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I’m going to show you how understanding, finding and engaging your target audience online sent me 6,643 unique visitors and $5,826.80 in less than 2 months…
Without spending a penny.
If you can live where your audience lives and see what they see, you can leverage that to drive insane traffic to your site.
Check out all the income reports to see how things have grown since I wrote this post.
If you rely on SEO and rankings to drive traffic and earn money online from affiliate clicks your leaving a lot of money on the table.
Not only that but purely relying on SEO to provide an income and pay the bills carries its own risks as many webmasters have learnt the hard way in recent times.
I find that a lot of people are so focused and obsessed with SEO and link building!
They forget about all of the other ways you can generate traffic online at no cost with less stress.
As you can see in the graph on the right, search engines sent just 10% of the total traffic to my site and that was with no effort on my part.
What Will I Learn?
It really is quite easy to do regardless of your target market or niche.
It can be broken down step by step as-
The first thing you need to do is define who your target audience actually are.
Do you know what makes them tick?
What type of questions might they be asking when they arrive on your site and does it answer them?
For example I recently did some work with an Optician’s website. The design of the site placed white text on a big picture back drop, it was very difficult to read.
As an Optician you would have expected them to realise the site needed to be accessible and easy to read.
But that wasn’t the case and is a great example of someone that didn’t fully understand their target audience.
When I was thinking about setting up this blog I wondered what type of people may benefit from the content I create. Obviously it’s pretty much anyone with a website but you can dig deeper than that-
Each one of those types of audience has different priority’s. The hobbyist SEO has a full time job and a stable income with limited time where as the full time SEO rely’s on the performance of their SEO campaigns to bring home the bacon.
Then you may have affiliate marketers and local businesses who know nothing about SEO but want to integrate it into their strategy.
Understanding your audience and different types of people in your audience is essential.
I realised that my audience needed content that was easy to understand regardless of experience but without compromising on how much meat was on the bone.
If you run a health website you may have people that are just seeking out information or looking for immediate treatment. Defining those different audiences is important.
Once you have defined your target audience you need to understand them. Really find out what makes them tick. Why are they looking for information online in the first place? What questions or concerns might that person have associated with a specific keyword as they look at your site?
Does your site address all of those concerns? If you compare your site against the top 10 results in Google does it really offer the best value, can you honestly say your page is the ultimate page on the subject period?
Continuing with the Optician story – they also hadn’t fully thought about what types of questions a potential customer might have such as-
So when a potential customer landed on the site they didn’t really find the answers they were looking for. Granted they were looking for an Optician, which they found.
But it didn’t address key questions of the target audience and even if it did there was a good chance they couldn’t read it anyway.
As a successful online marketer at a number of levels throughout my career and ultimately working as an affiliate marketer for myself, I have a good understanding of my audience.
All you have to do is browse around relevant blogs & forums for an afternoon and you will see the same things that will help you understand your audience.
I took the time to understand my audience before I created any content. As I went through I made a list of key concerns / problems / worry’s that peoples had with SEO and online marketing.
Over time they became a list of post ideas that directly address the key questions & issues my target audience face – issues that I knew how to solve and did so on a daily basis in my own SEO activity’s.
Every piece of content I produce has to address all of those questions and concerns to ensure I engage the audience correctly.
If it doesn’t – you might lose them forever.
So how do you go about finding your target audience online? Where do they hang out?
Finding out where they live online is pretty easy and there are a number of tools at our disposal for this.
Since I first wrote this post I have started to use BuzzBundle to find and engage my audience online.
It is an amazing piece of software that I’m using exclusively to grow traffic to the blog.
All you do is enter a range of keywords/phrases to monitor and BuzzBundle will find all of the relevant forum posts, blog posts, tweets, yahoo answers and more!
To get involved in the conversation all you have to do is click reply and type your message. BuzzBundle automatically takes care of any account registration if necessary.
It really is a great tool and I highly recommend it!
I also use it to monitor related terms for previously published content and anytime BuzzBundle picks up a relevant match I can direct people to my content directly!
One of the best places to engage your target audience is at popular forums and there are 3 different websites you can use to find them.
Boardreader makes it really easy to find your target audience and help you to understand them at the same time.
All you have to do is enter a keyword and click search, it will return a list of forum threads discussing your keyword. In the example below I did a search for link building-
This is just a snippet of the results but straight away I can see a few opportunity’s to understand and engage my target audience.
I can jump in to understands peoples views on using RSS for link building and then join in the conversation – perhaps I might engage everyone in that thread with a follow up post or tutorial on the subject?
There is also a challenge thread for really useful link building tips. The post states how they are fed up of seeing the same tips over and over (understanding) and want to see something new (engagement opportunity).
I’m pretty sure I can engage that with any one of my tutorials.
So in just 2 threads I have learnt a lot about my target audience, what problems they face, what they want to see and can engage them directly on the subject at hand.
Its win, win, win, win from where I’m standing.
Omgili is like BoardReader but offers up a different set of results.
It also returns a list of related message boards & forums giving you even more opportunity’s to find, understand and engage your target audience.
Again you can see there are lots of opportunity’s for me to find out what makes my audience tick.
As well as forums you can look at other corners of the web to locate your audience.
Twitter Search
Twitter is also a great way to find your audience online. Carrying on with the link building theme search-
Although no one is really asking a question there are lots of links to related articles where I can engage my audience. Perhaps leave a comment on the blog and put my side of the argument across.
I have shown you how to set up Google Alerts before, so I wont bore you with the particulars.
But you can setup a number of alerts for your target audience and build up an inbox of alerts jam packed with places your target audience hang out online.
It takes about 10 seconds to setup an alert so you really have no excuse!
Engaging your target audience is easy and I’ve already mentioned a few ways to do it throughout this article but in summary you can-
It might sound like the same old advice but many people don’t realise how powerful this is and fail to put in the work to directly engage their audience online.
If you are going to get involved with the conversion ensure that anything you post offers genuine value not only to the people reading it but the wider community as a whole.
Quick 2 sentence answers rarely offer any value to anyone and I’ve already learnt my target audience are fed up of seeing the same tips over and over.
It is the engagement in these communitys that will truly reflect on you and your brand – so take time to write posts that help.
Engaging your audience like this has a huge number of benefits. First of all you break away from the mentality of getting people on and off your site via an affiliate link as quickly as possible.
Your site and brand starts to become something that offers key value to your target audience. This has a snowball effect overtime as people begin to relate and build trust with you.
It is important to build that level of trust with your target audience above anything else.
If you focus on creating something that is genuinely helpful and useful you won’t even have to try and sell anything to generate profit.
This blog is living proof of that and has over a 50% audience retention rate and 1 in 5 visitors shares an article via social media.
All I have done is identify & understand my target audience and given them what they want.
First of all you must take the time to identify and understand your target audience. Take time to think about that properly before doing anything else.
Once you have done that (no cheating) you should compile a list of places they hang out.
For example I went and built a list of website & SEO related forums along with how many members, threads and post they each had.
Once you have that list you can go out and start directly engaging with your audience constantly refining your understanding of them.
The benefit of understanding your audience will shine through the next time you create a piece of content to address key problems your audience face. It really is a circle of bliss.
Remember to engage them in the right way and provide genuine help and advice to solve their problems.
It certainly beats leaving all of your eggs in Google’s basket!
234 Responses
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Hi MatthewSound advice, as usual. The part of offering genuine value to our followers is very true! It builds trust & LOYALTY! I am sharing the result of your advice, & adding the results for all those following you to know that what “you sow, you reap” eventually! it is worth the effort.On English QUORA (SAM RAY), I have clocked 30,000 in 2 months, & on French QUORA, almost 17,000 in half the time.As soon as I hit my 50,000 mark, I’m returning back to you to “lead me by the hand, down the path to Monetization”!
Hey Sammy, sounds like you are busy hustling!
Thanks and I hope you can put what you have learnt to good use
Awesome write up. Thanks for sharing..
No problem 🙂
I love your stuff! I am wondering what is the point when you start getting sales?I have a new blog, good content, get 20 visitors a day, but struggling to make sales.
You should be focused on building your email list not your sales
Hi matthew ..you wrote really amazing content which is really helpful…you explained about target audience clearly.Thanks for sharing …
Hi Harish, thanks for the comments
I don’t normally comment on blogs (accept for link building 😉 ) But your blog is a gold mine and I’ve genuinely learnt so much. Thanks Matt!
No problem, please come back 🙂
It is valuable post but do you think its very easy for a single person to write content. Even posting a single post takes too much time if you also have to interlink on site articles , put images and have to share on social media?
Yes if you work hard enough!
Thanks for this. Actionable steps for us SEOs to follow.
No problem David!
Thanks Mathew what an amazing read. Do you use any writing services like iWriter to quickly and cheaply write on forums etc. If so have you had any success with it. I am trying to work out a way to do this in a tight timescale.
No I havent sorry
Thanks for this awesome information. I was surely neglecting the comments in my old blog which was surely a mistake. This time i am not gonna do that mistake again. Thanks again
Those are your most engaged readers
don’t get me wrong matthew but your blog has not really an value for the useres, it is really amazing how you can lure so much peopel to read your bulshit….. how ever good luck in gaining money…..
It’s funny that people always post hate anonymously
No problem Ucuz!
More than amazing and reliable post . I was looking for this kind of stuff from last one or two weeks finally I get it , thanks again for the great info ,I personally share it with my friends and request other to share it, so many people can take benefit from it
Thanks for sharing Jessica 🙂
Brilliant post Matthew, I’ve been following you for about a year now and always love the practical advice you give, just like you im fed up of recycled content you see all around the web, but you sir think out of the box!
Thanks George 🙂 I try my best 🙂
you are the best.I did this and I am receiving traffic freeeeeeI teach English .I found were people are gathered more and created a new discussion titled as” learning English in three months” there I write something helpful for people and then lead them to my site for more info.any way you are the best.you have save a lot of money for me.thank youuuuu
Awesome that is great to hear, I am glad you are finding success!
thanks–I went through this carefully and noted some points to try. I guess in one blog or website one should focus on only one theme? not have many miscellaneous aspects? For instance if I am posting on writing, books, cats, religion and spirituality, each should be separate? Or as an author with multiple interests they can all be together?By nature I like to be silent and invisible–will have to change!
I would focus on one niche only
Very nice article. Learning a lot from your articles. Thumbs Up.
Thanks Hitesh 🙂
Great write-up! Sounds like quite simply what you’re talking about in your article is social marketing. Simply taking the time to actually understand, connect and engage with your audience. Yes, this is a slower more hands-on marketing strategy that most marketers are not used to doing. BUT, although it is slower upfront, it can actually bring you larger and more accelerated returns down the road. Like you said, “It really is a circle of bliss.”
Can’t argue with that =D
Great post Matthew! I particularly liked the boardreader and omgili tips you gave. One thing I’m really confused about is how I can apply your above strategies to my health blog. I focus mainly on treatments and I find it’s a pretty dry subject… Should i just start answering questions in the form of posts? Any tips you can provide on that would be much appreciated!
Yes just provide help and advice when people are asking questions about your niche
Matthew, you have a lot of info here and it is true; so many people are just hungry for backlinks and it is stressful trying to figure out what is around the corners in regards to the search engines. The search engines just want you to pay for traffic, that is their business. My business is trench shoring, very small group.
That is very true indeed and there is so much more to internet marketing than search engines 🙂
Informative article! Thanks for the useful tips for target audience online! Gotta share this to my fellow readers and friends!
No problem Mdu 🙂
Hi Matt,I work for an SEO agency and we also run an e-commerce site. We’ve been looking for ways to find and engage with our target audiences and this article has been a great help! Boardreader and Omgili are two really useful resources I wouldn’t have found if it weren’t for your advice.
No problem David, happy to be of service 🙂
Hi Matt,Such an extremely helpful article for newbie like myself. Thank you!
No problem Rachma 🙂
Hello Matt, Another excellent post. You always deliver worthful insights to your readers. I was not knowing about Omgili and Boardreader. Thanks for sharing the information.
No problem Mahesh 🙂
Great artikle. Thanks. I am always confused about the length and every SEO person in my team has different opinion about the post length.
Which ever post length communicates the point/helps people is the right post length
Great stuff,Matthew! I personally like using Omgili Thank you for sharing.
Thanks 🙂
Hey Matthew,I am really thankful for your detailed information of getting targeted traffic. But I must say that it is not really easy to drive traffic from forums like v7n and webmasters as they have strict guidelines. Can you provide us another list of a forum with relaxing guidelines?Thanks
Most forums are tight on this kind of thing which is why its important you provide huge value to the community to the point where banning you would be detrimental.Most people aren’t willing to provide that kind of value upfront and as such, find themselves banned very quickly.
I didn’t know about Boardreader and Omgili, will see how they can help. I’m in Africa btw….and I’ve downloaded the zip file, thanks for the free traffic building resources.
Hi Metthew,You are awesome. You have shared some great resources to generate traffic and understand target audience. I learnt many things from here. I have shared and downloaded the list. Keep writing
I can’t believe I am still finding these blog posts from 3 years ago. Oh, wait you led me here…Nice job.I’m curious about changing the date on the blog post. Any Google relevance?
I don’t change the dates on posts but the date you see on the post itself is the date it was last updated rather than the date it was first published and I feel that is more relevant.
Hey,I think I underestimate the power of social engagement on forums. I just have one concern though. How can I give back useful advice when I’m just starting out myself? I might know more than a complete newbie that hasn’t ever looked into my niche (making money online) but then again there’s millions of other that have tons more experience then me, such as yourself?Do I just join conversations and when the opportunity rises I add valuable comments when I can?Or should I study and learn a bit more before joining these forums?Great read by the way,Esteban
Well the point is you do know some things that others don’t, that doesn’t matter if you started internet marketing 1 day ago or 15 years ago. The fact will remain that you know some stuff that other people don’t and other people know stuff you don’t.So don’t worry about that, just help people where you can!
I had the exact same issue to begin with so I learnt something and taught it. I now started a new blog and will be sharing my experiences there. 🙂
Hi Matt, These are pretty simple techniques to target the audience. You have offered a list of resources to find the target audience. Here I have one question in my mind. It is not possible for everyone to follow all the resources at one time. So, we should focus on 2 or 3 resources or givie equal time to all of them? What are resources that you follow generally in this list?It was another awesome post. Thanks for posting,
Push hard on all of them, then use Google Analytics to measure which source is offering you the best time investment
Hi Matthew,Directly from my inbox to your blog post!Really inspiring post! Success never comes without effort.All we need is to engage audience by providing valuable content.Thanks for sharing boardreader!!Have a nice day!
Thanks Minhaj!
Hi Matthew,This is well-timed article, right now I fell deadlock, stress with SEO and this article is an escape route. In your article the main traffic and your income come from forum and twitter beside forum and twitter could you share another way to generate target visitor?
Mosts post on this blog ar about that 🙂
I am trying to read your blog on my phone and there is a very annoying share tabs top of screen which always blocking my reading as I scroll. Place it at the base of page or side of page or at least if it’s going to be at the top of page make it stable so it not bounce up and down directly infront of where I’m trying to read. it’s a really big turn off trying to read and continually being visually blocked of the content, including desperately want to close the page down but I like the content which is keeping me here. May be for me the solution is to not read this site on mobile devices. Because I really do like the content.
Can you let me know what device and browser you are using please?
Incredible stuff Matt! Always assumed that the feat of Self-Resurrection would never be repeated. Turns out dead people just aren’t dedicated enough…
Thank You!I’m declaring right now that I will use this exact formula to do exactly what you have done (for a different niche, of course). Spending time researching the market, then finding places that engage them…What a concept. I’m will also be using some of your other methods (Wikipedia links, PBN’s, etc) concurrently in order to absolutely take ownership of my market. PS-This method seems like an ideal way for e-commerce sites to gain significant traction as well.
I wish you all of the luck Sean 🙂
Matt, Your articles are purely motivational. They make me free “if someone can do all these great work, then I can try them out too”Great tips that will boost my internet marketing drive. Thanks a lot!
Anyone can do anything any other human has done if they dedicate themselves
Great article, Matthew! I always wonder, how different the SEO tools are regarding the UK / US and Germany. It’s always nice to find advice on your website!Cheers
Well I have no experience in the German market personally =/
I agree with both statements and the way I go around the “less popular niche” before entering it would be to determine the market size and the commission amount. If the market is small but the commissions from sales are significantly large, then i would potentially get involved. It all has to do with the ROI and work involved.Hope that made sense and was a valuable contribution.
Is the list zipped? Do I need to pay for win zip to download the file or is there a way to unzip the file for free?
Just use WinRar
I’m a huge fan of Buzzbundle. I use it for all kinds of stuff including brand building, rep management, and outreach. Definitely a great tool to have in the tool box.Great post Matt!
It sure is!
Hi MattGreat post. I had a question. How much content ( posts/articles, video, text) should I produce before I go live with my blog. I know from helping produce other websites after we did the research we would publish all the basic content before we went live. What are your suggestions with how much content to produce first?
Have 10 solid pieces of content in place when you go live
Matt, Really a great article. You have proved it “Old is Gold”.I really like the way to use Forums and other tools to target your audience. 🙂
As with any business, get the basics/foundations right and the rest takes care of itself
Ok, Matthew.. you’ve convinced me.. I’ve been neglecting forums for such a long time, but now I’m going to give this strategy a shot!Huge thanks for the tips and tools!
No worrys 🙂
Matt,You are one of my favorite reads, sir. The super interesting part is that you built this blog using purely white hat hustle on a brand new domain(not optimized for anything other than your name), but established it with tutorials for black hat/grey hat tools.Nothing wrong with that…the great G is not exactly a lawmaking body, and needs to be slapped back a bit, I’d say. It’s sad to me that this page doesn’t have as much traction as your others, but such is life, I suppose. Still, I’m glad you built this the way that you built it; and freely demonstrate how successful it is every month. I’m also a big fan of how you rebooted your email captures. Looking pretty sweet. Keep it up, man. 🙂
Thanks 🙂 It was an interesting experiment!
Hi, Well Matt, in your video you did say something about replying to tweets. As a newbie affiliate marketer I have tried that and got my twitter account suspended more than once (although I did get a sale). So how do you remove that limitation with Buzz Bundle? Also, how do I find the keywords for buzz bundle for a product I am trying to market. Google keyword planner keywords keep turning up other competitors?Thanks Matt for the great work you are doing, hope for efforts and implementing them will make me richer by the day even though I am just starting out!
I guess every time you replied you were promotiony/pushing people to your site?
5 for 5 Matthew another golden nugget post.I have some serious research to do. I’m not really in the SEO niche but have had some good luck with video SEO and rankings.
Thanks 🙂 Good luck!
Thank you for writing this great post. Now i have direction to work upon. I too feel that without understanding your target audience it’s not possible to project the best of YOU as well.
Glad to be of service!
Hi Matt: can/should this strategy be used on a e-com site?
Yeah it should 🙂 Blog to hook/engage people then reel them into the ecommerce!