How to build an audience — Quicksprout
> Pick an audience you care about. You’ll be creating high value content and tools for this audience for several months with no real benefit to you other than the promise of future profit.
> Find your niche. For example, if you like marketing, don’t just say your audience is “marketers.” Narrow it down to something like “small business owners who are trying to start using content marketing.” You can always expand later.
> So, how do you know if your audience is a good one? Determine whether your audience is already buying a decent number of product. Competition is NOT a bad thing. If there’s no competition at all, that almost always means that your audience simply doesn’t buy anything.
> Target audience could be buying any of these products:
**** Physical products
**** Informational products like e-courses & e-books
**** Software/Web tools
Look at number of amazon reviews, number of products on amazon, number of google ads to get an idea of the demand.
> Understand your target audience really well.
**** Demographics: location, age, gender, income, education level, religion, ethnicity, marital status, number of children. Use following tools to get this data.
**** Psychographics: This data is about what your audience thinks and believes.
Why do they want to learn about (your niche)?
How important is (your niche) to them (i.e., is it a hobby or part of their job)?
How do they like to learn (e.g., video, text, audio, etc., and on what type of device)?
> To eliminate competitors, position yourself to appeal to a specific audience by creating content in a way that they want but no one else is providing.
**** Identify differentiators. A differentiator is anything that a reader may like or dislike. For example, some readers prefer advanced content, while others want beginner content.
**** Identify competitors.
**** Chose set of differentiators which your compeitiors are not providing. For example: If competitor is providing advance paid content, you can start with free beginner content.
> If you just start blogging, you won’t have any readers unless you have a large personal network. Go where your audience hangs out on the web and get them to come to your website. The basic idea is to get at least a few hundred regular readers and then start blogging more frequently on your own site. That way, your readers can help promote your content, and you’ll grow much more consistently. Use these strategies to get initial readers:
**** Guest posting on blogs where your readers hang out.
**** Paid advertising.
Do build email list of your readers.
> Once you have subscribers to your content, its time to validate your product idea. You can ask readers what they want, conduct a survey or know their pain points in comments section. Pitch different ideas to different subset of subscriber list, know which idea sucks. Get to know what your readers will pay for. This way you filter out the best idea. Once you have the idea, build a product and sell it to your audience. You don’t really need a fancy sales pitch because you’ve built a relationship with your audience over time.
> You can create a product and then find customers to sell it to. Or you can flip that model on its head and build an audience first. When you build an audience, you build relationships that allow you to learn about your audience and create products you know they’ll love.
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I have 10 years of industry experience in Google, Adobe & Goldman Sachs. I took 100+ interviews at Google to hire for the role of Software Engineer. I am a former Tech lead at Google Pay & Google Ads team. I am helping everyone build a successful career in Software industry.
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