Where to Find Your Perfect Audience -050

This is part four of a series on how to find your perfect audience! Catch up by reading post one about knowing your WHY, post two about creating your ideal reader profile, and post three about knowing who you currently have in your audience.

Where to Find Your Perfect Audience

Experts say you should write for your target audience, preferably with one ideal reader in mind. When I first started blogging, I totally nailed this concept. Every post had a laser focus on that one reader.

Because my audience literally consisted of one person: my mom.

Ten years, two blogs, and a podcast (or three) later, I’ve learned a thing or two about writing for the ideal audience. Mostly I learned the hard way: by alienating people, accidentally building the wrong audience, and trying to force my current audience to like content they did not like. Targeting the right audience can be really tricky, especially if you also want your blog audience to be your book audience.

If you are starting from scratch or with a smaller audience, you can find where your target audience is hanging out and do some quality research. If you have already built an audience, you need to find out who they are. You want to target readers who will help you reach your goals.

So, WHERE ARE THEY? How do you go find your perfect audience and bring them back to your blog? I’ve got a slew of ideas for you. 2500 words worth of ideas, so buckle up, buttercup.

Before you look at the actionable steps, download your worksheet to identify your target audience.

Listen to Create If Writing – Episode 050

Where to Find Your Perfect Audience

The cohesive theme of your blog combined with a clear goal will help you attract and keep your target audience. But unless you are great at SEO (search engine optimization), people are not just going to stumble across your blog. You will need to do some work to find your readers. I’m going to break this down into platforms and tools.

Platforms to Find Your Perfect Audience

Facebook Groups
You are probably already utilizing groups in Facebook, but if you are not, get in there. I really think this is the best place right now to connect, but it can also be very frustrating as so many people are using groups. 

First, find relevant groups. Go back to your reader profile and use the information you created. If your ideal reader is a mom who likes to read and has grown children, you have three different groups to search for: mom groups, book-reading groups, and groups for empty nesters. As a group-creating addict (I admin something like 25 groups), I can tell you that there is a group for EVERYTHING. If not, CREATE one and use keywords in the description so people can find it in Facebook. Maybe you’ll created your own group of ideal readers! 

Pay attention to the stated guidelines of each group. Don’t just bust in to drop links to your blog. Watch and see what people are talking about and engage in meaningful conversations. Trying to be helpful and provide value will get your farther than trying to link to your blog every day. Each group has its own culture and you need to get to know it a bit first. It’s pretty easy to see when people are trying to simply piggy-back off another group to gain followers. Be an asset. Follow the rules.

Twitter
Twitter is a fast and easy way to connect. I like to find and follow other bloggers and writers similar to me. Then I look at who they follow and especially who follows them. Check the Twitter profiles to find new followers. (For more on this method, see my guest post on Jane Friedman’s site on using Twitter in 15 minutes a day.)

You can also utilize search and advanced search on Twitter to find conversations and users. See this list of Twitter chats to hop in and join an actual weekly conversation. In Twitter chats people tend to follow each other and get to know each other week to week. It’s a great way to connect on the platform. (Need help figuring out Twitter chats? Read THIS.)

Amazon Reviews
Reviews on Amazon can be great for research (and a rollicking good time). Search for genres similar to what you hope to write and check out the book reviews. Great reviews can help you know what people enjoyed and bad reviews can help you see gaps that people want filled.

Some reviewers also have an email listed. You CANNOT add these to your email list (you always need permission for that), but one more aggressive strategy might be to send an individual email to reviewers who liked a book, offering a free chapter or digital download or maybe linking to a relevant blog post. Don’t be ultra creepy- be sure to mention where you found their email address. But if they are making that public on a site like Amazon, they are open to communication. Or…they might not understand the internet and privacy so well.

Goodreads
Not everyone on Goodreads fills out a full profile, but you can spend some time searching books like yours or in the genre that you hope to write, reading reviews (again, great for research purposes!), and connecting with reviewers either through the platform. You can click through their profiles to find where to connect online through Twitter or a blog. There are also many groups centered around genre that can also be fantastic for connecting with readers. I’m not a huge Goodreads user myself, but many people are and for book writers, it is a great place to connect with readers.

Wattpad
I am not a heavy (or even light) Wattpad user, but many have found success releasing manuscripts one chapter at a time on this platform. It’s slick and pretty and many of the books have hundreds of thousands of reads.

Not every writer wants to share work for free, but even if you don’t share content, the site is full of readers. You can connect there with people’s other social profiles or even just use it as a research tool. See what kinds of books people want to read and what kind of feedback they are leaving.

Blogs
Back in the day, people used to leave comments on blogs and then connect with other bloggers by clicking through the comments. Though commenting is really drying up, you can still connect through comments. Some blogs have hundreds of comments and you can learn more about potential readers or click through their name to find out if they have a blog or online presence to connect with your target people. Head over to their blog and leave a comment.

As with Facebook groups, don’t be gross and try to just fish for readers. It’s always pretty obvious and looks smarmy. Every so often on a blog post, someone asks a question and before I can respond, another blogger jumps in and leaves a link to where they answer that question in their own post. I mean, kudos to you for being resourceful (and faster than I am responding to comments), but it just doesn’t sit right with me.

Product Hunt
This site isn’t for everyone, but it’s a great place to submit your book, blog post, or podcast episode. It has some strict rules (don’t ask for upvotes in particular) but can be a great place to share your content and bring readers back to your site. It’s used by a lot of entrepreneurs and freelancers and you have to get invited to be able to Hunt (ie, post) your own products or links.

Medium
I really like Medium and would love to spend more time there. Some people have moved their blog exclusively over to Medium rather than self-hosting. I wouldn’t do that. But I would say that it’s an okay place to actually re-post your blog. (Many times, duplicate content is an issue for people, but Medium seems to be above the Google law on this, so you can literally post on your blog, copy and post the same thing on Medium.)

You can connect with new readers through reading and commenting as well. Make sure your profile is set up to send people back to your site. To give you a big rundown of how you can use Medium, this is a super guide from Buffer.

In Person
Yes, I mean not behind a computer screen. GASP! This can be tough for the people like me who are either in pajamas working out of the house or wrangling a bunch of kids. But you can go to local meetups, seek out local groups that meet in person on Facebook, or even host your own Meetup. This is a great way to actually connect and get information from real people in person. I have spoken at a few local conferences and find that some of the people that hear me in person do my thing stick around and become engaged. It opens up doors that the internet can’t do, or at least not as quickly.

Guest Posting
It can be really helpful to get in front of someone else’s audience. Guest posting can be pretty simple and effective! Here is a great list of 100 sites that allow guest posts. Always be sure to read their guidelines, read a few recent posts, and reach out personally.

Other
I don’t want to spend a ton of time going through every single platform. Some of them I neither use nor fully understand or like. But you can connect on basically any platform by doing searches for users or hashtags, checking for groups, and joining conversations that are already happening. Some other places to look for your ideal peeps: LinkedIn, GooglePlus (communities can be a good place to connect), Instagram, Reddit, StumbleUpon, and more. I love Pinterest for bringing traffic, but it’s not my go-to for actually getting to know people as it’s the least social of the social platforms. (Which I mostly love.)

Tools to Find Your Perfect Audience

BuzzSumo
This is a pricy tool, but has some free search options, even if they tease you about the awesome content you could get for only $99/month. Use BuzzSumo to search for your genre or a book title or blog post similar to yours and you can see top posts online, broken down by the number of shares on each social media platform. This can let you know what is being shared and WHERE, which is an important component of finding your peeps.

FAQ Fox
FAQ Fox lets you search for what questions people are asking in forums. That’s pretty awesome because I heard a lot of people giving the advice to “check in forums” to learn what questions people are asking. But the internet is FULL OF FORUMS. This cuts right through the noise in a way that Google couldn’t. See which can help you see what questions people need answered, what problems they have, or what they are curious about. Learn more about the best ways to use the tool from this post. Did I mention this is free? 

Sem Rush
SemRush allows you to search terms and see what related searches people are making on the internet. It is not free, but you can get ten free searches per day. These tools can help you learn what your potential readers want to know and read and also what keywords to use that might help your blog become more visible in search.

Keyword Tool 
This may not lead you to your audience, but the Keyword Tool will help reveal some things about your audience that might bring them to you or help you create relevant content for them. You can try using the basic Google method where you start typing and see what Google fills in, but this is more extensive.

Google Keyword Planner
This is also more about creating the right content that will bring people to you, but is helpful in terms of research and knowing what questions people are asking. For a great tutorial on the Google Keyword Planner, check out this informative post.

Facebook Custom Audiences
This is a bit advanced if you aren’t already using the Facebook advert manager, but you can do SO many things with the information that our favorite spy, Facebook has. You can actually upload your email list as a custom audience to Facebook in the adverts manager, then create a lookalike audience and target them with ads. This is a great way to bring in new, ideal readers, especially if your email list is already pretty targeted and filled with your peeps. This post from SmartBlogger has a TON of info (including how to upload your email list) on using the Facebook adverts manager tool for custom audiences.

You can also create custom audiences and look at the insights from those custom audiences, whether you choose to use your own audience (like your uploaded email list) or create an audience to watch. Facebook collects data like my kids collect Legos, so you can learn TONS of information (and be terrified at the amount of information that Facebook collects).

Here is a tiny glance at some of my custom audiences:

 

To Sum Up: Where to Find Your Perfect Audience

What you may notice as you’ve read through these tools and platforms is that there are two main strategies to finding your ideal audience. Both are proactive, which is to say they require you doing something, but they are slightly different. Ideally, you should do both.

1.Reaching Out to Bring People Back to Your Site
This way is more hands-on and personal. It involves things like commenting on blogs, speaking up in Facebook groups, attending Twitter chats, and anything that means that you are stepping out and personally talking to people. You are hopefully doing this in a non-smarmy way where you really want to be helpful and connect without just stealing someone else’s audience.

Example of a smarmy way to leave a comment:

2.Researching and Creating Content that Will Attract People to Your Site
When you are using some of the tools to understand your ideal readers, you will be learning information that you can use to create the kind of content that will hopefully attract those people. SEO (search engine optimization) is a piece of that, but it also can look like this:

1. Study keyword tools and search what questions people are asking
2. Write a stellar piece of content that answers or addresses those questions
3. Join related Facebook group
4. Per the FB group’s rules, share your perfect blog post to answer their questions OR use that link in a non-smarmy way to answer crowd-sourcing questions in the group

OR:

1. Study keyword tools and search what questions people are asking
2. Write a stellar piece of content that answers or addresses those questions
3. Post to Twitter using popular hashtags in your industry

Those are just two examples to get you started. The point is that you can research, create content based on what your people want, and then share where those people will find it.

If you ONLY create the great content your people want but expect ideal readers to just find you, you’ll be sorely disappointed, unless you’re an SEO genius. You need to have both pieces: creating the ideal content for your ideal readers and also going out to find those readers to bring them back to your ideal content.

This beast of a blog post concludes our four-part series on Finding Your Perfect Audience. WHEW.