AP 0909: How Do I Find An Audience for My Niche?

AskPat 909 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: Hey, what's up everybody? Pat Flynn here, and welcome to Episode 909 of AskPat, thank you so much for joining me today. As always, I'm here to help you by answering your online business questions five days a week.

We have an amazing question coming in today from Michelle, but before we get to that I just want to say I'm so excited for this coming Monday because the doors open for my brand new course, PowerUpPodcasting.com. So if you've been thinking about starting a podcast and you're just worried about either the tech or what you're going to talk about, what your show's going to be about, how's it's going to stand out, how to actually keep it going, how can you launch it to people so that you're just not sharing information to nobody, all of these things are answered in Power-Up Podcasting for you. I hold your hand through the entire process, and 167 people have gone through this course already, and there's amazing, amazing results coming in. So I cannot wait to bring in another batch of students, work even more closely with them, and have you up on iTunes. Just like you're listening to AskPat right now, there are people going to be listening to you too. So if you want to sign up for the waitlist and get first notification on Monday when the sales page goes live, all you have to do is go to PowerUpPodcasting.com, you can sign up there and we'll see you on Monday with that. Cannot wait, it's going to be so much fun.

But first let's address Michelle's question here, which is a great one about targeting. So here she is.

Michelle: Hi Pat. My name is Michelle and I've been listening to Smart Passive Income for over a year and half now. Your niche duel is what helped me to develop my current business. The exercise of listing seven passions, seven fears and seven problems led me to my idea, College Swimming Guide, which can be found at CollegeSwimmingGuide.com. My niche is very specific; I help parents of children who want to swim in college. After going through the recruiting process with my son and realizing how confusing it was, I wanted to help others simplify the process.

My question is: how do I figure out where my target audience is hanging out so I can best target my posts and my ads? I know a lot of them are on Facebook, but where do I look in addition to Facebook? Pinterest or LinkedIn maybe? And how do I figure out if they're there? Thanks for everything you do for everyone in the community, Pat. I really enjoy your podcasts and your other materials.

Pat Flynn: Hey, Michelle, thank you so much for the question, I appreciate it. Yes, Facebook is going to be a great place to start but, of course, you can just target people who have interest in swimming for one, right? And then you can target age groups as well which will help you narrow it down to the college level, which is fantastic.

And by the way, I just want to say thank you for listening to me and the show for over a year and a half, that's amazing. I just forgot to mention that at the top here, but thank you for that, Michelle.

But digging deeper, you can actually find who those people are through different groups on Facebook. So use the search bar there, and no, that's not going to help you actually target your ads because you can't really target groups at the moment, but it'll help you be able to go into those groups, find people who are interested in swimming, for example, and then see where else they are going. You can see some of their interests. You might already have connections in your own existing network where you can dive in and see, okay, this person is connected to this magazine, this person is connected to this website, oh here's another reference to a page that has a lot of swimmers that I can actually target. You can target pages, too, so what other pages are people following or subscribed to or have liked or are a fan of on Facebook specifically—you can target them as well.

Now if you have an email list already there's some interesting things you can do with your email list. And that is, create lookalike audiences. So, meaning you can actually upload your email list to Facebook and create a lookalike audience and it'll, using a crazy algorithm, dive into the data of your existing email list and the things they have interest in and all the things they're doing, just so many data points, so many. And what they will do is, when you create a lookalike audience it'll find people who are just like the people who are on your email list. And so even though they might not necessarily be somebody who has indicated they wanted swimming, they are very likely to because they're on a similar matching profile to that existing list that you have. And then you can serve ads to them as well, which is really cool.

Now on these other platforms that you mentioned, Google and LinkedIn and Pinterest, the only way to really know if ads are going to work is to run them. And the nice thing about ads, typically, is it's based on clicks not necessarily impressions. So, you'll know if there's nobody there or nobody responding to your ads there. So I would just recommend doing it anyway just to see. But, of course, you want to be smart with the approach and so what I would recommend doing is utilizing Facebook and also Instagram. Instagram would be a great place to focus your efforts in as well, and that obviously is connected to Facebook and it is, I believe, run through the Facebook Ads dashboard as well. If you have an Instagram account you actually run your ads and focus on that there, so all in one spot, which is really cool.

So, that's how you do that. And also, you kind of have to be creative a little bit. You might want to have conversations with your existing customers, or with your existing target market. If you have any email addresses, try to pull a conversation with those people either through direct message or even on a Skype call at some point, and just say, “Hey like, where do you go for more information about this kind of stuff?” Or, “What kinds of other interests do you have?” And that way you can start diving into a little bit more of the psyche and the person behind who it is that you're serving there. I think it's important to see what other interests they have, so you might be able to find out where they're at.

You might also want to scope the high school level, too, right? I mean, yes, college is important, but I think a lot of the information you're sharing is going to be useful at the high school level, too. I think I mentioned college earlier but I wanted to just reiterate that people going into college are likely going to benefit and probably benefit even more from this, too. So, targeting parents of college-bound students, parents of that age, is going to be really helpful. Find the most popular states that have swimming as a sport, and target there as well. I mean, there's a lot of ways to go about it. And the deeper you get, the more honed in on your targeting, the cheaper the ads are going to be, too. And the nice thing about ads is, like I said, you only have to pay for when they work. When they work in terms of a click, maybe not necessarily a conversion, just want to make that clear. And also you'll know right away. Just putting up an ad in general is a great way to validate whether something's going to work or not, or a message is going to work, or you're targeting the right people.

So Michelle, I hope that helps out. Thank you so much, I appreciate you and I want to make sure I get you an AskPat teeshirt for having your question featured here on the show. And for those of you listening, if you have a question that you'd like potentially featured here on the show as well just head over to AskPat.com and you can ask right there on that page.

Thank you so much, I appreciate you and, man, I am once again just so stoked for Monday because so many new students are going to come in. I'm going to be able to help them through the process, get over those fears of course, like the fear of your own voice, or, “What are people going to think about me,” to the technology. Like, I make it so easy for you. And I'm so confident in this course; it's going to change lives. I cannot wait to share it with you. So PowerUpPodcasting.com, sign up there now.

And if you're listening to this episode in the future, if the carts are closed it's because I'm closing the carts after a week, and I'm working closely with those students so I can literally hand-hold them through the process, and then I'm going to re-open it later in the future. Will it be the same price point? I'm not sure. Typically, I run a couple rounds of open-close so that I can determine what the right price is, so it may go up. So get in early if you can. PowerUpPodcasting.com. Cannot wait to share it with you. Just thank you, guys, for all the support and all the requests for this course as well. You guys are an inspiration, thank you.

Now here's a quote to finish off the day, by Shannon Adler: “Life always begins with one step outside of your comfort zone.” True that. All right guys, take care and I'll see you in the next episode of AskPat. Bye.