1: Identify Your Audience
Who do you want to talk to? Describing a person isn’t the answer. If you want to talk to women with a particular credit score, income, or education level, that would be considered a specific “demographic”. But for most products and services, the audience is much broader than race, sex, or education. The simple way to identify your audience is by figuring out what someone will search for when they find you. Keyword searches are the most common type of search on Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
Someone will open a search engine and search for the keyword phrase “how to meditate“. If you teach meditation, you should pay Google to show your site at the top of the search results when someone searches that keyword. That will bring targeted traffic to your site. You have identified some of your audience. Without knowing who they are, how much money they make, or anything else. The only thing you know about them so far is that they searched for your product or something related to it, in this example, “how to meditate”.
2: Identify 100 questions they are asking on Google/YouTube
Now that you understand how to identify your audience, you should identify as many of them as possible. Go into Google and search for your main keyboard- “how to meditate”- and you will see Google also suggests other searches under “people also search for”. Those terms are all searched by your target audience. You should write them all down in a word document. Those are all keyword phrases that will help you target your audience with keywords search advertising.
There are other ways to identify the keywords that your audience is typing into Google before finding you. Do you have big competitors? Go to your competitors’ websites. There are several tools online that will help you determine what keywords your competitors are searching for or bidding for online. But just looking at your competitors’ websites will give you good ideas. Look at the site titles, the article’s headings, and topics. Look at the way the site is structured. The keywords that they want to rank on Google for will be prominent throughout the website. You should copy these onto your document. If you are competing with someone for the same audience and product, you certainly want to compete for those keywords.
3: Create content answering their specific questions
If your primary keyword is “how to meditate“, you should have articles, videos, and FAQs about “how to meditate“. Any other keywords that you have should be associated with content on your website. Perhaps you could create a meditation guide. Put a form on your website to give you their name and email address in exchange for an MP3 download of an audio meditation guide. Or have a video or audio library on your website where your audience can come to your website and do guided meditations using your content. Educational content is crucial to rank on Google. Google wants to see that you are an authority on your topic for business. They will not drive traffic to a website that is misguiding their customers or searchers.
Make sure that your content is directly related to the keywords that were ‘searched’. In other words, if they searched the keyword “how to meditate”, but your website is all about the camp where they can go to meditate, google will recognize your audience’s behavior and stop driving traffic to your site. The audience will react well to the relevant content. They will only spend 1.5 seconds on a website that does not show them what they searched.
Google tracks their searchers to see what their behavior is after they go to your site. If somebody searches how to meditate and then spends 25 or 30 minutes looking through your site, reading different articles, and looking at other pages throughout your site, Google recognizes that they found what they were looking for on your website. That is how to rank higher on googles page organically without paying. Google drives more traffic to your website if it perceives that you are offering value for that search keyword.
4: Advertise your content using keywords on google
Advertise your content using the keyword advertising tool on Google called “Adwords“. If you’ve written an article called “how to meditate“ and have a sign-up form for your product or service at the end of the article, you can advertise on Google for the specific keyword. When somebody searches that term, they will see your advertisement and have the opportunity to go to your page, sign up for your newsletter or product, and look at your content. The best way to be successful with keyword advertising is to start with your content. You should have content first and then read through your content to determine your keywords. That is how to make relevant keyword advertising campaigns. You can start with keywords, but you have to write highly focused and relevant content related to those keywords.
The best way to get traffic on Google and YouTube is by answering specific questions that your audience is asking. A YouTube video should be titled “how to meditate”. A blog post should be titled “how to meditate“, if your product is a class about how to meditate. You should advertise for specific keywords like “meditation classes”, “meditation courses“, or “meditation coaches“. That will ensure that the people finding your website are looking for your classes and not for free educational content.
If you’re selling them a course, you should get them there with the promise to sell them education. Not by promising to give them information. You should have information on your website that is highly relevant to the search. If you are going to pay for advertising for a class, don’t waste money advertising to people who don’t want to buy a class.
5: Link to related influencers and websites
Google already knows who your competition is. They know who is the authority on your topics. If you create links within your website that will go to those websites and offer value to your customers, Google sees that, and they will know that you are related to those websites or at least that you are connected. That will help Google identify who you are and group you in with people already in authority on your topic.
Not everybody who posts content about meditation will be your direct competitor for a class. They may have meditation videos that are not for sale. So it can offer some value to your audience competing for your customer. However, having meditation videos on YouTube is a great way to get subscribers and watch hours on YouTube. Suppose you have good long videos for meditating on YouTube. People who will sit there and watch your content for hours that will help you to get your subscribers and watch hours to the required limit for monetization. Beyond that, you will have the subscribers watch your videos and make money with ad revenue on YouTube.
6: Write “guest posts” for other content creators in your field
If you have great articles about your topic, offer to write articles on a website related to your topic. Most website creators are constantly looking for content to put on their website. Many of them will be happy to hear from you. Not only will you be offering great content for someone else’s website, but you’ll be able to include links and images for your website. That will drive traffic organically (that is for free) back to your website, where they will have the opportunity to sign up for your mailing list and purchase your product or service. Allow others to write guest posts for your website and link back to their site. These practices are very effective for Google’s organic search rankings. Without them, you won’t rank high on Google organically. You must demonstrate that you are an authority on your topic before Google starts showing you organically in the search results on the first page.
7: Post surveys, Quizzes, and a questionnaire about what challenges your audience is facing
Have you seen quizzes and questionnaires on Facebook or participated in surveys on the internet? Running your own quizzes and surveys will help you build unique data for your content, and help you build an your audience. Having real data will also build your authoritativeness across the web.
Suppose you quiz 100 customers and find that the answers are much different than you expected. That will help you to understand your audience better, advertise better, and provide more satisfying content to those customers. Furthermore, other websites will use your results as “case studies“ to help understand their audience.
8: Answer questions in Facebook groups, internet forums, and YouTube videos
Join Facebook groups and create your own. When people are searching or asking questions within those Facebook groups, they get hundreds of answers, and many people will spend hours going through those posts, reading the answers, and answering them themselves. When you answer questions and comments on Facebook, YouTube, and other blogs, you bring attention to yourself from people interested in the topic. Spend time answering questions across the internet to drive those readers back to your site.
Do not spam the comment section on people’s websites, YouTube, or Facebook groups. Mentioning your product, service, or your company’s name is generally not a violation in the comment section. Going through the comments and posts on Facebook and replying to 30 people with a URL of your site is spam. You will most likely get banned from that group and your comments deleted. That does you no good. Just answer the questions and mention your company. One question per post or one response per post is sufficient. Do not spam other people’s websites or customers. That will get you nowhere.
9: Drive traffic to a “landing page” to collect customer emails for newsletter and product launches.
This section examines how to capture your audience. Email advertising is imperative when building up your customers. Those customers don’t have to buy anything from you just to be your customer. You may be emailing them great content for months or years before they make a purchase. Most people want to know who you are before they make a purchase. It is crucial to build up your audience and communicate with them regularly.
Use your keyword research to drive your audience to a “landing page“. That landing page should have a sign-up form with an offer attached to it. “Enter your name and email and get our free report on how to meditate“. Once you’ve captured thousands of emails, you can send out an email to everyone simultaneously. An email could say, “get my new book about how to meditate”. When sending emails to a large audience, you can rely on the “law of averages”. If you send relevant offers to interested audiences, a certain percentage of your audience will purchase your product or subscribe to your service. Having a list of thousands of interested customers is extremely powerful and profitable. So drive traffic to your landing page and collect email addresses and names for your list.
Build your list! Perhaps you’ve heard that before. It is a vast topic. Do your research and educate yourself about how to build a list for your product or service. There are a million ways to build a list. Creating a landing page and driving traffic to that page are among the most basic and effective ways to build an impressive list of customers interested in your product or service. Not only that, but that specific list knows who you are, so when you ask them to buy something, they already know who you are, and it’s not a stranger just sending them junk mail.
10. Create an “Information product” (like an e-book) or “video course” to sell to your audience
Sell “information products” or give them away in exchange for email sign-ups. Having good information products will help people be able to identify you in the future. When they’ve learned something valuable from you, they will go to you for education or guidance in the future. Google will see that their searchers view you as an authority because they go to you for answers to the questions.
To establish your dominance and attract your customers, you should create information products like e-books and video courses. Not to mention the sales income from selling 1000s of copies of your e-book over time for five dollars each. All you have to do is write the e-book once, and it doesn’t cost you anything to produce the e-book repeatedly as a PDF and send it to anybody who signs up or pays five dollars.
Some people sell their e-book for $.99 once they get enough traffic. You’re generating a decent income if you’re selling an e-book 10,000 copies per month for $.99. If your topic has enough search volume, 10,000 visitors per month is a low number. As a rule, if you want to generate 10,000 buyers per month, you probably need 200,000 visitors per month (that’s a lot). That’s about 5% which is what a high converting website will get, and 5% of your audience will buy from you. The other 95% will go back to the search results and move on.
5% is a high conversion rate. You are more likely to be around 3%. Consider that when paying for traffic. Is it worth paying for 100 page views to get three sales or even five? Will you get your money back if three visitors out of 100 sign up? These are essential questions to ask yourself when setting a budget for advertising and setting a price for your product. If you cannot collect a high enough price or if advertising is too expensive, it would be helpful to know that before you spend a bunch of money on it.
11. Create a “podcast” and send reminders to your audience before it airs each (day or week)
Offering great value in the form of a podcast is hard work but it’s among the best ways to build an audience. Certain people will listen to you every single time you have a podcast. But in general, you will have new visitors every time you do a podcast also. Collect their information and add them to your list. Your podcast should be specifically tailored to keyword searches. A podcast topic should be a high-volume search topic across the web. “Google trends“ will help you understand what people are searching for and in what volume.
Choose your podcast and blog, and video topics based on what people are searching for the most. If you create the best content in the world and nobody searches for it, you will make zero dollars, and no one will see it. Post a recording of your podcast on YouTube every time you do it to create YouTube content, get watch hours, and possibly create subscribers on YouTube. In addition to that, somebody might listen to a podcast recording and then search their favorite casting app to attend your podcast live the next time you have one. There are many reasons to post a podcast recording on YouTube immediately after the podcast has ended.
Learn more
I sincerely hope this article has offered some new information or ideas that you have not heard before. The topic of building a list or building an audience has been widely written about in blogs and talked about in videos. We put the information here for you as a guide. You don’t have to search all over the internet for this information. You could write about the topic of each section of this blog post in a million different ways. It’s essential to research and educate yourself on each method and section of this blog, not moving forward with a basic understanding but developing a deep understanding of what you’re doing and how these principles work to build up your business. Visit our coaching page to learn more about how we can help you build your audience.