The Top 10 Ways to Find Your Audience

 

Your Audience Is Out There Somewhere!

It doesn’t matter who you are, what your opinions might be or even whether you have anything to say worth listening to.

Someone is willing to listen to YOU right now.

In fact, they are listening to someone right now and they might as well be listening to you!

But, most likely they aren’t.

Even if you have thousands of fans, clients, customer and supporters for your ideas, products and services, you haven’t even touched the surface of the audience available to you right now.

As I write this there are 310,574,391 people in the United States alone and  the world has a few more … 6,877,731,978 at last count.

I’m pretty sure you aren’t reaching them all.

But, I’m also just as sure that there are THOUSANDS of people who agree with what you want to say — No matter what you think.

 

1. “Who IS your Target Audience”

• What type of audience do you want?
• Are you looking for a particular age, gender, location etc – or stage of life, political interests?
• What are the personality traits, emotions, needs, passions and frustrations of you audience?
• What value or benefit can you bring to the table?
• Who is your ideal customer?
• What kinds of groups or associations would they join?
• What do they dislike?

 

Try imagining a prototype person who is your main audience.

• Name the person.
• Give them an age.
• An outlook on life.
• A job.
• A family.
• A city to live in.
• Interests.
• An Education.

 

Do you have more than one audience?

Why not list them all out?

• What is cool to these people?
• What impresses them?
• How do they interact?
• Are they technical?
• Are they sophisticated?
• Are they conservative?
• Are they radical?

 

What is the tone of their language?

• Do they use slang?
• Do they want “Just the facts?”
• Are they emotional?
• Are they angry?
• Do they have a history together?

 

What do they want and need?

• What are they missing?
• What are their problems?
• What do they value?
• What is most important to them?
• What are they least likely to care about?

The best way to spread your message is to start by observing what is already being shared, discussed and admired by your audience.

 

 

2. “Identify where your audience is and what they do”

• Where do they hang out?
• What activities are they taking part in?
• Are they readers?
• Social animals?
• Do they have their own jargon or lingo?

 

Talk to your audience

• Do surveys.
• Ask your friends and relatives what things they would look for if they were your potential customers.
• Find online forums that appeal to your audience.
• Research what your competitors are doing.
• Keep on top of what your industry buzz is about for successful target marketing.
• Subscribe to relevant newsletters and publications.
• Use market research to find vendors and content providers.
• Search Google for blogs, profiles and groups.

 

Look for “Hot Spots”

Where does my target go to …

• Network
• Research
• Read the news
• Catch up with friends
• Be entertained

 

See who’s getting results  …

Which items are …

• Getting the most buzz
• Gathering responses
• Causing controversy
• Being the most useful

 

Check your competitors …

Be sure to locate your competitor’s online presence to make sure you’re heading the right direction.

• Focus on high-traffic sites, events and profiles …
• Find potential partners, what websites are they on.
• Don’t stop researching your target audience. Your marketing strategy must keep pace with change.

 

Check your own analytics.

Google Analytics is a great way to see who refers readers to your site. Check out where your audience comes from and visit those sites.  Then check and see where they are going when they LEAVE your site.

 

 

3. “Find the key influencers”

Who are the key  …

• Bloggers
• Marketers
• Experts
• Print Publications
• Media Outlets
• Mavens
• Reporters
• Social Media Addicts

Then figure out what motivates them to move your message out to the masses.

 

 

4.” Engage with Empathy”

You don’t stand out in a crowd, by standing there and yelling. Think about the boy who cried “Wolf.”  It works the first time, but after a while people tune you out.

Introduce  content or conversations your audience is interested in using a voice that commands respect or affection or they won’t listen to you.

Ask …

• What is my audience interested in?
• What would they want to read?
• What do they search for?
• How can I entertain?”

Definitely …

• Be personal
• Be helpful
• Be enjoyable
• Ask questions
• Be human
• Be nice
• Be interesting
• Use their language and jargon
• Share media (pictures, videos, reports) they will connect with

 

5. “Expand the edges”

Reach out to your audience and become part of communities.

• Subscribe to blogs
• Join networks
• Join groups
• Write articles
• Publish a book
• Attend live events
• Speak
• Create useful content
• Comment on blogs and forums
• Set up Google Alerts to track mentions.
• Use StumbleUpon – to discover and read new content
• Introduce yourself – Sending someone a personalized email shows them that you have noticed them and you care about them enough to personally contact them.
• Respond to posts
• Answer questions
• Solve problems
• Make them notice your presence.
• Share interesting content.
• Check out advertisements
• Use Google Trends and Trendrr to search for what is trending now.
• Use Quantcast to get data (size, age, income, education etc) on your audience.
• Use Technorati to search for hot blogs and posts.
• Use Dan Zarrella’s ReTweetability Index and Wefollow.com to find the most influential Twitter accounts by keyword and number of re-tweets.
• Use local geo-targeted directories such as Placeblogger
• Search Facebook fan pages

 

Find out who and what is popular

• What posts are drawing comments
• What is being retweeted
• What Fan pages have high followers
• What topics are hot today
• What is the news media covering right now
• Which headlines are drawing you in
• What videos are getting the most views

 

6. “Deliver quality solutions”

Think about who you are, what you stand for, and what valuable contributions you can make to your audience.

Be as specific as possible.

• What do you have to say that will surprise your audience?
• What do you want your audience to think, learn, or assume about?
• What impression do you want to convey to your audience?

Solve real problems!

Develop content and delivery platforms (blogs, social network profiles, article sites, forums, etc.) so you have a platform to can communicate your expertise on a consistent basis.

 

 

7.  “Determine your keywords and key phrases”

Develop a list of keywords and key phrases your audience is searching for.

For detailed help on keyword research, view the free video tutorials at http://newbiequickstart.com

Keyword research is a tactic marketers use to help increase search engine optimization (SEO) for bloggers and websites to improve their visibility in search engines.

After you have your keywords, here are a few ways to use them:

Use Twitter Advanced Search to search on your keywords and phrases and follow interesting people in the results.

Subscribe to the RSS Feed of the results.

Identify hashtags used in posts related to your terms.

Write tweets using your keywords as hashtags.

Use Twellow.com to search Business Categories.

Use Blastfollow.com to follow Twitter users in mass based on subject.

 

 

8. “Outsource your marketing to find your target audience.”

It’s easier than ever to find qualified and knowledgeable experts for reasonable rates to create marketing strategies for your company’s target audience.

Click here for free resources for List Building and Outsourcing.

 

 

9. “Advertise!”

Who says you have to jump through hoops to build an audience.

It is nice to know that there are targeted, reliable, effective options in paid media to reach consumers in their media of choice.   Check out the Tobri Business Premier Advertising Package and tap into the millions of page views being generated on Tobri every day.

 

 

10. ” Do good!”

All of the above methods really come down to one basic principle.  Do good things and you will have all the audience you ever need.

Hope this helps!

 

http://kenmcarthur.com/the-top-10-ways-to-find-your-audience/

7 Blogging Tips From Top Bloggers

If you’ve been following the boom of social media marketing, you already know blogging is an essential ingredient to any social media strategy. Are you unsure about what to write, when to post, how to grow your subscribers and how to keep them coming back for more? If you’ve had any of these concerns, you’re not alone!

To help you take your blog to an entirely new level, here are 7 tips from the best-of-the-best in the blogging and social media arena. Every expert below has created a thriving blog with tens of thousands of subscribers who engage with their posts on a regular basis. If you want to know how to create and grow a successful blog, make sure to take notes (and take action)!

 

#1: Measure Your Blogging Success

“If you’re blogging for business, rather than blogging about your cat, baby, fashion addiction, or crush on Taylor Swift, you need to set some success metrics,” says Jay Baer, founder of Convince and Convert.

Without a statistical measure of your blogging progress, adding content to your blog on a regular basis can be an incredibly lonely proposition. Is anyone out there? Does anyone care?

However, within the business blogging arena there are a wide variety of potential metrics to gauge your momentum. It’s imperative that you select the most relevant ones that match with your blog’s purpose.

The first step in that process of course is to know why you’re blogging. This sounds simple, but it’s shocking how many bloggers aren’t clear on the core business rationale behind their blog initiative.

As I see it, you have 3 options:

• Blogging for Content
  This is the scenario where you are writing a blog with considerable emphasis on search optimization, attempting to drive traffic to the blog via strategic content creation and keyword inclusion. Your metric is search traffic.

• Blogging for Commerce
  Related to the first, but commerce-oriented blogs are more interested in conversion events than in traffic generation. Funneling traffic from the blog to some other web destination (typically a corporate site or lead form) is the primary objective. Here, your metrics are leads and conversions.

• Blogging for Community
  These blogs seek to build a consistent readership that interacts with the blogger(s) and advocates on behalf of the content on other social outposts.

 

 

Determine the main reason why your business has a blog and pick success metrics to match.

 

#2: Pursue Guest Blogging Opportunities

One of the best ways to get exposure for your blog is to blog for other people. Rich Brooks, president of Flyte New Media, offers some great advice to start building relationships for potential guest blogging opportunities.

“Find the influential bloggers in your related industries,” says Brooks, “and read their blogs. As appropriate, leave intelligent, thoughtful comments that further the conversation. This can drive traffic to your blog and may open up opportunities for guest blogging at their blog as they become aware of you through your brilliant insights. However, this must be a win-win for it to work. If you leave comments for completely selfish reasons, you can expect limited results.”

 

#3: Reframe How You Look at Business Blogging

“I often hear people complain that they don’t have time to write on their business blog or they don’t know what to write about,” says Denise Wakeman, founder of The Blog Squad. “Yet a blog is one of the best tools you can use to distribute your message across the web.”

One way to move away from this mode of thinking is to reframe how you look at blogging. It’s not about writing on a blog; it’s about taking advantage of a powerful marketing tool that works for you 24/7/365. Then, schedule writing time so it doesn’t slip through the cracks in the course of a busy day or week.

 

Here’s a 4-step process to get you started:

1.     Block out your writing time on a calendar.

2.     Plan your content in advance. Create an editorial calendar and plug in your topics 1 to 3 months in advance.

3.     For each of your blog categories, list a minimum of 5 topics you can cover related to your company, products and the solutions you provide.

4.     Pop them into your editorial calendar as prompts so you’re never at a loss for ideas when it’s time to create content.

 

#4: Add Keywords to Your Blog Titles and Posts

Rob Birgfeld of SmartBrief says keywords are the secret sauce to a successful business blog.

“It’s easy,” Birgfeld says, “to write blog posts on whatever topic springs to mind. But chances are your blog was created to help achieve business goals. In order to reach those goals, take data from your search engine marketing efforts and develop an editorial plan around your top-producing keywords.”

Gather your top 10-15 keywords or phrases and write blog posts specific to each one. Keep the content compelling, but be sure to sprinkle the selected keyword (and synonyms) throughout the post.

Most importantly, be sure to include those all-important keywords in the blog title and in the tags that you select. Not only will a keyword-driven blogging strategy help you build and plan out your editorial calendar, it will help you reach company goals via proven search engine marketing data. Thus providing you with something that’s hard to come by in social media: An easier sell to your CFO.

 

#5: Interview the Best in Your Industry

Michael Stelzner, founder of Social Media Examiner, suggests, “Hire a videographer and go to the biggest trade show in your industry. Interview all the leading book authors and thought leaders.”

When you do this, you’ll end up with tons of content you can release on your blog over months. And chances are, when the big names see your video, they’ll share it with their fan base, driving new traffic to your site.

 

Here’s Mike Stelzner interviewing Scott Monty of Ford at Blog World 2010. This is a great example of attending the best events in the industry and connecting with the influencers.

#6: Create Persuasive Calls to Action

“You’ve got anecdotes, case studies, top-ten lists, provocative insights and more on your business blog. Hats off to you. That’s a huge achievement, particularly if you’ve been publishing a blog for a year or less. But what’s your call to action? And by that I mean, what step is a visitor prompted to take after landing on your blog?” says Debbie Weil, expert blogger and author of The Corporate Blogging Book.

What obvious callouts do you have to attract a visitor’s eye after he or she reads your latest blog post? Think about it. Your blog reader, if a first-time visitor, has most likely typed in a keyword phrase and ended up on your blog through search results.

Readers may not even know that it’s a blog. So you’ve got their attention, at least for a few seconds. This is your real-time moment to prompt your visitor to take the next step. If I sound all salesy here I don’t mean to. This is permission marketing 101. It’s offering something unanticipated but relevant at the exact moment your visitor is looking for it.

Here are a few ideas for persuasive calls to action from Debbie Weil’s Social Media Insights Blog:

• Download our white paper
• Join us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.
• Ask us a question
• Download our e-book
• Sign up for our free webinar
• Request our toolkit
• Sign up for our e-newsletter
• Request a demo

#7: When it Comes to Video Blogging, Forget Acting

“I remember the first time I was on camera,” says David Garland, founder of The Rise to the Top and author of Smarter, Faster, Cheaper. “I was trying to be someone I wasn’t… with an awkward spray tan. (Stop laughing.)”

For some reason, our personalities can sometimes change when on camera (something about that scary lens). What the audience craves is to see the real you. All the good stuff, quirks and everything else.

Try this. Invite someone over with whom you are VERY comfortable. Have him or her ask you a question and simply answer it. Then, have the person hold a camera and try it again. Rinse, wash and repeat until you feel comfortable. When you talk into the lens, picture that person. It will make all the difference.

Here's David Garland interviewing Mike Stelzner about the success of SocialMediaExaminer.com.

 

http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/7-blogging-tips-from-top-bloggers/

7 Tips for Driving Targeted Traffic With Twitter

Social media has many uses—from making contacts to performing customer service—but driving quality traffic to your site is Twitter’s secret weapon.  The big question is this: How can we get more of that lovely attention we crave?

As my recent poll shows, generating incoming traffic is the number-one need that people have right now, and for good reason. Traffic translates into:

• Attention, engagement, conversation and recognition
• Spreading your message far and wide
• Prospects and subscriber opt-ins
• Customers, increased sales and leads
• Media and interviews, which lead to more attention

… and last but not least, an ego boost.

In a previous article here I mentioned the many benefits of Twitter for your business. Now here are seven key points you need to know if you want to get more targeted traffic from Twitter:

 

#1: Know your audience

Growing your traffic always starts with your audience if you want to do it right. Untargeted, uninterested “hits” are a waste of time and resources at worst, and at best just pure vanity.

• What does your audience want and need?
• How do they like it delivered?
• Which topics are on their minds right now?
• Are there trends that are growing in popularity?
• How do these folks speak? What words and phrases do they use?

This means that driving traffic starts with listening and observing. Get to know your target so you can most efficiently engage them.

Twitter has a tool for this. Use search.twitter.com to find what people in your niche are talking about and follow some of their conversations.

Once you get an idea of what people are interested in, join in those conversations and talk to people.

 

#2: Get the “right” followers

So much rubbish is thrown around about how to grow your follower count that it makes it seem that the number is all that matters. Wrong!

You need people to want to hear what you have to say. This means you do NOT want people who auto-follow because they are either:

1. Robots and not real human beings (e.g., spam software, people trying to inflate their follower count, scrapers)
2. Not actually reading your tweets and just following to allow you to DM them

The followers you most want are those who follow you because they are interested and think they will get value from your tweets. These people are most likely to find you via:

• People retweeting your stuff, either within Twitter or using a TweetMeme button
• Referrals from other Twitter users
• Your blog; for example, your articles that say “Follow me on Twitter at @chrisgarrett and tell me what you think,” or your sidebar Follow Me button
• Other people’s blogs, when you guest post or comment
• Clicking your forum signature when you participate in discussions, or your email signature

Unfortunately Twitter closed off a really nice way that people used to get targeted Twitter followers. It used to be that we could “listen in” to conversations that people we followed were having, but now you have to be following both parties. This means we can’t discover new people that way. If someone puts something before they mention your @name it can still work, and I still occasionally get followers through that.

Essentially the advice is, put your Twitter name where it will be seen and encourage people to share it!

 

#3: Build engagement

Talk to people.

Engage your followers. Don’t just see them as a passive list of eyeballs! Treat folks as human beings and you will do much better at this stuff. It is called social media for a reason.

• Ask questions
• Hold conversations
• Dip into others’ conversations
• Encourage feedback

 

#4: Get clicks

So now your followers are seeing you as an interesting person and not a robotic “feed,” which means they are more likely to take notice when you tweet out a link.

Tweet Valuable Links

Whatever you do, don’t just tweet your own stuff. That is both selfish and boring!

Get into the habit of sharing anything cool, regardless of who created it. Retweet good stuff and other people are going to be more willing to retweet yours. Tweet out fun and useful links your friends send you in email or from the news. Be known as a person who tweets good stuff.

 

Timing

Not everyone is online at the same time. There is a whole world outside of your timezone, plus people have a different schedule than you. You know the feeling of confusion when you land in a foreign country. Not only have you got to adjust to local time, but also people seem to have their meals at a different time of day, shops open and close at strange hours, and business meetings seem to be held randomly. Twitter is like that, you can’t just look at a time zone converter and think people will be at their desk at a certain time.

1. Tweet the same thing a few times, a few hours apart, to give your message several chances to be seen.
2. Vary the times of day you tweet and monitor response.
3. Watch for the peaks and troughs of activity in YOUR stream (not just what works for others).

I tend to aim to catch the peak times for Aussies, the EU/Brits, East Coast USA, and West Coast USA, but it is far from an exact science!

Headlines

There are two main driving factors that affect your chances of getting a click:

1. Your reputation
2. The headline

Hopefully at this point #1 is taken care of, but #2 takes some work.

First of all, use my free download 102 Proven Headline Formulas as a starting point. There are 102 fill-in-the-blank templates which ought to give you a head start on writing a compelling caption.

If you use an interesting title and it matches your audience’s wants and needs, then you are going to get clicks.

Split test

You might not get it right the first time, so try another variation:

• Phrase it as a question
• Make it into a “How To” headline
• Use curiosity versus just the facts

A lot of this is about learning what your audience reacts to best.

 

#5: Measure performance

When you use a link-shortener with a built-in click-tracker such as bit.ly, you can see how well any of your links perform. This is useful for improving over time and to see which links get picked up virally.  As they say, what you measure you get more of!

With Twitter it’s not just the link clicks that YOU get, but the retweets and shares that really drive the real traffic. TweetMeme and bit.ly can give you vital reporting about how well you do, as well as your Google Analytics.

 

#6: Do more of what works, but test, test, test

When you find what works for you, do more of that. Keep in mind though that if you only do the same things you will either get the same results and not improve, or you will wear out that technique. Experiment, learn and mix it up.

Trends change, techniques improve, fads go out of fashion. Do not get stuck on rails, move and flow with your audience.

 

#7: Encourage sharing

Once you have your initial click, your job is not done!

Make sure your article has a TweetMeme button so that anyone who likes what you shared can easily share it too.

If you want to get really fancy, give people an incentive to share, such as a random prize drawing for anyone who tweets your message. Of course, the message will contain a link back to you …

Once in a while it doesn’t hurt to actually ask for retweets. Just don’t overdo it, as you will only annoy your followers. This will make them less responsive, rather than more.

Does it really work?

Here is a case study for you. For the last Social Media Success Summit in 2009, Mike Stelzner and I ran a competition on chrisg.com using all the advice mentioned here in this article.

 

The competition post was retweeted over 1,000 times

Using TweetMeme we can see that the competition post was retweeted over 1,000 times before it stopped tracking.

 

Social Media Success Summit 2009 Competition Clicks

Just the cli.gs link alone was clicked 12,753 times.

So yes, it does work.

Bottom line:

• Gather the correct audience
• Be awesome
• Share cool stuff
• Encourage other people to share it too

Does Twitter work to generate traffic for your stuff? Got any tips to share? Anything people do that annoys you? Please share—go ahead and comment below right now!

 

http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/driving-targetted-twitter-traffic/