In order to market your company effectively, you need to find out where your target audience is. In this post I’ll show you how you can do this. I like using examples, so in this case, I’ll assume you sell Star Wars merchandise.
How to Find Blogs
- Google “Star Wars blog”
- Filter out all the blogs that don’t have any traffic. There are basically three ways you can do this:
- See how many comments each post has. Very few or no comments usually means not many people read the blog.
- Look for the TweetMeme button. Just a few re-tweets for each post usually means that the blog doesn’t have a lot of traffic.
- Check their estimated traffic on Compete.com.
How to Find Forums
Use these Google queries:
- Star Wars discussion boards
- Star Wars message boards
- Star Wars “powered by phpBB”
- Star Wars “powered by vbulletin”
Then filter out forums with little or no activity. See when the last thread was started and how many views/replies each thread has.
How to Find Niche Communities
- Go to Ning and search for your keyword.
- Use this Google query: [your kewyord] allintitle:join
- Use this Google query: [your kewyord] allintitle:”Sign Up”
- Do a search on Facebook and filter the results by clicking on “Groups”.
- Search for LinkedIn groups by choosing “Groups” from the drop-down list and then entering your keyword in the search box.
- Use these Google queries:
- [your keyword] social network
- [your keyword] online community
