Do you always wait for people to visit your blog? 
Is that the best way to build a successful blog?
Many of you have purposed in your hearts to find your audience and thrill them with your awesome, life-changing content. Good.
Decision is the easy part.
Taking a step is somewhat difficult.
You may have tried your possible best to reach your ideal audience, but the results you’re getting aren’t encouraging in any way.
The harsh truth is that you’ve been taking the wrong approach to finding those who are hungry for a piece of your knowledge.
This post is going to eliminate all of that, and nudge you in the right direction. Your audience is somewhere, waiting for you.
Of course, your target audience may switch over to another blog in order to get their needs met, but the way you’d have solved their problems will leave a lasting value in their lives.
That’s the major reason why you should be motivated to impact your world. Your content is what they need.
Your podcast would invoke their creative spirits, and your videos would release an insight into their unique abilities.
Are you determined to find your audience? If yes, here are the 10 unknown places/ideas to get you started:
1). Get inside your audience
You can get inside your audience through their demographic status.
And to begin this process, you have to look towards your competitors. You know the top websites in your niche that have the same audience you’re seeking to attract.
This is the time to complement what your rivals are doing, instead of trying to beat them. The web is a connected sphere, where only those who are willing to give more, gets much more in return.
Your competitors have your audience already. All you’ve to do is look through their shoulder and leverage their years of hard work. How do you achieve that?
Start by spying your competitors’ website/blog to determine the demographic state of their loyal readers. I’m talking about the age, location, sex and income statistics.
There are many free and premium tools to easily extract the data, but I personally prefer quantcast.com. Examine the screenshot below closely:
I used copyblogger.com because they’ve the type of audience I want to reach – content marketers and small/mid-sized business owners.
Just sign up free at Quantcast, typed their website address into the search box and pushed. Within 2 seconds, I discovered they had 207.3k US unique visitors monthly.
And out to these people, 53% are females while 47% are male. 25% of both male and female are 25 – 34 years old, while the remaining six audience segments shares 75%.
What does this data mean to you? Simple: when you write content, you’ve to narrow it down to the age bracket of the exact audience you intend to reach and their respective gender and income brackets.
If you’re going to write guest posts that would be received with open arms, get a lot of social shares and citations around the web, you need to get inside the audience first, by knowing their demographic relation.
2). Get into relationship economy
Like I said earlier, you’ve to give to get. You’re no longer looking for your audience, because you already knew their demographic relation. The only work required to inspire them is to get into a relationship economy.
According to Carol Lynn Rivera, you need to first become more effective in promoting other people’s content so you can be more effective in promoting yours.
No matter the value you provide, you need to allot special time to read what your competitors are creating, and share it. Don’t be scared of shooting at your own feet.
Get to know influencers and their blogs. Tweet their posts, and cite them when you write a post.
Leave genuine comments that truly send a message of your love and commitment to the blogger’s growth. Eventually, your kind gestures would be appreciated and reciprocated.
3). Find key influencers on twitter
In every niche, you’ve key influencers rocking in and doing what they know best. When you want to reach a wider audience by leveraging their huge followership and authority on twitter, it’s important you uncover influencers and follow them.
But the problem is how to find them. Unless you’ve a list of key influencers on twitter, it’d be extremely difficult to know who they are. You can search Google and read up a few posts on the topic, but the best way to easily locate a true influencer is through Topsy.com
It’s simple. Just visit Topsy.com > click the influencers tab > input your primary keyword into the search box and dig in. Instantly, you’ll discover experts with tens of thousands of twitter followers.
And best of all, these experts are active, and can gladly share your valuable post or product with their raving followers – your audience.
4). Reverse-engineer your followers
I started blogging in 2011 and ever since, it’s been a journey of few good successes and many failures.
Yes, I’ve failed countless times on my quest to build an audience that remains loyal to my brand.
But the beauty of it is that social media has helped me to find my true audience and multiply that effort beyond my imaginations.
When you’re marketing on twitter, your goal isn’t just to reach your followers and get them to tweet your content. No, you’re only doing a half job. You can reach the people following your followers.
According to Adam Connell, when you share your post on social media, tag popular brands or the people you follow within your status update.
If that doesn’t prompt them to retweet your post, kindly ask them to share your content – of course they’d do it if you’ve said some nice things about them.
5). Your About-Me Page
If you’re a solo entrepreneur, then your “About me” page is very important. It’s a special page where you tell your story, with a deep affection. The story you tell on this page should be true, and undiluted.
Have you ever checked your most referring pages in Google Analytics?
I did and found the potentials of building a targeted list of loyal audience through this page.
So I did.
I did set up a new autoresponder, added an opt-in box to my “about” page and barely 3 days I’ve gotten 30 subscribers already.
These subscribers are yielded to me, because they chose to accept my style, after reading my story and getting emotionally soaked in. You should do the same thing if you’re searching for your most reverend audience. Put your ‘about’ page to good use today.
6). Google Analytics data
How often do you study your analytics to determine the caliber of people visiting your blog?
It could be possible that you’ve not been speaking to them directly with your message. For instance, if your target audience are mostly female, but you write with manly tone, do you think you can easily persuade and disciple your audience?
Your referring and exit pages are also very essential, when you want to understand what people seeks out first, and why the left without saying hi.
From henceforth, start studying your Google Analytics. Don’t be overly engrossed with the number of unique visitors your website is getting per day. No matter how big or small it is, it’s a waste if your content is not useful for them.
7). Interupt Pop-under survey
In line with studying your analytics to understand what’s really going on with your audience, you should start using surveys to extract important data. Mike King gives a unique tip of how to get the best out of surveys.
By the way, you can use survey monkey (site) to set up quick questionnaire that would be easily answered by your readers.
Ideally, you should use this survey to interrupt what people are reading in a creative way. How? When people are reading your posts, at the middle of the content when the heat is on, a survey should appear asking the reader what s/he thinks about the post.
What could be added to it? Is your problem solved with the post already or you need to read the entire post? Have your questions flow seamlessly with the content.
If you get a lot of people to fill this pop-out survey, you’ll be well-positioned to deliver better and more engaging content for them, instead of just writing to fill the schedule calendar.
8). New Affiliate networks
Do you think you’ve an idea worth sharing?
Is your idea worth paying for? Then it’s time to create an information product for your target audience. But this time around, you’re going to use new affiliate networks.
Why new?
The reason is because 87% of affiliates who join these networks to promote other people’s product are well-determined and energized to reach the potential buyers – your audience.
There are more valuable information online now, than before. So upcoming affiliates have amassed wealth of knowledge and are eager to explore the world. It’s a good move.
As you recruit army of affiliates to promote your products, create a high-converting landing page to build your list. You’ll be amazed by your audience’s response.
Don’t tell the story yet
Another simple way, yet unknown by millions of website owners to find your audience right now – don’t tell your story yet, and watch the reactions of your blog readers.
It’d shock you to the bone to know that most of your blog readers really don’t care about you or your story. They’re just there to hang out, maybe because they’ve free time to read your latest posts for ideas – but are not true disciples.
The simple trick to find out those who really matter is to hoard your powerful story, and ask people to show interest if they want to hear it.
You should include an opt-in box to specially collect leads and share your story; your idea or case study through an insider platform – email. Those who didn’t opt-in for your story may have their reasons; good reasons most times.
Don’t conclude that they’re not your true audience. Instead, ask them why they didn’t respond and what you should do to get your idea to them. After using this second strategy, you’ll be able to know who trusts you, and why they do.
Finally, forget those who don’t care about your story or asked for it. They’re not your audience. Don’t try to convince them to get on-board.
You’ll sabotage your success. Focus all your attention, love and usefulness on your audience and nurture them.
Branded T-Shirt Style
Recently, I started experimenting with branded t-shirts.
The flagship internet marketing conference held in my city last month.
I was a sponsor of the event and while meeting up with keynote speakers, an idea struck my mind.
What if I print my blog URL at both sides (front and back) of a colorful T-shirt and use it to attract the right audience.
Believe me, it was a great idea. We had over 600 attendees and when everyone was seated, they could clearly read the inscription on my T-shirt. I was sitting at the front seat.
The inscription o my shirt was, “learn how to write content? Then I had my website address. Believe me; I got 283 fresh and inspired visitors on my website that week and 202 joined my email list.
Have you thought of expanding your reach through offline marketing? If you’ve a marketing budget, I encourage you to brand t-shirts and give away. Just make sure you’ve a powerful call-to-action.
What next…?
There is no shortcut to finding your audience and captivating them with your inspiring story. You’ve got to be consistent and keep your eyes on Google trends, too.
But most importantly, work on your conversion because reaching thousands of fresh audience from the sources listed above wouldn’t do you any good, unless you convert them into paying customers.
Just recently, I watched Eben Pagan’s video and he said something very striking, “content is cash!”
If you are able to create useful and engaging content consistently, your audience would be persuaded to purchase it.
As usual, do you’ve any challenge engaging your audience after you’ve found them? Share your comment in the box below. See you at the top!