and the phrase how do I or help needed?

31 Identify any recent or upcoming conferences. #1 Check out the conference session topics from the program schedule. The Solution #25 Conferences You ll discover the hottest issues for this audience right now.

32 #26 Google Alerts With Google Alerts, you can keep track of what people post online about your topic or about you!

33 Internet forums, also known as message boards, are discussion websites where #1 people hold conversations in the form of posted messages. The Solution To find forums around your topic, search at Google for [audience] or [topic] and forum. #27 Forums

34 1. Write down what you think are the top blogs on your topic. #28 What Others Are Providing 2. Check top blogs for your topic according to Google search results. 3. Check top blogs for your topic according to Bing. 4. Use Buzzsumo to discover these competitors most popular blog posts. 5. Read the questions and comments for those posts.

35 Consider what is changing in your industry right now? #1 What impact do these changes have on your audience? The Solution What s difficult about these changes? #29 What s Changing?

36 Find the Gaps: Identify What s Missing

37 #30 Amazon Book Reviews 1. Go to Amazon Bestsellers and drill down to the appropriate category to identify bestselling books in your niche. 2. Read the book reviews, keeping an eye out for comments like I wish it covered XYZ or I wish there was more material on XYZ.

38 #31 #1 Take a look at your competitors blogs and ask, What haven t they covered, The or what Solution haven t they covered adequately? What Have Competitors Missed?

39 #32 What s Going to Happen Next? Ask, What s likely to happen next? Jump the gun and post about it before your competitors.

40 In Summary: You Need to Know Your Readers

41 Bloggers: it may be worth creating some Personas. Build Some Personas A persona is a fictional, generalized character that encompasses some of the typical needs, goals, and behavior patterns among your audience. I recommend learning more about personas at Hubspot.

42 Brought to you by Gary McLaren... facebook.com/garymclarenauthor plus.google.com/+garymclaren twitter.com/garyjmclaren