The Hunt is On – Finding Your Target Market Online

This is a follow up article to Sniper Scope – Increase Sales by Defining Your Target Market which describes what a target market is and how to identify the people most likely to be attracted to your product. If you haven’t already done so, go ahead and give the article a once over to bring yourself up to speed.

Marketing is a major component in the development of your business. Without an effective internet marketing strategy that brings in customers, your internet business is just an expensive hobby.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Hobbies are great for relaxing. I have quite a few of my own which include writing fiction, decorating cakes and collecting music. However, they’re not so great if you are trying to put food on the table or quit your day job. For that, you need a business that makes money. To make money, you need customers and to get customers, you have to market your business well.

Identifying your target market makes selling your products a whole lot easier. Instead of running around the internet posting your sales message in every online nook and cranny, you’ll save time and money by putting your ads in places where your audience is most likely to view and respond to them.

Sniper Scope – Increase Sales by Defining Your Target Market

I made the same mistake that a lot of first time business owners make. We think we want everyone to be our customer. In reality, we only want the people who can benefit from our products, who will understand the value of what we are offering and buy from us. These people are our target market.

What is a Target Market?

A target market is a group of people, usually defined by a set of demographics such as age, gender and location, who are most likely to buy your product or service. Put another way, these are the people who will run into, or are already dealing with, the problems that your product solves.

For example, you’re a web designer who sells custom made websites. Your target market would be people who want a professionally designed website. Now that’s a pretty big group but one that gets narrowed down according to the characteristics of your products. If you do site design at a low price point then you’re going after people who want budget friendly design services.

When I started my internet business, I had heard that blogging was a great way to attract customers and I jumped in with both feet. I believed that by providing useful information, I could kill two birds with one stone; draw in customers and demonstrate my skills. However, I did not identify my target market and instead just began dashing off post after post.

7 Website Statistics You Should Track

The majority of bloggers track how many people visit their blog each day which is a nice number to know if you are only interested in the quantity of traffic your blog gets. For those of you interested in improving the quality of traffic that comes to your blog, here are seven stats you should be keeping an eye on.

Pagerank is Dead. Long Live…Something Else.

Some time ago on my personal blog I wrote about how everyone needed to stop being slaves to Pagerank and instead focus on creating a quality experience for their users. At the time I wrote that post, people were crying over the fact that Google had slashed their rankings as punishment for selling links. This led to much weeping and gnashing of teeth over what to do to get back on Google’s good side and caused some websites to take measures that will probably prove to be counterproductive in the long term.

Increase Website Traffic with WordTracker’s Keyword Questions Tool

WordTracker has introduced a free new keyword tool called Keyword Questions. What the tool does is take a keyword you type in, pair it up with a question word such as ‘who’ or ‘when’ and then generates a list of questions people have asked about that keyword. For instance if you type in the keyword ‘money’, you will find that people asked ‘what president’s face is on the money?’ 1,143 times. (Please note that the WordTracker database tracks queries for the last 140 days so that would be 1,143 queries over 140 days.)