How do you find the perfect audience, the niche to target your message to? It’s a tough question and the vast majority of marketers will get the answer wrong.
In the world of email list building, bigger isn’t always better.
You have to go smaller.
Doing your homework in advance and finding a highly specialized market will serve you greatly in the long run. Then, targeting these individuals by understanding their needs and problems, speaking to them and offering a 100 percent customized solution will help you be much more successful than attempting to address a broad audience or promote a generic product.
Sounds easy, right?
The truth, however, is that this aspect of email list building is the most crucial and for many can be the most challenging one.
What does it take to do effective niche research? Pure luck won’t cut it here. Every choice you make needs to be 100 percent strategic.
Here is the first video (one part in a series, so watch all 3 videos!) where I teach this method and show you step by step how to do effective niche research.
If you'd prefer to listen to this content from the video above, play it or download it from the podcast episode below.
How Starting with a Product will Limit You
Do you think that you have the perfect product idea in mind? Do you think that you can monetize this idea effortlessly? Think again!
Starting with a product and trying to find the niche will result in failure nine out of 10 times. Why? It’s a high risk strategy that involves a lot of guesswork and without a captive audience you will have no one to sell to.
You’ll have to guess what kinds of people have a need for the particular product. You’ll also have to guess about their pressing problems that the product will (eventually) solve. You’ll have to guess what tone and writing style will enable you to reach these people.
Starting to see how this much guesswork will jeopardize the effectiveness of your strategy? That’s the road to choose if you have time and money to waste. But you don’t, so be sure to follow the steps outlined here first and you will save both time and money!
Start with the Audience
When you first come to think about it, this approach may appear anything but logical. Yet, you’ll get a lot of information by starting with the audience:
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Who are these people, what do they do and what are they interested in?
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You’ll acquaint yourself with their biggest problem.
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You’ll learn a bit more about their demographics and psychographics.
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You’ll learn what kinds of content and what messages these people respond to.
Finding the Right Audience: The Steps
Ok, it’s clear – starting from the back and moving towards product creation will give you all information that you need to succeed. Let us move on to the practical aspect of it – how do you do that?
Step 1 – Identify a large potential market: it has to be a big audience with a particular problem. You could, for example, begin with people that want to make extra money. That’s a big niche that will maintain its popularity in the years to come.
Step 2 – Narrow it down: making extra money is a very broad niche. To make your message effective, you’ll need to narrow it down. Keyword research or going through the Amazon list of best-selling books in the field will help you find a smaller niche. It could be, for example, people that want to earn more money by doing freelance work online.
Step 3 – Make it even narrower: the more you narrow down the market, the easier it will be to address these people. Be specific. Target people who’re tired of their 9 to 5 job and want to launch their own services business online as a freelance designer.
These are dynamic, ambitious and skilled individuals that have a particular goal of earning income doing freelance jobs and that want to know how to get there. Bingo!
There it is – you have your audience, they have a pressing need, you are aware of these people’s emotions and where they are in their life which helps you understand the best way to address them.
Remember, targeting a wide audience (people wanting to make money, for example) will give you a bigger exposure (who doesn't want to make more money) but the return on your efforts is going to be insignificant and the competition will be massive. Your message will get lost in the 'noise'.
That’s why you need to dig into the niche, make it specific and ignore everybody else. This allows your message to stand out in the crowd!
Finally, remember to stay focused in niches that you’re passionate about. Being successful will require hard work, patience and time. If you don’t love what you’re doing, chances are that you’ll lack the motivation and persistence needed to make it through the ups and downs of niche email list buildng.
Watch this video to understand more about this last point because it is indeed the 'make or break' idea here:
If you'd prefer to listen to this content from the video above, play it or download it from the podcast episode below.