The Truth About Discovering Your Online Audience

Seth Godin in his book ‘This is Marketing’ gave an illustration about finding one’s online audience using the lock and key.

He said ‘You don’t create a key and start finding a lock. You find a lock and start looking for a key.’ That’s probably one of the greatest online marketing analogy ever.

One of the biggest online courses of 2020 is how to create and sell digital courses. A lot of people paid hundreds of dollars but found little success. It wasn’t because they were scammed, it was just that they overlooked something.

In this article, I’m going to show you a way to discover your online audience.

The Lock

In the analogy given by Seth Godin, the lock is what you find first. The lock signifies a need — a problem — a vacuum — or anything that can be better.

Thus, you should find a problem that needs a solution. Before Facebook, you could only communicate online with your family and loved ones via email. With Facebook, you can not only communicate, but you can also follow up on their progress.

The lock was the lack of a platform that can bring people together virtually.

Before Medium, you could use the limiting WordPress.com, Blogger, and a few other platforms, but the curation on these platforms was bad if there was any at all. Things could get better. Bloggers shouldn’t need to host a blog before they enjoy a seamless blogging experience.

This is the lock Medium came for.

Before 2009, it was tough to get someone who would drive you with their car from Point A to Point B. You may have to hire a special transportation service or get a concierge service. You could also pay someone, but it was up to them to decide how much they would charge you.

That was the lock Uber came for.

The Key

The key in the analogy is the solution to the lock. It is that solution you’re creating to a problem. To create a key, you must have a lock. Else, you won’t have a direction.

A lot of people create digital products without ascertaining if there is a market for their products. They assume that because they have an idea about a particular thing, someone else will be willing to pay for it.

Yes, there may be a problem your solution will solve, but you don’t create a key for a lock that has an excess amount of keys already. You find one without a key.

For instance, if you create a course about YouTube SEO, you’d better be offering something special or much better than what’s online, because a simple search on Google can get me for free what you’re trying to sell to me.

To sell something like this, you need to go beyond selling a product, you have to sell a dream or an aspiration. Thus, instead of saying ‘The YouTube SEO Masterclass’ or The YouTube SEO Course’, you may have to use something like ‘I will teach you to become a top YouTuber with millions of highly engaged subscribers.’ Or ‘How to Get Millions of Views and Highly Engaged Subscribers for your YouTube Channel.’

How to Find Profitable Niches or Locks

Your Interest

What you’re interested in matters a lot. If you’re not interested in Football and you start a YouTube channel around Football, you will give up easily. Don’t forget that you need 4000 hours of viewing time before you can qualify for Adsense.

Whatever it is that you’re interested in, someone else is interested in it. You just need to make your content enjoyable enough for that person. For people to be interested in videos of pimples popping, then you have a market.

Your interest is the foundation. For instance, you may be interested in hairstyles. Your channel may be about this. The next step is the need to know the right questions.

Getting the Right Questions

Having discovered your interest, the next thing is to get the right questions. Using the hairstyle instance, what questions are people asking about the different kinds of hairstyles? They could be questions like:

To do this, go on Google and start searching, but don’t hit enter. Those suggestions are questions people frequently ask Google. Answer them.

You can also visit forums. Just enter the niche + “forums” and Google will return results of forums on that niche. Read the questions and the answers on these forums. Some discussions have hundreds and thousands of contributions. These are the questions people are asking. Answer them.

You can also learn what people want to know with the YouTube search box. Type in your keyword and let it populate the suggestions with popular entries.

Finally…

Just like you won’t create a lock for a key, you should do your market and audience research before you create content. More, ask questions about what people want. These will give you direction on what to create.