Lesson Tag: buying audience

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In this video I discuss:

• What a “buying audience” is and why it’s necessary when picking a niche
• Examples of niches that DON’T have a buying audience, and why that’s so dangerous
• Multiple examples of “buying” audiences, and rules-of-thumb for all niches
• How to make money in a buying audience every step of the way, NOT simply for the ultimate topic they’re researching
• A note about review-based websites and who should pursue them vs. who shouldn’t

Please direct all questions and requests for support to the FIMP Facebook group (free for registered members).

3.3 Transcript Below

Alright, let’s keep this train a-choo-chooin’!

I want to talk about now something incredibly important – and I know I’ve said that about a lot of things in this section – but there are really a lot of important things to cover in niche discovery and niche selection.

So what we’re going to talk about in this lesson in great detail is: What is a “buying audience”?

Now you may have heard of this before or something similar. And you may feel that you have a pretty good idea what this is. But just in case, make sure you watch all of these videos. It should be I think a fairly brief one compared to several of the other lessons in this section – certainly the last couple.

So first, of course, we want to talk about what a buying audience is. And a buying audience is a pretty simple concept overall. It’s not hard to understand. It’s not hard to comprehend or apply to your business. But it is absolutely detrimental if you do not catch it and you don’t think about it. I mean you could not think about it and get lucky at the niche selection stage – happens all the time which is awesome, right? But I want to really put a spotlight on it and make sure that you do not miss this because it really can be detrimental if you don’t catch this when you’re picking your niche.

So, a buying audience. The concept of a buying audience is basically… the people that are reading your articles come into your website, are they likely to make a purchase to answer the questions they have or the pain points that they’re facing?

So if someone comes to your website and they read your article where you’re addressing one of their pain points or you’re answering a question that they have, are they likely to make a purchase to help answer or to help solve that pain point? So we’ll talk about what this means more in depth in the rest of this video, but at its core, this is what this is.

And I can’t… again… just can’t emphasize how important it is that you kind grab a hold of this and you really keep it in mind any time you’re picking a niche. Because you can get traffic to a site… this is where I’ve said over and over again: if you get traffic to a site, you can turn that traffic into money. And you can turn that money into more money.

This is the exception – I’ve talked about how there are exceptions – if you’re not dealing with a buying audience, that is the exception.

So let’s talk a little bit more. Let’s dig in to what this all means and how to make sure you avoid this kind of pitfall in niche selection.

I know it may come off a little bit harsh, but freeloaders in this industry are, again, just detrimental. They will suck you dry and you’ll see your analytics numbers – your number of visitors – going up and up and up but your income would not increase with that if you’re dealing with a freeloading audience.

So there are a ton of niches out there where people will almost never make a purchase based on your content. I see people that say, “Oh I want to start a song lyric website.” Or “I want to start a website with a bunch of quotes or daily blurbs or daily inspiration.” “I want to start a recipe site.” All of these things are niches where people are looking to gorge on free information and then leave.

And if you think about this from your own perspective when you were browsing the web – when you were looking for these things – you were not in a mindset that you would make a purchase to satisfy, “What are those song lyrics? Oh, I’m going to buy the music sheet!” It just doesn’t work that way.

So again, if you think about where you are at… if you were looking up song lyrics or motivational quotes or motivational images or recipes… all of them are on an even keel level playing field. Those are all the exact same kind of site we want to avoid. Because again, they just attract a bunch of freeloaders.

So the reason these are so difficult to monetize is because they need colossal visitor numbers to be profitable. We’ve talked about this earlier in the training, too. The only way to really monetize these sites consistently at least is to put some ads on them.

So you would like install Google AdSense and then you’re maybe making 50 cents to a dollar per click. And again, you’re maybe getting one to three percent click through rate and that means you need hundreds of thousands – if not millions – of visitors to hit a full-time income… and that’s every month… to hit a full-time income in this industry.

So it’s much less likely just based on economics of this industry that there are going to be much fewer websites online with a ton of traffic and a lot more websites online with a modest amount of traffic – you know, somewhere between 500 and 1,000 visitors a day, maybe 5,000 visitors per day. That’s much more achievable than trying to get hundreds of thousands of visitors every single day.

So we’ll again really dig in to this when we dig into keyword research but just to introduce this concept now. So if it doesn’t really tie in to anything solid in your mind, don’t worry about it, we’ll get to it in a couple of sections. But the keywords you create content for on your site should be search terms that people use when trying to solve a pain point or answer a question that will ultimately result in a purchase.

So we’ll talk about some examples here.

If people were searching for terms related to “athlete’s foot”, they’re very likely looking to make a purchase to help solve that problem or ease that pain point. Sometimes multiple purchases. Same would be true if like “ringworm” which is… I guess not everybody knows… but ringworm is a type of fungus. It looks like a worm under the skin – that’s how it got its name – but it’s really just a patch of fungus on the skin. So, same thing.

“The best” pretty much anything. “The best vacuums”, “the best robot vacuums”, “the best supplements for working out” – pretty much “the best” anything, especially if you’re going to apply it to multiple kind of product categories within a niche. You know, “the best protein shake”, “the best weight gainer”, “the best pre-workout supplement”. So a lot of those are going to be keywords that you could write about and very likely be attracting purchasers. A lot of people that are looking for content like that are looking to make a purchase to answer that question or solve their pain point.

This versus that. Bagless versus bag vacuum cleaners. That’s someone that’s not super late in the buying cycle. That’s not someone as late in the buying cycle as someone searching a model number for a Dyson or reviews for a Dyson. So the keyword changes as someone goes through the buying cycle.

So at a really high level, they may be searching like “vacuum cleaners” or “vacuum cleaner comparisons”. And the deeper in the buying cycle that you catch them, the more purchase intent that they have and the more likely they are to convert to a commission through your site if you give them a really content.

So blank versus blank – whether comparing two different models – is about halfway through the buying cycle which is a good place to catch someone because you can carry them from there all of the way through the purchase if you have all of that authoritative and helpful content on your site.

But another example – getting even deeper in the buying cycle like I said – would be looking up a certain model number or looking up a model number plus the words “review”. That means somebody is probably getting really close. They’ve kind of pinpointed that product and they’ve said, “I really want to buy this. I just want to double-check some things.”

So any number of those make good search terms, because again, these people are looking to make a purchase to solve their current pain point.

Yeah, I just mentioned that product-related searches. I mentioned such and such review or the model number of something – pretty much anything that’s related to a product is probably someone that is looking to make a purchase or do a research but they’re just double-checking some things before they make that purchase.

Most problems are good search terms to pick and most of them are going to be looking… just generally speaking, if someone is facing a problem, they’re probably looking to make a purchase to answer their question that they’re facing with that problem or just flat out solve their pain point that is their problem.

So particularly private problems. The more private, the better. Because it’s less likely that they’re going to talk to their peers about it, post about it on social media – even seek medical help. People will oftentimes search online long before they do any of those things for private problems.

So even better, athlete’s foot is actually a decent example. Ringworm is another decent example that people aren’t going to post on Facebook like, “How do I get rid of ringworm?” or “Oh I got the athlete’s foot, how do I get rid of this? My feet burn!” People don’t post that on… well, some people might… but most people don’t post that on social media.

So they are kind of in an urgent situation a lot of the time when they’re searching for private problems specifically. But most problems – generally speaking – are really, really good keywords to pick.

And again, we’ll get really in depth with keyword research, but I want you to keep all of this in mind because this is what ties kind of your niche to a buying audience. It’s the keywords they’re using in between.

If you pick the wrong keywords… and again we’ll talk about this a lot when we start talking about keywords… if you pick the wrong keywords, you could get a lot of traffic and not make a whole lot of money. So that’s why I work digging into this so deeply.

So any hard to solve problem is a really good kind of search term to choose as well. And any emotionally-charged question or problem – something dealing with a relationship, something dealing with their dog or their beloved pet being in pain, or facing issues, or facing something complex and difficult – all of those are really, really good.

So kind of just tuck that away – you don’t need to memorize this list right now – I will probably reference it again when we get into the keywords training and picking good keywords, but I just want to talk to you right now about… all of these are – generally speaking – good terms for talking to a buying audience. And the more you talk to buying audiences, the more money you’re likely to make. So I just think that it’s impossible to teach this part well without talking about keywords even though keywords are a little bit further down the road.

So the other thing to realize is it’s not just a final solution. And what I mean that is you don’t just have to make money or write articles about the very last step. You know: the end result.

Like if someone is looking to renovate a house, that doesn’t mean that you have to sell them contracts or services to solve their problems. It’s important that you realize that because there’s a lot of opportunities in between where they are and their final solution that you could write content on and potentially make money on – make affiliate commissions on.

So you can solve several of their problems with tools and kind of ingenious workarounds kind of like if they’re looking to renovate something, you may be able to point them to a D.I.Y. solution or walk them through a do-it-yourself solution that would mitigate and completely solve their problem.

And maybe you recommend some supplies on the way or something else but this could also… you know, someone looking to renovate their kitchen… that could be broken up into several different articles. You know, someone looking for the differences between certain types of cabinets, the differences between certain types of (what’s that word) countertops. I’m sorry, I had a brain fart. Countertops. Just the differences between so many different things. Appliances, stainless steel alliances versus black appliances versus white appliances. There’s all kind of content that you can create along the way.

So you’re talking about more and more content, again, to fill up your website position – use authority – and to kind of have more shelf space with Google, so to speak, where you have more articles out there. And the more articles you have out there, every piece of content you publish, you kind of increase your chances of getting more and more rankings.

The other thing to kind of tie this all together and simplify it is any complex purchase decision – generally speaking – with high price products is a pretty safe target.

So if you think about someone looking for air purifiers or someone looking at electric toothbrushes – I know that one personally because a few years ago I was on the market for electric toothbrushes and found a really helpful site that compared them all side by side and talked about the pros and cons and talked about the features you needed and the features you didn’t need, and this brand versus this brand – that’s excellent because some of those toothbrushes get up into like $300 each.

So anything where people are going to have a lot of questions along the way and you can write about all of those questions and really help them solve their pain – help them answer their questions – are going to be really, really good niches. The more of those kind of keywords that add up, the kind of the better that niche could be in the long run.

So one final note about buying audiences is review-based sites can be really great – really, really great – because again, someone that’s looking for reviews is typically fairly late stage in the process and they’re probably pretty close to a purchase.

But the other thing to know about review sites is if like say… I see people go all the time into like cellphone reviews or computer reviews. And unless you can buy the product yourself and shoot video footage and take your own pictures and experience it all first-hand, it can be very, very difficult to find a way to add more value than your competition when the only thing you can do to produce an article is read what your competition is saying and then write about it.

But one of the unique approaches to any tech industry is if you can afford to buy all of the different cellphones or if you can come up with a clever way to get your hands on them without buying them, you have a big advantage because there’s a kind of high barrier of entry to that niche. If you could just shoot video footage of all these different things, how many people can do that? Major journalistic outlets can do that and really establish reviewers, but not a whole lot of people can afford to get their hands on that stuff.

So even though it could be really expensive… at least I know in the United States, if you’re blogging about it (so really quick disclaimer: I am not an accountant or a CPA, but I work closely with mine with stuff like this – and you should work closely with yours if you’re doing something like this) but all of that would tax-deductible. I ran a niche site about virtual reality. I still have a niche site about virtual reality. And I bought all the different headsets as they were coming out, reviewed all of them in depth, got a lot of videos for them, ran a YouTube channel for it, and saw some really decent traction really early on because it was new and there weren’t many people out there buying all of the technology themselves.

So just keep that in mind. Remember that your success depends largely on your value offering. And if you can’t get your hands on these products and get first-hand experience and perspective, it could be very difficult to add extra value.

So just keep that in mind if those are niches you’re considering. That it’s not an impossible challenge to overcome, it’s just difficult and it’s probably better to work with a simpler niche early on. Or just work in a niche where you can afford to buy all the products – so that’s another kind of little asterisk. I spent a lot of time talking about technology which is typically really expensive but that’s not necessarily true for every niche you would create review-based sites on. So just keep that in mind.

So one of the ways to get into a niche that’s like a technology-related niche, rather than running a review site, you might pick a lot of pain points and questions surrounding cellphones, generally speaking… surrounding computers, generally speaking… if you’re talking about a really technological niche or any niche like luxury goods where… say, Louis Vuitton hand bags or women’s luxury hand bags in general.

If you were trying to go into that niche and you couldn’t afford to buy all the products, you could absolutely write content helping people, calling their attention to the most important things as they’re going through the buying cycle themselves and then you can still monetize that content really well.

So instead doing side-by-side cellphone or side-by-side computer reviews, you would do phone’s usability and features within certain phones and what to look out for in a phone. Typically speaking, writing articles about in general – and this would all again be fueled by keyword research which we’ll talk about later – but instead of comparing phones side-by-side in videos and stuff like that, you may compare usability and features side-by-side. You may write an article about phone usability overall and what makes a phone usable, what are the easiest to use cellphones – stuff like that.

Talking about computers, you could talk about what is RAM, what are processors, what’s the difference between AMD and Intel processors – just information that people are searching that is very, very difficult to find really good information on a lot of the time, and people that had technical computer shopping questions – stuff like that. So instead of comparing computer side-by-side, you would write about a lot of content throughout the buying cycle that someone goes through and you can still, that way, position yourself as a credible authority and refer people to purchases through your affiliate link without ever comparing one computer side-by-side with another computer.

So I hope that makes sense. I think I’ve made that fairly clear. I think it’s okay to move on now, but I just really, really want to emphasize that. It’s an important caveat for everything we’ve talked about so far.

So to give you kind of a really important rule of thumb – again, to break this down and kind of summarize it and just kind of stick that thing in your brain – that you should really hold on to: it’s easy to get entangled by all of these details… I know… and just kind of overwhelmed. But at the end of the day, if you remember the core of this lesson, your selected niche is going to be much, much more likely to be valid.

I know we discussed a lot of other things, but at the end of the day, if you remember: will your audience frequently make purchases to solve the pain points or answer the questions you’re writing about? If the answer to that is “YES” for a lot of the kind of content you’re envisioning for your website, and a lot of the pains that your audience is facing, a lot of the questions that they have, it’s distinctly possible that you have a much more valid niche than someone that didn’t think about this at all.

So, that’s it. That’s all there is about working with a buying niche… a buying audience. Really, really important lesson. Again, it’s not totally essential for success but the better you factor this in to your niche selection process, the more likely you are to succeed in the long run versus someone that needs a ton of traffic to make money through advertising. And again, my number one priority over and over again throughout this training is to set you up for success as well as I possibly can.

So, that’s that. We’re done talking about buying audiences for now.

As always, if you have any questions, feel free to post them on the Facebook group. It’s totally free for registered members and people that have registered for accounts for free. And I’ll see you there and I will also see you in the next video.

In the next lesson, we’re going to be talking about competition – something that I think people get really overwhelmed and intimidated by in this industry – and I’m going to tell you why that really isn’t the right instinct. It’s actually really, really good news.

So we’ll talk about that in the next video. I’ll see you there and I’ll talk to you then.