Pretend for a second that you own a lemonade stand. You’ve found the perfect spot to set up your lemonade stand, and you start offering your lemonade.
Every single day you stand outside letting everyone know about your lemonade. Unfortunately, you get minimal sales. This doesn’t make sense.
You’ve crafted the perfect drink, and everyone should be standing in line to buy it.
You decide to ask some people why they are not even considering your lemonade and you find out that you’ve set up your lemonade stand in a town where everyone loves orange juice. Your perfect spot isn’t so perfect anymore.
This scenario might sound crazy to you because of course, you wouldn’t set up your lemonade stand in a town that loves orange juice and hates lemonade. You would find a town that loves lemonade.
But this is what many people do with their blogs.
They set up their blog, and then they promote their blog content to people that don’t care about it.
What happens then is that you get random people coming to your blog and leaving pretty quickly because they don’t care about your content.
Your audience is just a general audience. What you need is to find your target audience.
1. Why Finding Your Target Audience Matters
If someone only cares about finding recipes for a low-carb diet they are starting, your message about how to gain more followers on Twitter isn’t going to resonate with them.
You’re wasting your time sending messages to people that aren’t interested.
When you find your target audience, that means your messages aren’t being wasted.
It means you have a better chance of getting people to sign up for your mailing list.
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It means you have a better chance of getting people to buy your products and services.
So how do you find your target audience?
Let’s talk about it.
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2. How to Find Your Blog’s Target Audience
Finding your target audience is going to take some work, but every aspect of blogging requires some work. Ready to begin?
On Other Blogs
Guess what? Other bloggers have already done the hard work for you. Odds are you aren’t the first blog in your niche, so why try to find a brand new audience when it already exists in the comments of other blogs?
Other bloggers have already done the hard work for you. Odds are you aren’t the first blog in your niche, so why try to find a brand new audience when it already exists in the comments of other blogs?
The comments section of a blog is often overlooked, but it can be an excellent way to introduce yourself to your audience.
The catch is that you have to stand out, but fortunately, that isn’t too hard in the comments because most comments are very general.
When you can leave a comment that draws the attention of not only the blog owner but the readers of the blog, then you are on to something.
When you can do this consistently on the same blog, then you start to gather a following.
So head out and find some good blog posts that you think get a decent amount of traffic and leave a great comment.
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On Social Media
On social media, you should spend some time looking to see who follows the influencers in your niche. These people will likely be your target audience. If you find people that are active on the social media platform, then follow them and engage when you see the right opportunity.
What many people do wrong on social media is that they forget the social part. Instead, they treat it solely as a place to promote their content.
You’d be amazed at the results you can get just by spending some time each day interacting with others.
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Facebook Groups
This might seem like social media, but I’ve given groups their own section because on Facebook you can find specific groups that cater to your niche.
There is also the blogging-specific Facebook groups that usually have a day dedicated to sharing your latest blog post. While these groups usually have a wide range of people, it’s always possible to attract a couple of people from your target audience.
Every little bit counts.
It might seem silly to spend time trying to build an audience one person at a time, but like with any other business, word of mouth can be pretty powerful.
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3. Find Where Your Audience Hangs Out
Depending on your niche there might be online forums and communities specific to the topics that you write about.
Again, it’s all about immersing yourself amongst the natives.
It’s very easy to get caught up in other bloggers saying they get 10,000 new followers or email subscribers a month but the truth of the matter is that most bloggers have to put in the hard work to get a couple of new people a day.
And that’s okay because each day of work that you put in will eventually lead to exponential growth.
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4. Don’t Search Blindly
There is no reason to believe that to find your target audience you need to blindly cast your net out into the ocean and hope that you catch something.
Your audience is already online, so all you need to is find the places where they hang out and then make yourself stand out.
Sometimes this is as simple as having an interaction with them.
How many times do you get to interact one-on-one with a blogger that you like?
It’s pretty rare, so when you take the time to do it, you can stand out tremendously.
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Instead of thinking that your content alone is going to magically attract your target audience, you need to proactively go out there and pull your audience in.
Initially, this will seem like a lot of work, but as your audience grows, you’ll find that you can spend less time building an audience, and more time on providing them with awesome value.
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